Showing posts with label Helen of Troy. Show all posts

March 25, 2016

The Battle Over Troy

Historian Frank Kolb shifts Trojan War from Turkey to Greece

About 6km inland from Turkey’s Aegean coast stands a pile of ancient masonry believed to be the site of legendary Troy. An outsized Trojan horse — very Disney — rears beside it. A few broken doric columns lend a classical air. And tour guides explain how at this stronghold, more than 1000 years before the birth of Christ, the Trojan champion Hector fought the Greek superhero Achilles in a war over a faithless beauty named Helen.

Now one of Germany’s most distinguished ancient historians, Frank Kolb, is challenging this article of faith with claims that the Trojan War was fought not in Turkey but in mainland Greece. Kolb, a professor at Tubingen University, is out to deflate the popular belief in a real Trojan War fought at the archeological site identified with Troy since the German amateur archeologist Heinrich Schliemann began excavating there — the locals call it Hisarlik hill — in the 1870s.

Kolb, an expert in the ancient history of western Turkey, argues in the next issue of Talanta, journal of the Dutch Archeological and Historical Society, that the legend of the Trojan War was formed in Greece before migrating between the 11th and the 8th centuries BC to Turkey, or Asia Minor as it was then called. “Together with the Trojan legend, the names of persons, settlements and tribes were transported into that region, which thus became a kind of lookalike of central Greece,” he writes.

The Trojan War story is told in The Iliad, an epic poem written around 700BC. The work, composed by a reputedly blind bard named Homer, is the distillation of an even more venerable body of myth preserved in the aspic of formulaic verse. Homer was the first epic poet in Western literature. Some scholars believe the Greek alphabet was developed to bear his work. Little, though, is known about him.

Throughout its 2700-year lifespan The Iliad has been many things. It tells of the rage of one warrior, Achilles, and its consequences. Of the sorrows, and the splendours, of war. And the necessity — the democracy — of death. These days it is often read as a clash-of-civilisations tale pitting the Greek West against the Oriental East. Kolb’s essay, titled Phantom Trojans at the Dardanelles, suggests the clash at the heart of the poem is Greek-on-Greek. Achilles’ famous duel with Hector, he claims, cannot have been staged on Turkey’s Aegean coast. Instead, it “reflects a war between neighbouring tribes in central Greece”.

Ilios is Homer’s preferred name — a Greek name — and TheIliad is, by definition, “the story of Ilios”. The word Troy, which relates to the surrounding region — the Troad — is used less frequently and never explicitly to name the settlement. And yet it is Troy, and not Ilios, to which our culture has the deeper attachment.

The idea that the Trojan War was really a kind of Hellenic war that shook itself from its moorings, drifted east across the Aegean, and washed up in Turkey, will likely cause a stir. Athens will be delighted to reclaim its foundational epic from the hands of its Turkish antagonist; Ankara will be nettled.

Turkey is deeply attached to the idea that the Trojan champion Hector, whom many readers of Homer see as the poem’s real hero, was one of its own. In 2009, a 5m statue of Hector was erected near Canakkale, the jumping-off point for tours of the World War I battlefields of the nearby Dardanelles as well as the archeological site of Troy. In that year the local mayor, Alaaddin Ozkurnaz, told the Anatolia news agency: “It is very important for us to have a permanent marble work of art about Hector, an Anatolian who we embrace as one of our own.”

Kolb, however, argues that the name Hector has no Anatolian, or Turkish, roots. But it does turn up in Mycenaean Linear B tablets, which preserve the earliest form of written Greek, along with other names of important Trojan figures in The Iliad. In fact, Kolb writes, in The Iliad “the large majority of the personnel on the Trojan side bear Greek names”. Homer’s Greek heroes, such as Achilles and Ajax, are also mentioned on the clay Linear B tablets. “There is, however, nothing heroic about their role in the Mycenaean world,” Kolb adds. “They appear as servants, artisans or administrative functionaries in Mycenaean palaces.”

Anchises is another name powerfully connected with the Trojan War. He was the lucky Trojan who got to sleep with the love goddess Aphrodite. She bore him a son, Aeneas, who fought valiantly for his home town. Aeneas escaped from the ruins of Troy, after the quintessential Greek ruse of the Trojan Horse, to found Rome. That story is told in Virgil’s epic The Aeneid, a Latin sequel to The Iliad. However, as Kolb points out, Anchises was also a famous Greek aristocrat in the Greek Peloponnese.

