τριγλώχιν - A type of arrow mentioned in the Iliad

[sumskilz]

In the Iliad (Book 5, line 393 and Book 11, line 507) a type of arrow is mentioned that I've seen translated as “three-barbed” or “three-leaved”. The word is τριγλώχιν. It’s been suggested, and often repeated that this is a reference to the “Scythian” type socketed trilobite arrowhead. However, this is not archaeologically supportable. The earliest well-dated finds of this type in Greece date to the Greco-Persian wars and appear to have been loosed by the Achaemenid side.

So my first question is what does this word really mean? Etymological reasoning, cross-references to other ancient usages, and/or citations would certainly be appreciated. Keep in mind, I know next to nothing about the Greek language of any time period.

My second question is, what type of arrow do you believe it actually refers to?

[Kyriakos]

Not exactly the same issue, yet afaik in the Odyssey the bow of Odysseus is sometimes argued to be a composite-typed one, ie it bends both ways (the edges bend to one side and the main body to the other, iirc).

[paleologos]

Appropriate disclaimer:
I am not a linguist or a philologist or an archaeologist.

This is what my hurried research has dug up:
Under "tri-lobed arrowhead":

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Under the Greek word "τριγλώχιν":

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Under "heart valves":

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Apparently the "tricuspid valve" is translated in Greek to "τριγλώχιν βαλβίδα" (triglochin valvida).
The shape of the valve slits is what would have been if a membrane had been perforated by a tri-lobed arrowhead.

Now, the number three in Greek is "τρία" (tria) and the Greek word for tongue is "γλώσσα" (glossa).
So I guess a transliteration-translation of "τριγλώχιν" would bee "having three tongues".


About archaeological archery findings in Greece.

Archery was not widely practiced.
It was more like a hunting skill and as such, a pass time for nobility.
Certainly not something for the masses.
It is doubtful whether a body of archers (inevitably a small one) could do damage of any consequence to the overlappingly shielded hoplite phalanx.

During the Peloponnesian War the archers defending the Athenian wall were Skythian mercenaries.
(I cannot provide a reference for this but someone well versed in the history of Thucydides should know where to look.)

Metal was a thing of great value and I recon they were not in the habit of letting it lying around in the form of arrowheads that could only be used once and then would be lost.

Homer is describing the arrows of Scythians in the Trojan army.
The Greeks had been acquainted with the Scythian ways of war and had names for Scythian military paraphernalia.
Archaeological findings (rather their absence) simply suggest that Scythian ways of war had not been adopted by the Greeks.

Think of it this way.
The ancient Greeks had a word for elephant.
The existence of elephants in ancient Greece is not archaeologically supported. (Duh!)
Greek merchants were trading ivory in Greece, it is not unlikely that they had actually seen the animals.
Likewise, the English word "crocodile" is derived from Greek "κροκόδειλος" from "κρόκος" (crokos), meaning "pebble" (in the context of that word) and "Δείλος" (Deilos), the archaic Greek name for the river Nile.
But there were no crocodiles in Greece.

[Kyriakos]

Three tongued? Maybe it is an arrow made of a living giant leech?

[sumskilz]

@paleologos

That type of arrowhead does seem to me to fit the description, and I get what you mean by Homer placing them in the hands of the enemy, which makes more sense, but it still poses an archaeological problem (maybe). Metal is valuable, but those arrowheads have still been found in the hundreds at battle sites in Greece and Anatolia. Several times a year in Israel, we have people who just happen to come across them and bring them in. That has to be just a tiny fraction of those which people keep for themselves or end up on the antiquities market. The oldest known finds ever, come from Urartu (roughly Armenia) and aren't earlier than 670 BCE. They were making them there as well, because a mold was found.

Supposedly the Iliad dates to the Eighth Century. These linguists date it 760-710 BCE. The closest we get to that archaeologically, is they were found in Smyrna in a destruction layer which dates to about 600 BCE. If that indicates who was using them closest to Homer's time, then your supposition makes sense, but that is still a pretty big time gap. The reason I say "maybe" poses an archaeological problem is that the dating techniques of archaeology are more of an exact science, so it might make more sense to adjust the dating of at least that portion of the text to match the archaeology, not the other way around. Still it would be nice to find a hypothesis that makes the two lines of evidence consonant. So that's why I asking if there are other interpretations.

Anthony Snodgrass (Early Greek Armour and Weapons 1964) argued the term referred to a triangular arrowhead. Does this lexicon entry support that view? Especially this:

3. Pythagorean name for an angle, Hero*Deff.15.

I don't know what that text reference is an abbreviation of.

[paleologos]

Anthony Snodgrass (Early Greek Armour and Weapons 1964) argued the term referred to a triangular arrowhead. Does this lexicon entry support that view? Especially this:

This lexicon entry is about "γλωχίν" not "τριγλώχιν".
It seems to mean "triangular extremity".

