Homeric hymns are a group of 33 songs composed to honour the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greek pantheon. They are called ‘Homeric’ as it was often assumed in antiquity that they were composed by Homer. Modern scholars date most of them to the Achaic period of Greek literature (7th and 8th centuries BC) and regard them as a work of a range of different poets.

It is usually believed that the tradition from which our surviving early Greek poetry grew was an ‘oral’ one, i.e. that singers composed without the aid of writing. Archaeological evidence points to a gap between the 12th and 9th centuries BC during which written records have not (at least as yet) been found in Greece or the Greek settlements around the area of the Aegean Sea.

Before this time the late Bronze Age cultures of Crete and Greece (known as Minoan and Mycenaean) wrote Greek in a syllabic script (called Linear B ) whereas the Greek alphabetic script appears only from the 8th century BC onwards when the Greeks took over and adapted the script used by the Phoenicians.

Below is one of the Homeric Hymns to Artemis:

Sing, Muse, of Artemis,
Sister of the Archer god,
The maiden who delights in arrows
Who grew up with Apollo.

By Meles, where the reeds are deep,
She harnesses her horses
And swiftly through Smyrna
She speeds her chariot
All in gold
To Klaros, the vine land,
Where Apollo sits waiting
With his silver bow

For Artemis
Who delights in arrows
And lets them fly from far away.