Comment by anon291
13 hours ago
It's not that surprising. The earliest complete copies of many ancient texts is similarly dated. For example, the earliest copy of the Rg Veda is dated to about that age as well. It's hard to keep complete copies of big books.
As well, both the Iliad and Vedas are originally oral traditions. Likely there were different versions and different parts of the stories were emphasized to appeal to their audiences and local tastes and current events. Something that can still be apparent in historical texts but probably greatly reduced by the function of printed versions presenting a singular "authoritative version."
Only in the beginning, in the wake of the Greek Bronze Age dark age, was Homeric epic an improvised oral tradition that could be tailored to a listening audience’s preferences. By fifth-century Athens, writers depict the text as already definite, composed by one guy named Homer (instead of a long series of anonymous bards). Greeks may still have been learning and passing on Homer orally, but it was as a text that one received and was expected to relay onward faithfully.
The Vedas are surprisingly uniform across a very long time period.
It's likely that there have been bottlenecks, where a single written version became the main common ancestor to copy from. Long after the oral tradition died down and other written versions were lost. Or because some patron decided to fund the dissemination of a particular copy, like Guttemberg or King James, or the Toledo School of Translators. Or because a particular heir of the oral tradition wrote it down, like Homer.
It doesn't necessarily mean that the story was stable, it's just the version that got to us.