The way I understand your posts is that your objection to the meaning of the word is the absence of the artifact itself from the space of Greece during the time period between the "epics of Homer" and the Persian Wars.
Do you also take into account that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not intended to be read as history textbooks?
Or that they were not even written by a single individual "Homer"?
From wikipedia:

The chronological period of Homer depends on the meaning to be assigned to the word "Homer". Was Homer a single person, an imaginary person representing a group of poets, or the imaginary author of a traditional body of oral myths? If the works attributed either wholly or partially to a blind poet named Homer were really authored by such a person, then he must have lived in a specific era, which can be described as "the life and times of Homer". If on the other hand Homer is to be considered a mythical character, the legendary founder of a guild of rhapsodes (professional performers of epic poetry) called the Homeridae, then "Homer" means the works attributed to the rhapsodes of the guild, who might have composed primarily in a single century or over a period of centuries.

Much of the geographic and material content of the Iliad and Odyssey appears to be consistent with the Aegean Late Bronze Age, the time when Troy flourished: before the time of the Greek alphabet. In a third and last interpretation, the term "Homer" can be used to refer to traditional elements of oral myth known to, but not originated by the rhapsodes; from these they composed oral poetry, which reflected the culture of Mycenaean Greece. This information is often called "the world of Homer" (or of Odysseus, or the Iliad). The Homeric period would in that case cover a number of historical periods, especially the Mycenaean Age, prior to the first delivery of a work called the Iliad.

link

Let's just stick to the facts.
Fact number one:
Greek poets knew of the existence of triply barbed arrowheads and their use by Scythian archers when line 393 of Book 5 and line 507 of Book 11 were worded.

Fact number two:
Specimens of such arrowheads came to the Greek mainland much later.

Conclusion probable number one:
The poets were travelers. (? - or )

Conclusion probable number two:
The poets were very interested to stories travelers had to say.

[Kyriakos]

^Can't it indeed mean triangular arrow-head? Angle being termed as "tongue" as Sum mentioned re Pythagoras
The reference seems to be to some work by Hero of Alexandria? (the one who invented the steam-engine )

[sumskilz]

This lexicon entry is about "γλωχίν" not "τριγλώχιν".
It seems to mean "triangular extremity".

Possibly because I know nothing about Greek, τριγλώχιν looks like τρι + γλωχίν, which I took to potentially mean "three triangular extremities". Snodgrass seems to have interpreted it that way, but I have no idea how well he knows ancient Greek. Do you think his interpretation cannot be correct?

(EDIT: Snodgrass seems to have thought three angles or three points, but anyway the points of a single triangle can be visualized as three triangles themselves so not a clear distinction in that)

The way I understand your posts is that your objection to the meaning of the word is the absence of the artifact itself from the space of Greece during the time period between the "epics of Homer" and the Persian Wars.
Do you also take into account that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not intended to be read as history textbooks?

Sure, I just expect that whoever wrote it couldn't accurately describe arrowheads that didn't exist yet anywhere. Archaeologically, 670 BCE is the earliest they could have existed anywhere. It's actually more likely something closer to 630 BCE. There is the whole absence of evidence doesn't equal evidence of absence thing, but that's not a very good argument when we there are a lot of destruction layers without any trace of them in the first half of the Seventh Century. As a side note, the belief that they originated on the Pontic Steppe actually turned out to be inccorect it seems. The Scythian grave evidence is much later and all the precursor technologies point to a Transcaucasian origin.

Let's just stick to the facts.
Fact number one:
Greek poets knew of the existence of triply barbed arrowheads and their use by Scythian archers when line 393 of Book 5 and line 507 of Book 11 were worded.

If that's what that describes, then yes.

Conclusion probable number one:
The poets were travelers. (? - or )

Conclusion probable number two:
The poets were very interested to stories travelers had to say.

This is perfectly reasonable, my issue is that they were unlikely to have existed anywhere at the time the text is dated to. It's possible that portion of the text (at least) was written later. It wouldn't necessarily have to be a long time later.

Some have tried to use the Iliad as evidence that the arrowheads existed earlier than they are attested to in the archaeological record. I don't find that to be a solid enough evidence to stand on its own. If the term refers to a different type of arrowhead or if the text is at least partially later than the experts claim it is, the mystery is solved.

EDIT:

The reference seems to be to some work by Hero of Alexandria? (the one who invented the steam-engine )

Thanks, just searched. Wikipedia mentions a Definitiones attributed to him.

[paleologos]

Possibly because I know nothing about Greek, τριγλώχιν looks like τρι + γλωχίν, which I took to potentially mean "three triangular extremities".