This might explain why Greek place names, such as Thebe, turn up in Homer’s Trojan world. Another example is Larissa, which in The Iliad is inhabited by a tribe loyal to the Trojans. But Larissa also happens to have been a city in ancient Thessaly, now northern Greece. The Leleges and the Pelasgoi, groups that Homer places near Troy — the poet has rampaging Achilles destroy their cities — were in reality inhabitants of central and northern Greece.

In Homer’s time the Aegean coast of Asia Minor was land rich for the taking. Migrants set out for these shores by boat (much like today’s refugees) in search of a new life. Homer was, in all likelihood, part of this migration. His poetic language is a fusion of two Greek dialects, Ionian and Aeolian, both of them used by immigrant Greeks to the eastern Aegean. And he has clearly, in composing his story, braided together heroic tales from different regions of Greece and Asia Minor. But one thing, Kolb argues, is certain: there were never any Trojans at this place. There were Dardanians, and they gave their name to the Dardanelles; but the Trojans, he believes, are a Homeric invention.

Homer is the original dead white male and The Iliad is the taproot of Western civilisation.

The poem was glamorous in antiquity — it was the “milk” on which Athenian boys were raised. And its glamour — its allure — has never dimmed.

When the British poet Patrick Shaw Stewart, who fought at Gallipoli during World War I, gazed across the Dardanelles to the ruins Schliemann had exposed less than half a century earlier, he spied there a god of war and comrade in arms.

The Homeric hero Achilles chose immortal death over a long, yet forgotten, life. And it was to him that the poet penned these heart-wrenching lines:

Was it so hard, Achilles,

So very hard to die?

Though knewest, and I know not —

So much the happier am I.

So I will go back this morning

From Imbros over the sea;

Stand in the trench, Achilles,

Flame-capped, and shout for me.

In the past 12 months two new translations of The Iliad have appeared between hard covers, while a live-relay reading by some of the finest actors of the British stage — including Simon Russell Beale, Simon Callow, Sinead Cusack, Ben Whishaw and Samuel West — was broadcast in August last year to a global audience. The professors, meanwhile, are at odds over the poem’s precise relationship to the ruins in Turkey. Homer is the Western canon’s version of antimatter: Homeric problems are drawn to the void; few Homeric solutions emerge.

Until relatively recently the scholarly consensus held that Homer’s verses were mere myth and the archeological site had little or no relationship to the text that is still read, studied and, increasingly, adapted for stage and screen.

That began to change under the direction of the Manfred Korfmann, best known of the recent directors of excavation at Troy-Hisarlik.

Korfmann claimed in 2004 that Homer should be “taken seriously”. What is more, “his story of a military conflict between Greeks and the inhabitants of Troy is based on a memory of historical events — whatever these may have been”. Majority opinion in the English-speaking scholarly world — though not the European, specifically German, academic milieu — now supports him.

But the archeological site of Troy-Hisarlik is not, at first sight, amenable to his vision. He had to work hard to make it stick.

The site is made up of at least nine settlements built atop one another, much like a multi-level carpark, and it is the sixth and seventh layers, destroyed around 1200BC, that are most often identified with Homer’s Troy. The Greek, or Achaean, forces are led by Agamemnon, the lord of Mycenae — “king of kings” — and brother of the cuckolded Menelaus of Sparta, husband to the wayward beauty Helen.

Any later than 1200BC — the late Bronze Age — and there would have been no Greek attack on Troy, for the palace of Mycenae lay in ruins. However, in the century before its collapse, Mycenae certainly looked the part. Visitors to its remains, in the Greek Peloponnese, get that. With its Lion Gate, its riches of beaten gold and its massive walls of well-cut masonry — dubbed cyclopean because it was thought only a Cyclops could assemble them — powerful Mycenae lives up to Homeric expectations. But Troy — not so.

The believers maintain that here, within a tiny citadel, a wealthy Trojan kingdom withstood a siege by an armada of 1200 ships filled with the Greek world’s best fighting units. These included Achilles and his fearsome Myrmidons — Navy SEALS in shin greaves.

Homer’s Troy is rich in gold, with sumptuous halls and high-vaulted roofs. King Priam, who sired 50 sons and 12 daughters, ruled from a magnificent structure built wide with porches and colonnades of, in the poet’s words, “smooth, lustrous ashlar, linked in a line”. Not by any stretch of the imagination do the visible ruins match Homer’s wonders.

