When is Homer's Iliad thought to have been composed?

The question of when Homer's Iliad
was composed is a difficult one. The story may have been passed down orally
for several hundred years before it was finally written
down.

Also complicating the issue is the problem of when
the Trojan War took place (if it took place at all; some scholars believe the war Homer
describes was not an actual historical event). The time period Homer's work appears to
describe is Bronze Age Greece. Archaeologists who have worked at Troy have concluded
that the level of Troy most likely to have been destroyed by war is dated to around 1200
BCE. However, the type of writing known to have existed at that time is certainly not
the sort of Greek that has been passed down to us. Additionally, after 1200 BCE,
numerous Greek sites were either destroyed or abandoned, indicating that the Greeks
themselves were under some sort of duress. Furthermore, after this time, the ability to
write seems to have been lost for some time.

Finally,
though, by the 800s, Greece had emerged from its "Dark Age" and writing begins to
reappear. We can get some idea of when the Iliad
was written down because other Greek authors start referring to the poem.
Also, we start to see Greek artists depicting scenes from the Homeric epics, especially
in vase painting. The combination of literary references to the poems, artistic
representations of scenes from the poems, as well as other elements found in the poems
themselves have led scholars to date the writing of the Iliad to
between 775 and 725 BCE. Some scholars, though, have argued that the poems did not
achieve their final form until the following century.