Been reading about the Iliad and the Odyssey recently and was wondering just how accurate he was regarding Mycenaean culture? (He wrote the books considerably later than the events right?)
Thanks in advance!
Homer was probably not very accurate about the Bronze Age. There was certainly a lot of Mycenaean involvement in Anatolia at the time and there is evidence of wars specifically in the region of Troy with the Mycenaeans (though the best evidence we have actually shows the Mycenaeans and the would-be Trojans on the same side of a revolt against the Hittites). However when Homer describes the details of war he gets a lot wrong. Homer never saw a chariot in war and had no idea how they worked, for example.
When Homer talks about social norms and combat there is a debate over whether he is using his own culture or whether he is using what he knows about the more recent past of 800 or 900 BCE instead of 1200 BCE.
For further reading you can check out M.I. Finley, The World of Odysseus which is an oldie but goodie. He argues that Homer is describing Dark Age Greece, not the Bronze Age. Another great book is Ernst Cline, 1177 BCE: The Year Civilization Collapsed. The book is about the Bronze Age links between Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Greece so he discusses Mycenaean involvement and Anatolia and the likelihood of a Trojan War but not specifically what Homer was thinking when writing.
It's worth bearing in mind that there may never have been a person called Homer, and if there was, he certainly didn't write anything. The Trojan War cycle developed over centuries of oral tradition, and even the ancients knew that it wasn't properly written down (and therefore canonised) until the 6th century BC, if not later.
The earliest actual evidence we have that the Greeks knew the story of the Trojan War is a vase from Mykonos depicting some of that story, dated to the 7th century BC. This seems to fit nicely with the fact that the world described by Homer looks a lot like what archaeologists have discovered from the late 8th and early 7th century BC - not the 13th century BC. It seems most likely that a story set in the heroic, dimly remembered past was fleshed out with details from the contemporary world. Only a few rare items from Homer actually belong to the Mycenaean period.
Allow me to chip into the book recommendations with Oliver Dickinson's The Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age: Continuity and Change Between the Twelfth and Eighth Centuries BC (2006). It covers the Mycenaean and Early Iron Age periods, so it will give you a good idea of the cultural changes over that time.