The Trojan war happend around 1200bce and homer lived around 800bce. While this wouldn't be too odd for historical records to be recorded after the fact by a number of years.
It seems quite odd that he would have detailed Knowlage of events and descriptions given between those times we have the bronze age collapse and the burning of all the grate palaces. Writing and literacy declined to extremely low levels between these times. I find it mind blowing to think that these details were passed down via oral stories.
Would it be likely that he could read the linear B script and was simply transcribing it to a readable script.
Obviously I know it is the illiad is highly embellished with myth and personalitys that probably didn't exist. But to write and record such detailed family trees and descriptions of the fleet and other details seems amazing to me.
Hi there -- the Iliad isn't a history of the Trojan war but rather a collection of stories set during the time period of the war, which we think happened due to archeological and other evidence around the time period. This older thread goes into some more detail about this and has some recommended reading, while this older thread talks about the movie Troy.