Chicken genome may show where they were domesticated

[Japetus]

I'd love to read a book on the history of chickens.

The chicken chapter on 'Birds in the Ancient World from A to Z' , is quite an informative read.

you may, but it's there. As you note in your correction, chickens are present in Greece from the Cent.7 bc - and Homer is the source for almost anything thus dated (Hesiod is the alternative).

I doubt that there were chickens in ancient Greece the time the 'Odyssey' was supposed to take place (12th century BC). Homer on the other hand lived on 7th century so himself might have encountered chickens, would have been strange to add them in his story though.

 

[Doc7]

The chicken chapter on 'Birds in the Ancient World from A to Z' , is quite an informative read.


I doubt that there were chickens in ancient Greece the time the 'Odyssey' was supposed to take place (12th century BC). Homer on the other hand lived on 7th century so himself might have encountered chickens, would have been strange to add them in his story though.

would
Homer have had any way of knowing chickens weren’t present in 12th century BC?

 

[Perris]

Homer on the other hand lived on 7th century

This is a moot point. What matters chronologically is when the poems were fixed in writing. The oral tradition before then would have allowed flexing of content and sense over time. The 12th century BC is a modern construct that has little to do with the texts of the Iliad or Odyssey.

 

[Japetus]

Please then quote the relevant passage from Odyssey.
Keep in mind that the name 'ornithes' for the chickens in modern greek, means birds in general in ancient Greek.

 

[Perris]

it may take a while to find, I'll get back to you

 

[Perris]

still looking for the chickens, but have found domesticated geese, 19.602 sqq
And Aristophanes Birds has lots of different words for different types of birds.

 

[333113]

Plato lived in the 4th c. Bc - while the writer diogenes laertius lived in 1st c. Ad.
To correct my previous post, in the 15th century bc the chickens traveled to ancient Egypt, it was the 7th c. Bc that they came to ancient Greece through Persia and only a century later they started using them for meat/eggs.

I know people (okay, mostly guys) (okay, ALL of them, guys) who would (do) keep their game birds in the house or attached garage or second bedroom or bathroom, but would never think of keeping a layer or a meat bird anywhere but a barn. Cockfighting is illegal in a lot of places now, but that's some really serious chicken fever, and probably was back then, as well.

 

[Perris]

Yes there was cock-fighting: Themistocles (the strategic mastermind behind the victory over the Persians) apparently instituted an annual cockfight in Athens, D'Arcy Thompson Glossary of Greek birds p.22, so that would be early fifth century bc. (There were also no-crow collars from Roman times, idem. I wonder if they worked as well/better/worse than the modern version )
He also has no reference to Homer under alektruon (chicken), so my memory failed on that. Apologies for misleading anybody. Hopefully the right author will spring to mind sooner or later. In any case, domesticated chickens were alive and well in classical Greece, from the fifth century bc, if not before. Thompson has pages of references.