While Troy VI and VIIa fit the time frame of a possible Mycenean Greek attack, nothing else about them dovetails neatly with Homer. The former is the more impressive of the two settlements, yet it was destroyed by earthquake. The latter came to a violent end, but there are no Greek calling cards in the charred rubble: nothing definite to link the settlement’s end to a war bearing any resemblance to Homer’s.

The crux moment came when Korfmann presented archeological evidence of a much larger “lower city” at the site. A bigger Troy was more Troy-like. He proposed an ancient city 15 times larger than the undistinguished pile atop Hisarlik hill. This Troy would have housed up to 8000 souls.

Kolb argued against this view at the time. Korfmann was not only a compatriot of Kolb’s; both worked at Tubingen University. When Korfmann presented his conjectural recreation of Troy as an Anatolian power city, Kolb scorned him as the “Erich von Daniken of archeology”.

It was at this point that their stoush hit the English-speaking papers. In October 2002, The New York Times covered the contretemps in a report headlined: “Was Troy a metropolis? Homer isn’t talking”. The piece, which ping-ponged the arguments of Korfmann and Kolb back and forth, concluded inconclusively by asking whether Korfmann or Kolb would be Achilles the victor.

The debate about the “historicity” of Troy — the question of whether and to what extent Homer’s Trojan War has a grounding in reality — has since broadened into other fields. One of these is the wonderfully named discipline of epigraphy: the study of inscriptions. Much of the interest now revolves around whether cuneiform inscriptions from the Hittite empire — the reigning Anatolian superpower in 1200BC — shed any light. But there’s still no clincher. For each push from a believer, there is pushback from a sceptic.

Since Korfmann’s death in 2005, the intensity of the debate has subsided, but it continues nonetheless. And now the battle over Troy is to be revived, along fresh lines of attack, by Kolb’s Talanta piece.

If the success of an argument can be measured purely by the amount of modern statuary erected in support of it, then Korfmann, with the support of the Trojan Horse and the 5m-high Turkish Hector, must surely be the posthumous victor.

But the Greeks are pretty good at statuary, too. And who knows how they will respond to news that Hector is really a Hellene.

By Luke Slattery
With many thanks to The Australian

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December 01, 2014

Five Lost Cities

Of course they are many more than five!

Our day-to-day lives can often be pretty monotonous. So it's no wonder that many of us find lost cities to be fascinating examples of mystery, adventure and sometimes fantasy. Whether these places have been made inaccessible by natural disaster, devastated by war or fabricated entirely, lost cities have sparked the imaginations of millions of would-be anthropologists and treasure-seekers around the world.

What exactly is a lost city? Well, the criteria are pretty loose. In some instances, the city was buried or destroyed. Many of the cities we commonly think of as lost weren't technically lost -- they were simply unknown to the Westerners who later "discovered" them and made them famous, according to Steven A. Wernke, assistant professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University [source: Wernke]. Ironically, the lost cities that have left some of the heaviest imprints on popular culture are the ones that may not have even existed. This is probably because we associate them with ideas of fantastic wealth, enlightenment and prosperity.

There are legends and ruins of dozens of lost cities around the world. HowStuffWorks has compiled a list of five historically significant cities whose stories run the gamut from conflict and devastation to prosperity and intrigue

Pompeii
In practically the blink of an eye, the thriving community of Pompeii, Italy, was reduced to ash-covered ruins, permanently frozen in time. It was a normal day in A.D. 79 for the residents of Pompeii. Suddenly, the tempestuous volcano Mount Vesuvius erupted, showering the city with ashes, cinders and other debris. Many residents were able to evacuate before the volcanic waste landed. However, those 2,000 people who didn't escape in time were trapped under the ashes, which almost instantly formed an airtight seal of sorts over the entire city.
The ruins of Pompeii weren't disturbed until they were discovered in 1748 and archaeologists began the excavation process [source: The History Channel]. Archaeologists never expected the near-perfect preservation of the buildings and objects that had been buried for more than 1,500 years. They were even able to create molds of the people trapped underneath the debris. Though their bodies had long since turned to dust, the air pockets where they were trapped remained intact. Once filled with plaster, the molds rendered a striking likeness of the volcano's victims, trapped in various states of evacuation [source: National Geographic].

El Dorado
The pursuit of wealth has long encouraged treasure-seekers to play the lottery, enter sweepstakes and search for pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. However, few legends have elicited as passionate a response as that of El Dorado, the famed (and almost definitely imaginary) city of riches that has eluded explorers for centuries.

