The appearance of the definite article

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I started my Greek education with Pharr, and I find that the most striking difference between Homer and all other Greek I've ever seen is that where Homer exhibits an almost Russian-like absence of definite articles, Attic and Koine are positively snowed under a blizzard of 'o, 'e, to and their declined forms, even on people's names! Does anyone know when and where this happened? Do really really old Attic inscriptions also exhibit a Homer-like lack of definite articles, and if so when did the transition take place? Or is this a dialectal Ionic/Attic thing? Or perhaps is the absence of definite articles in Homer just another one of those artificial things about the epic dialect -- things that don't reflect how Greek was actually spoken, at any time or place?