That's what it means.
In this sentence you seem to have missed the shifting in the intonation:
"Γλωχίν" is the triangular extremity, "τριγλώχιν" means "having three triangular extremities".

...or if the text is at least partially later than the experts claim it is, the mystery is solved.

Now you are getting it.
The text of both the Iliad and the Odyssey was the result of a long evolution during which parts were added, parts were removed and parts were reworded.
Parchment itself is a perishable material, especially considering the timespans we are talking about.
When the epics were written for the first time they did not exist in one unique form each.
It is entirely possible that different iterations were written independently of each other in different locations.
It is equally possible that since copies had to be made manually, a scribe might stitch-in a more embellished line here and there.

[sumskilz]

That's what it means.
In this sentence you seem to have missed the shifting in the intonation:
"Γλωχίν" is the triangular extremity, "τριγλώχιν" means "having three triangular extremities".

Thanks, when considering the tang wouldn't be exposed, it seems it could as easily refer to these shapes:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

These particular images are too large to be arrowheads, but there were arrowheads in Anatolia with shapes like this from the Late Bronze Age through the Iron Age.

Now you are getting it.
The text of both the Iliad and the Odyssey was the result of a long evolution during which parts were added, parts were removed and parts were reworded.
Parchment itself is a perishable material, especially considering the timespans we are talking about.
When the epics were written for the first time they did not exist in one unique form each.
It is entirely possible that different iterations were written independently of each other in different locations.
It is equally possible that since copies had to be made manually, a scribe might stitch-in a more embellished line here and there.

I was already thinking of it as a fluid text that developed over time, but I was assuming the Eighth Century age estimate I had read was of the fixation date. Looking at the Wiki article you linked, it seems the fixation date estimates overlap the "Scythian" arrowheads temporal distribution.

My intuition was that using the Iliad alone as evidence of a of an Eighth Century date for "Scythian" arrowheads was bad scholarship. It seems those that have done so, were even more off than I had thought.

[conon394]

Sure, I just expect that whoever wrote it couldn't accurately describe arrowheads that didn't exist yet anywhere. Archaeologically, 670 BCE is the earliest they could have existed anywhere. It's actually more likely something closer to 630 BCE. There is the whole absence of evidence doesn't equal evidence of absence thing, but that's not a very good argument when we there are a lot of destruction layers without any trace of them in the first half of the Seventh Century. As a side note, the belief that they originated on the Pontic Steppe actually turned out to be inccorect it seems. The Scythian grave evidence is much later and all the precursor technologies point to a Transcaucasian origin.

Absence of evidence is no evidence of absence but absence of a systemic examination of archeological digs can be. In interesting for example how much small change turns up in a dig where people are actually looking for it vs just hey score 1000 owls. The same can be said iron armor from the same period, does't survive well in the first place and the diggers were looking for cool bronze pieces and no systemic record was kept.

[Spear Dog]

Read in context it seems to me the arrow head in the Iliad has some sort of status or imparts a particular understanding to the situation where it is mentioned. The first mention has Hera, a goddess, wounded by the arrow and in the second citation the arrow is fired by "Alexandros, Lord of Helen" - whom I believe is Paris, Prince of Troy.

If this is the case the particular reference to the type of arrow could indeed have been a later inclusion to the story by the poets (you can almost imagine a Monty-pythonesque scene where as the poet recites ".... by an arrow" some wag in the audience calls out: "what type of arrow?" The poet, getting into the spirit of things replies; "...an important arrow" - and so it move on from there). The thing about a trilobate arrow is that it seems to be specifically a war arrow and is somewhat high tech (it would not be as simple a casting as a flat arrowhead), the third flange would give the arrow head lateral strength preventing bending on impact, and maybe even help the arrow to 'straighten up' as it penetrated. If it was the most expensive option in arrow heads, it would have been a weapon associated with the elite.

@Kyriakos #2

......in the Odyssey the bow of Odysseus is sometimes argued to be a composite-typed one, ie it bends both ways (the edges bend to one side and the main body to the other, iirc).

What you describe is known as a 'recurve bow'. A composite bow (in this context) is made from layers of different materials glued and bound together. (Again), in this context the bow of Odysseus was probably an asiatic compound bow which was generally also a recurve bow.

[Copperknickers II]

@paleologos

That type of arrowhead does seem to me to fit the description, and I get what you mean by Homer placing them in the hands of the enemy, which makes more sense, but it still poses an archaeological problem (maybe). Metal is valuable, but those arrowheads have still been found in the hundreds at battle sites in Greece and Anatolia. Several times a year in Israel, we have people who just happen to come across them and bring them in. That has to be just a tiny fraction of those which people keep for themselves or end up on the antiquities market. The oldest known finds ever, come from Urartu (roughly Armenia) and aren't earlier than 670 BCE. They were making them there as well, because a mold was found.