The origin of El Dorado, which is Spanish for "The Gilded One," dates back to the 16th or 17th century, when European explorers in South America first heard tales about a fabulously wealthy American Indian chief who was perpetually covered in gold dust [source: National Geographic]. The city -- supposed to be located somewhere in the northern portion of South America -- was said to be chock-full of precious gems and gold. Thousands of explorers have tried in vain to locate this city of riches, and many of them have died in the process from a variety of causes, including disease and starvation.
One of the most famous cases involves Percy Harrison Fawcett, a British explorer who set out in 1925 to find El Dorado, which he named the City of Z. Fawcett and his expedition party entered the jungles of the Amazon, never to be heard from again. Still more explorers have endeavored to find Fawcett's group but have repeatedly turned up dead or empty-handed. Given this track record, even Indiana Jones might encourage El Dorado seekers to buy a scratch-off ticket instead of risking their lives.

Troy
Few epic tales are studied more than "The Odyssey" or "The Iliad," penned by Homer around 800 B.C. These fictional poems describe the Trojan War. The city of Troy was located in what is now modern-day Turkey, sandwiched between Asia and Europe. Because of its accessibility, Troy was a cultural hotbed and ideal trade locale. Homer's epic poems describe how Helen, the stunning wife of Sparta's King Menelaus, allegedly ran off with a Trojan prince named Paris. This affair reputedly caused the Trojan War and earned Helen's reputation as the face that launched a thousand ships. Menelaus launched a huge offensive on Troy, resulting in the war that may have involved a notorious wooden horse, Achilles and a number of other famous tales.

With a history so rooted in legend, it's no wonder that historians were unsure whether Troy actually existed. It's evident that Troy was abandoned following the Trojan War, from 1100 to 700 B.C. It was then resettled and revitalized before it was captured by the Romans in 85 B.C. Soon after, the civilization fizzled out and was left in ruins until its discovery in 1822. Archaeologists have since identified many layers of cities built on top of each other. The stone walls and fortresses present in the sixth and seventh oldest layers are now believed to be the Troy described in Homer's epics, and the legend of the Trojan War is now widely accepted, although its cause is still uncertain.(This song tells the story).

Carthage
Similar to Troy, the city of Carthage was situated in a highly coveted spot in the Mediterranean near modern-day Tunisia. Carthage was founded by the Phoenicians (probably around 800 B.C.) as a trading post in North Africa, directly across from the toe of bootlike Italy. Though its prime location brought the city great prosperity, it also caused 150 years of war -- mainly with Rome -- that eventually led to Carthage's demise. The First Punic War (260-241 B.C.) showcased Rome's superior naval tactics and resulted in Carthage's resounding defeat. During the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.), Carthage battled Rome for rights to Spain and was once again soundly defeated. Rome even managed to outsmart Carthage's legendary military tactician, Hannibal.

Following this devastating loss, Carthage existed as a shell of its former glory until 151 B.C., when Romans noticed the city enjoying a renaissance of sorts. The idea of Carthage prospering made the Romans nervous, so they jumped on the chance to declare war after Carthage violated the terms of a peace accord. This war lasted only a few years and resulted in the total destruction of Carthage and all of its buildings as well as the deaths of thousands of Carthaginians. The city was eventually resettled, but it never fully recovered as a powerhouse. Today, Carthage is a wealthy suburb of Tunisia.

Atlantis
According to the Greek philosopher Plato, Atlantis was a bustling society, filled with wealth, architectural marvels and a thriving culture. While Plato's colorful descriptions of Atlantis are widely believed to be fictional, some historians think the city existed, although their guesses as to when and where vary widely. Plato noted that the island of Atlantis disappeared 9,000 years prior to when he wrote about it, but some scholars think this number was transcribed or translated incorrectly because 900 seems more plausible. Some archaeologists have theorized that Atlantis was located in the Greek Islands and was sunk by a volcanic eruption. Still others hypothesize its location to be underwater near the Caribbean, Ireland, South America or even Antarctica [source: National Geographic].

Whether or not Atlantis actually existed, the idea of this utopian city has enthralled many to such an extent that numerous books, movies and documentaries have glamorized it and sought to solve the mystery of its disappearance. As recently as February 2009, an aeronautical engineer made headlines worldwide when he claimed to have found Atlantis using the Google Ocean tool, which allows users to comb through thousands of photos of ocean landscapes. To date, the jury is still out on the matter of whether the underwater city off the northwest coast of Africa is actually Atlantis. [source: Telegraph].

