The Iliad came out of India
Michele Manher
Italy
Summary: The narrative inventions contained in the Mahâbhârata are found in the most exclusive cultures of the most ancient Mediterranean civilizations as Greece and Egypt. The Indo-Aryans' presence in the Middle-east, toward the middle of the III millennium, is attested by the archaeological sources and it is well documented even in the Amarna tablets. The Indo-Aryan Hurrians supported, with a political-military alliance, the expansion of the Amorites that, under king Hammurabi's guide, conquered - also culturally - the Near East, and not only. The Indo-Aryan culture, apart from being present among the Aryan noble classes in the Near East (Syria, Lebanon and Caaanan), arrive further, through the Hyksos-Phoenician colonizations, also in Greece, where it mix with other traditions, Semitic and North-European, contributing to constitute some characters of the not yet born Greek nation.
Myths and tales, coming from the most different cultural areas, interweave so among them, at sometimes in inextricable ways, in the whole area of the central and oriental Mediterranean. The result is that often also the more exclusive cultural traditions, as those filled of nationalistic spirit in Greece or religious in the Middle-east, have debts with others, also distant in time and space, cultural traditions.
The Iliad is born for giving an identity to the Greek nation and draws its source from the Mahâbhârata, the greatest epic poem then known, that the Indo-Aryan bards had been singing for centuries in the Indo-Aryan courts of the Middle-east. It is true that the Achaeans before and the Dorians after introduced in Greece memories and tales of the North Europe, but they were without a written tradition and, as showed by the comparative studies of the oral traditions of the Middle Europe, they could not turn their tales sic et simpliciter into epic written poetry.
There are well showed the analogies between the divine characters of the Mahâbhârata and the North European mythological tales, as are entirely evident, and showed in the present essay, the analogies between the narrative expedients of the Mahâbhârata and those of the Iliad.