Where Troy Once Stood -or- This Ain't Greece, You Turkey!

I'm a big fan of Iman Wilkens. The man has done a lot of ground-breaking research, and written a very intriguing (but rather dense and overwhelming) book called "Where Troy Once Stood". I first came across it years ago, and I go poke through it again every year or two. In that book, Wilken's dissects the Illiad and the Odyssey, and notes several non-greco-friendly points. His writting is a little dry and textbooky, but his analysis very intriguing, so I'll try to summarize it here... (Warning, this will be a fairly lengthy post)

1. Choice of Language. Homer never uses the Greek word for “Greeks” (that would be Hellenes, if memory serves me correctly) but instead calls them Achaeans, which means "people of the sea". Nor does he use the word for “Barbarians” (that the Greeks were so fast to apply to “lower” cultures) when describing the Trojans. Homer uses sympathetic language to describe the enemy, as though he were describing a tragic civil war, not a victorious conquest.

2. The two sides in the Illiad share the same Gods, half of whom support Troy over the "Greeks". They also share the same language, and the same funeral rites, implying they have the same culture. Certainly not true for Greece and Turkey.

3. All the important dead of the Illiad are cremated on large pyres. However, archaeological data (and other written examples from ancient greece) show us that the Greeks buried thier dead, crowned with golden funeral masks. A body that was not buried would was disgraced and the soul would not end up in Elysium, like in Sophocles' play Antigone.

4. Achilles, Hector, and contemporaries battle from the backs of chariots, all through-out the Illiad. But historically, the Greeks fought pretty exclusively on foot prior to Alexander.

5. Homers ocean descriptions are not of the gentle blue Mediterranean which rests next to Greece and Turkey. His descriptions of "wine-dark swelling waters" and tidal variances better match the Atlantic.

6. The Illiad describes ceaseless rains, heavy fog, and a good deal of snow. That does not match Turkey either. Also the descriptions of the landscape are far too lush for Turkey.

7. Size does matter. The ruins in Turkey (at a place called Hisserlik) that archaeologists such as Schliemann claim are Troy are of a city the size to hold 2,000 to 5,000 people. Not so epic. As Homer tells it, Troy mobilizes a defense of over 50,000 warriors.

8. In fact, the geography of Hisserlik and Turkey don't match Homer at all. The city is too close to the Sea, and it lacks the hills and wardikes Homer mentions. Certain nearby Trojan allies are located far distantly. In other cases it mentions troops arriving by Sea who'd have had a much shorter voyage by land.

9. The Odyssey exceeds the limits of the Mediterranean. In that part of the world, you can't really get more than a few weeks away from home by boat. There are numerous passages in the Odyssey that specify the direction Odysseus sailed and how long he went in that direction. Try to follow his sailing directions from Hisserlik, and you'll run aground repeatedly.

10. On a related note, many of the Homeric place names we are familiar with can be dated to the reign of Alexander the Great. As he conquered, he renamed new greek colonies after the familiar marvels of the heroic age. In other words, what we call Rhodes (etc) wasn't yet called Rhodes (etc) at the time Homer mentioned the Rhodian peoples (etc) in his very detailed catalogue of ships.

Those 10 points do a pretty good job of showing that the Oral Traditions of the Illiad don't match the historical world of Greece. Other historians have noted all this of course, and many have decided it means Homer's tales are but a myth or at least greatly exaggerated.

And that's where Iman Wilkens gets interesting. Instead of giving up on Homer, he asks a series of questions:
Is there another culture, older than the Greeks, that rode chariots and cremated their dead?
Did that culture live in a place that better matches the weather and plant life described in the Illiad?
And did that culture have an existing oral or bardic tradition of their own, of which Homer's works could be merely the greek translation?

The answer is "Yes" on all accounts. The Celts match all those descriptors.

So Iman Wilkens got out some maps, and traveled a bit, searching Europe for places with old names that where homonymns to the places in the Illiad. He went to those places and checked to see if they matched the descriptions therein.

He found that in southern england there is a valley o'erlooking the coast, with the remains of two ancient wardike earthworks, and a great number of rivers matching those in Homer. What's more, if you plot the sailing routes from those shores, you'll follow existing currents and only run aground where Homer says there's land.


The actual book makes it's points in a lot more detail, of course. It also covers a "mystery cult" reason for the Odyssey to use the specific creatures and encounters it does. Wilkens even finds a reason for the Trojan War beyond "gimme my wife back!"