With thanks to How Stuff Works

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May 05, 2013

Lost City of Heracleion Gives Up Its Secrets

For centuries it was thought to be a legend, a city of extraordinary wealth mentioned in Homer, visited by Helen of Troy and Paris, her lover, but apparently buried under the sea.

In fact, Heracleion was true, and a decade after divers began uncovering its treasures, archaeologists have produced a picture of what life was like in the city in the era of the pharaohs.

The city, also called Thonis, disappeared beneath the Mediterranean around 1,200 years ago and was found during a survey of the Egyptian shore at the beginning of the last decade.

Now its life at the heart of trade routes in classical times are becoming clear, with researchers forming the view that the city was the main customs hub through which all trade from Greece and elsewhere in the Mediterranean entered Egypt.

They have discovered the remains of more than 64 ships buried in the thick clay and sand that now covers the sea bed. Gold coins and weights made from bronze and stone have also been found, hinting at the trade that went on.

Giant 16 foot statues have been uncovered and brought to the surface while archaeologists have found hundreds of smaller statues of minor gods on the sea floor.
Slabs of stone inscribed in both ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian have also been brought to the surface.

Dozens of small limestone sarcophagi were also recently uncovered by divers and are believed to have once contained mummified animals, put there to appease the gods.

Dr Damian Robinson, director of the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the University of Oxford, who is part of the team working on the site, said: “It is a major city we are excavating.

“The site has amazing preservation. We are now starting to look at some of the more interesting areas within it to try to understand life there.
“We are getting a rich picture of things like the trade that was going on there and the nature of the maritime economy in the Egyptian late period. There were things were coming in from Greece and the Phoenicians.

“We have hundreds of small statues of gods and we are trying to find where the temples to these gods were in the city.

“The ships are really interesting as it is the biggest number of ancient ships found in one place and we have found over 700 ancient anchors so far.”

The researchers, working with German TV documentary makers, have also created a three dimensional reconstruction of the city.

At its heart was a huge temple to the god Amun-Gereb, the supreme god of the Egyptians at the time.

From this stretched a vast network of canals and channels, which allowed the city to become the most important port in the Mediterranean at the time.

Last month archaeologists from around the world gathered at the University of Oxford to discuss the discoveries starting to emerge from the treasures found in Heracleion, named for Hercules, who legend claimed had been there.

It was also mentioned fleetingly in ancient texts.

Dr Robinson said: “It was the major international trading port for Egypt at this time. It is where taxation was taken on import and export duties. All of this was run by the main temple.”

Submerged under 150 feet of water, the site sits in what is now the Bay of Aboukir. In the 8th Century BC, when the city is thought to have been built, it would have sat at the mouth of the River Nile delta as it opened up into the Mediterranean.

Scientists still have little idea what caused the city to slip into the water nearly 1,000 years later, but it is thought that gradual sea level rise combined with a sudden collapse of the unstable sediment the city was built on caused the area to drop by around 12 feet.

Over time the city faded from memory and its existence, along with other lost settlements along the coast, was only known from a few ancient texts.

French underwater archaeologist Dr Franck Goddio was the first to rediscover the city while doing surveying of the area while looking for French warships that sank there in the 18 century battle of the Nile.

When divers began sifting down through the thick layers of sand and mud, they could barely believe what they found.

“The archaeological evidence is simply overwhelming,” said Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford has also been taking part in the excavation.

“By lying untouched and protected by sand on the sea floor for centuries they are brilliantly preserved.”

The researchers now also hope that they may even find some sarcophagi used to bury humans in some of the outlying areas around the sunken city.

“The discoveries enhance the importance of the specific location of the city standing at the 'Mouth of the Sea of the Greek’,” said Dr Goddio, who has led the excavation.

“We are just at the beginning of our research. We will probably have to continue working for the next 200 years for Thonis-Heracleion to be fully revealed and understood.”

* Egypt’s Sunken City/ A Legend Is Revealed is to be shown on the German television station Arte on Saturday 11 May at 8.15pm

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent

With many thanks to The Telegraph

Picture credit “Helen of Troy”: Eclectic/Eccentric

More pictures here.

click to enlarge.

See also Helen of Troy - The Movie, The Music and Jon English - if you are not familiar with this story of Helen and Paris.