WHEN HOMER NODDED

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 20 April 1935, Page 5

WHEN HOMER NODDED

HE “CRIBBED” HIS STORIES. *) A PROFESSOR’S BOAIBSHELL. ' (From Our Own Correspondent.) (By Air Alail.) A professor has placed in a Londo'n safe deposit manuscripts 3000 and 4000 years old, which, he says, prove that the story of Homer’s Iliad, greatest of classical Greek poems, the epic of Helen of Troy, originated in an Indian poem written centuries before Homer was born.

According to this argument, Helen came not from Troy, but from Ceylon. The “Trojan War” was fought between Ceylon and Ajodhja of the ancient India.

This sensational announcement is made by Professor R. A. Dara, lately of Lahore University, India, collector of Eastern art treasures, who 14 years ago devoted his life to research among ancient manuscripts in order to compile a history of the world’s civilisation.

Frofessor Dara also claims to have discovered that the Gorgon iSisters, with their serpent tresses, were known in India, centuries before Hesiod, Aeschylus, Diodorus and Ovid wrote of them.

“Ramayana,” the Indian epic, which, according to Professor Dara, is the origin of the Iliad story, tells of the -conquest of Lanka (ancient name for Ceylon) by the hero Rama. The object of the invasion was the recovery of Rama’s beautiful wife Sita, who had been abducted by Rawana, King of Lanka. Home, it is contended, changed the name of Rama to Alenelaus, Sita to Helen, and TTawana to Paris. It was Sita’s dusky beauty it seems that launched the thousand ships of licro Rama. Professor Sir Gilbert Murray, the classical authority, said ‘ ‘ this theory is entirely new to me. If there’s anything in it I should say it would be from the Sanskrit, but I can’t give an opinion till I’ve seen the evidence. “