The Trojan War in England

[Rokcet Scientist]

The Trojan War: Another Look

The Trojan War was not fought in Turkey.

So says Iman Wilkens in his wonderfully entertaining historical expose Where Troy Once Stood. Wilkens says that Troy was in England and that Mycenae was in France. In his book, Wilkens offers convincing proof of a second viable interpretation of Homer's Iliad. And in his argument, Wilkens has two main points of focus:

1) The geography and archaeology of Homer do not allow for a Troy in Asia Minor or anywhere near the Mediterranean.

2) Most of the place-names that we assume are Greek and Turkish in origin are, in fact, Celtic.

Let us examine the first point. Troy is said to have had a population of 50,000. The walls of Schliemann's "Troy VII" are not large enough to encompass a city that large. Homer makes great mention of the ocean, not the sea. The tradition of calling an ocean and ocean and a sea a sea is long and historically documented. Add to this Homer's descriptions of tides and oceanic trees and plants and animals and other features of geography that do NOT describe Asia Minor or Greece or even the Mediterranean area, and you have evidence for Wilkens' argument. He goes on to talk about inland water, specifically rivers and dykes, which are far more common in Europe than in Asia Minor.

It is probably clear to the reader by now that Wilkens is taking Homer almost literally, as if Homer were an eyewitness to the events or, at the very least, writing from an eyewitness account. Skeptics may claim that Homer is not to be taken literally; but this claim would serve to undercut those skeptics' own case. Wilkens also names two other sources, Dares and Dictys, both of whom were contemporaries of Homer. The accounts of these two, one of whom was a Trojan, almost exactly match Homer, who is supposedly Greek. Their descriptions do not match the Turkish landscape, either.

On to the place-names. Of the 14 rivers Homer names [...]

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/anc ... tory/36931

[uniface]

http://forums.atlantisrising.com/ubb/Fo ... 00927.html

[Rokcet Scientist]

It all sounds very reasonable and logical, but also rather constructed.

[uniface]

What we assume to be settled ancient and medieval history is a collection of re-writes, shuffled around in time and space in the 1500s to make "history" correspond to the corrupt version of the Kabala they were obsessed with.

Fomenko et al. have demonstrated this repeatedly and convincingly.

[kbs2244]

Intresting theory, and worth of some research.

But...
"as if Homer were an eyewitness to the events"

Wasn't Homer supposed to be blind?

[uniface]

The research is pretty much done.

[Minimalist]

Intresting theory, and worth of some research.

But...
"as if Homer were an eyewitness to the events"

Wasn't Homer supposed to be blind?

Yes.

[Rokcet Scientist]

Was he born blind, or was he blinded later in life?
In the first case you can't blame him for getting descriptions of landscapes wrong as he wouldn't have any concept of them as we, the seeing do. Also: whether he ever could see or not, Homer wasn't ever a temporal witness of what he described, was he? Afaik he lived four-and-a-half centuries after the Trojan War, so everything he wrote must have been hearsay anyway. Which is a good guess in any case, because what would a blind man do in a war...?

Kinda like the bible, really.
And we all know of the veracity calibre of that tome, don't we?

Also it would be interesting to know how exactly Homer, being blind, wrote. Braille hadn't yet been invented, had it? So he had scribes he dictated to? What elevated him to such a status that he could afford scribes?

[dannan14]

i'm pretty sure Homer didn't write anything. The epic poem was a medium designed to be recited from memory, wasn't it?

[Johnny]

i'm pretty sure Homer didn't write anything. The epic poem was a medium designed to be recited from memory, wasn't it?

It's not even known for certain that Homer was one man or when he lived. Were the poems his or collected oral traditions finally written down? Sure, the ancient greeks thought he was an historical figure. But I don't know how trustworthy a people yet to develop a concept of zero can really be.

[Minimalist]

Most cultures go through a long period of oral tradition. Writing seems to develop as a need for record-keeping ( Israel Finkelstein and Phillip Davies have done some work on the distinction) and "literature" grows out that development. The scholarly consensus on Homer is 8th century BC which is, coincidentally?, right when the Greek world begins to emerge from the Dark Age in the aftermath of the collapse of the Late Bronze Age cultures.

[Rokcet Scientist]

I.o.w. Homer is just as real as Jesus...

Or Arthur!