Chapter 2 examines the Vedic sacrificial post called the yūpa and its role in ritual performances. A Mycenaean Greek cognate term and comparable ritual implement lies behind the Linear B form spelled u-po – that is, hûpos (ὗπος). Among other topics treated in this chapter are the Mycenaean deity called the po-ti-ni-ja, a-si-wi-ja, the Asian Potnia, and the u-po-jo po-ti-ni-ja, the Potnia of the u-po (that is, húpoio Pótnia [ὕποιο Πότνια]), a term matched exactly by Sanskrit patnī-yūpá-.

Chapter 7 examines the sheep’s fleece filter used in the preparation of Soma. A cult ideology in which such an implement played an important role was preserved for some time in Iranian tradition in the Caucuses, ultimately giving expression to Greek ideas about the presence of fleecy filters impinged with gold in the vicinity of Dioscurias – rationalizing accounts of the Golden Fleece of Aeolian Argonautic tradition. Particular elements of the Golden Fleece myth find parallels in Indic poetic accounts of the performance of Soma cult. The common Hellenic and Indic elements constitute a shared nexus of ideas that earliest took shape in Bronze-Age communities of admixed Mycenaean and Luvian populations into which Mitanni Soma ideas had spread via Kizzuwatna. The Golden Fleece mythic tradition, with its geographic localization in Transcaucasia, is a Mycenaean Asianism that took shape in Asia Minor under Indic and Iranian influences and that continued to evolve among the Iron-Age Asian Greeks.

Chapter 5 considers the Indic divine twins, the Aśvins (Aśvínā), or Nāsatyas (Nā́satyā), their association with the Indic Dawn goddess Uṣas, and their place in the Indic Soma cult. Discussion then shifts to the kingdom of Mitanni in Syro-Mesopotamia, a place into which Indic culture was introduced as Indo-Iranian peoples migrated southward through Asia, as also at Nuzi. There is good lexical evidence for the presence of a Soma cult in Mitanni, and Soma-cult ideas appear to have spread out of Mitanni, through Kizzuwatna, into the Luvian milieu of western Asia Minor, where such ideas would almost certainly have been encountered by resident Mycenaean Greeks, intermingled biologically, socially, culturally, and linguistically with Luvian populations. With that spread certain elements of Soma-cult ideology were mapped onto Anatolian cult structures.

Chapter 3 examines the Mycenaean wanaks and lāwāgetās, figures responsible for leading Mycenaean society in specific ways and who correspond notionally to figures implicit in Indic and Iranian social structures – figures who descend from still more ancient Indo-European antecedents charged with the task of leading society through the spaces of the Eurasian Steppes and in migrations southward out of the Steppes.

An examination of a varied set of linguistic phenomena that can be understood as processes of complexification at work in Ur-Aeolic as a variety of Greek that took shape in the context of an isolated speech community –specifically one situated in western Anatolian locales during the Bronze Age.

Examination of Luvian patronymic adjectives and their diffusion into the Mycenaean dialect of Anatolia – that is, Ur-Aeolic – and their distinctive use in post-Mycenaean Aeolic. Also, discussion of hekwetai ‘warrior allies’ that appear in the Linear B documents, whose names are commonly identified by the use of the Aeolic patronymic formation of Luvian origin, and discussion of other sacralized warrior relationships with Anatolian ties.

A synthetic, concluding discussion addressing the relationship between Ur-Aeolic and Special Mycenean and providing a historical framework for, especially, the introduction of Aeolic language and culture (pre-Thessalian/Boeotian) into European Greece following the Bronze-Age collapses and for the spread of pre-Aeolians (Iron-Age Ahhiyawans) eastward into Cilicia.

Exploration of the mythic concept of Aia, region of the rising sun, and its Hurrian and Luvo-Hittite background, its introduction to European Mycenaean Greeks by the Ur-Aeolians (Ahhiyawans) of Anatolia, and Aeolian Argonautic elaborations.

A linguistic investigation of the Aeolic dialect group, examining linguistic traits of the Lesbian, Thessalian, and Boeotian dialects and those traits common to all three and thus traits belonging to ancestral Aeolic.

This chaper looks at the peculiar mixture of linguistic forms that are archaic and dialectal in Homer and compares them to the hybrid dialects that are employed in English-language popular music today. Sections 1 and 2 provide a detailed account of the main linguistic features of Homer’s Kunstsprache and separates its archaic components from its dialectal components. Section 3 looks at perceptions of dialect (and dialect imitations) in Archaic Greece. Sections 4-5 illustrate how ancient and modern critics interpreted Homer’s dialect, and introduces phase theory, along with remaining open questions therein. Section 6 introduces several contemporary case studies of singers adopting a non-native, hybrid dialect of English when performing. These include Adele, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Green Day, Alesha Dixon, the Arctic Monkeys, Iggy Azalea, and Keith Urban. Lessons won from these case studies are then applied to Homer.

Chapter 9 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho sets out the evidence for Sappho’s use of metre, showing its position within the tradition of Greek poetic metre as a whole, as well as the sparse evidence that survives for her music.

Chapter 10 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho describes the distinctive features of Sappho’s poetic dialect, highlighting especially significant points and noting particular difficulties.

Our text of Homer uses a combination of dialects, indicating both that it couldn’t have been the native language of an individual speaker, and also that it must have evolved over a long period of time. Words from different dialects sometimes have different metrical values, allowing for great flexibility of expression.