Supposedly the Iliad dates to the Eighth Century. These linguists date it 760-710 BCE. The closest we get to that archaeologically, is they were found in Smyrna in a destruction layer which dates to about 600 BCE. If that indicates who was using them closest to Homer's time, then your supposition makes sense, but that is still a pretty big time gap. The reason I say "maybe" poses an archaeological problem is that the dating techniques of archaeology are more of an exact science, so it might make more sense to adjust the dating of at least that portion of the text to match the archaeology, not the other way around. Still it would be nice to find a hypothesis that makes the two lines of evidence consonant. So that's why I asking if there are other interpretations.

Anthony Snodgrass (Early Greek Armour and Weapons 1964) argued the term referred to a triangular arrowhead. Does this lexicon entry support that view? Especially this:

I don't know what that text reference is an abbreviation of.

The abbreviation is for the Definitiones attributed to Hero of Alexandria, I would imagine, since it's about geometry.

[Kyriakos]

Read in context it seems to me the arrow head in the Iliad has some sort of status or imparts a particular understanding to the situation where it is mentioned. The first mention has Hera, a goddess, wounded by the arrow and in the second citation the arrow is fired by "Alexandros, Lord of Helen" - whom I believe is Paris, Prince of Troy.

If this is the case the particular reference to the type of arrow could indeed have been a later inclusion to the story by the poets (you can almost imagine a Monty-pythonesque scene where as the poet recites ".... by an arrow" some wag in the audience calls out: "what type of arrow?" The poet, getting into the spirit of things replies; "...an important arrow" - and so it move on from there). The thing about a trilobate arrow is that it seems to be specifically a war arrow and is somewhat high tech (it would not be as simple a casting as a flat arrowhead), the third flange would give the arrow head lateral strength preventing bending on impact, and maybe even help the arrow to 'straighten up' as it penetrated. If it was the most expensive option in arrow heads, it would have been a weapon associated with the elite.

@Kyriakos #2


What you describe is known as a 'recurve bow'. A composite bow (in this context) is made from layers of different materials glued and bound together. (Again), in this context the bow of Odysseus was probably an asiatic compound bow which was generally also a recurve bow.

+1 I didn't recall the term "recurve"

[paleologos]

...
(Again), in this context the bow of Odysseus was probably an asiatic compound bow which was generally also a recurve bow.

Or a Cretan bow, still a composite one, but made from the whole horns of goats and joined in the middle with sturdy seasoned wood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM2vI4pmMY0

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

I have seen some theories suggesting that some of the characters of the Illiad and Odyssey were not Greek, such as Achilles, or may have come from Greek colonies North of the Black sea. Don't forget these authors would tell these stories in contemporary terms too.

[paleologos]

Don't you think it is more likely that most of the characters were mostly imaginary? (meaning a stick figure of reality, "fleshed-oud" by imagination)

[sumskilz]

Absence of evidence is no evidence of absence but absence of a systemic examination of archeological digs can be. In interesting for example how much small change turns up in a dig where people are actually looking for it vs just hey score 1000 owls.

They are fairly small, usually 2.6 to 3.6 cm in length and 0.8 to 1.1 cm in diameter at the widest point, but being made of copper alloys, they tend to be well-preserved. At this point in time, most excavations took place before systematic sifting, so I'm sure some have been missed. Actually I know some have been missed, because we found some in a pile dumped by an excavation that took place 1898-1900. Modern Turkey and Armenia have been covered pretty well by modern excavations though, Iran less so.

The same can be said iron armor from the same period, does't survive well in the first place and the diggers were looking for cool bronze pieces and no systemic record was kept.

Yeah, small pieces of corroded iron are easily missed. Small blades and arrowheads can look like chunks of tree root. I've seen iron pieces found via metal detector in sifting discard piles. Which means the sifters found them, and still thought they were nothing. Unfortunately, once something is in the discard, it's out of context.

If it was the most expensive option in arrow heads, it would have been a weapon associated with the elite.

They do tend to be found alongside more numerous iron bilobites early on. By the Achaemenid period, they seem to have become standard for Near Eastern armies, judging by finds anyway.

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

Obviously they were mythological/imaginary/etc. But what I'm saying is that some of the story may have been influenced by the North Black sea.

[Kyriakos]

Obviously they were mythological/imaginary/etc. But what I'm saying is that some of the story may have been influenced by the North Black sea.

North black sea didn't have any walled cities at the time. Achilles is supposed to be from Thessaly, and all the major myth circles of Greece feature trojan-war heroes, so you can't take stuff out without damaging the rest of the mythology
Some of the heroes are even tarnished, eg the lesser Ajax (of Locris) and the major Ajax (due to killing sheep thinking they were other heroes, and consequent suicide because Odysseus took the weapons of Achilles ).