Added note: The lecture text is provided here as a backup alternative to emeritus Professor P. H. Damstes website in the event there is difficulty accessing his website through the internet. In the 2009 expanded and revised edition of the book Where Troy Once Stood the lecture text below has been slightly abridged and includes minor changes. Where Troy Once Stood [Appendix 1 to Where Troy Once Stood by I. Wilkens, 2nd revised edition 1999, page 1 of 9] Since classical antiquity, readers of Homer have been puzzled by the inconsistencies of the Greek geography as described in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Already Strabo and Eratosthenes had abandoned their efforts to make sense of Homers geography in the Mediterranean. To mention only a few examples of the absurdities : when Odysseus had arrived in his native country Ithaca, which is supposed to be Thiaki near Greeces west coast, he at first made believe Athene that he had come as a passenger aboard a ship travelling from Crete to Sidon, present Saïda in Lebanon. But it is obvious to anyone that Thiaki is not on the way from Crete to Lebanon, but quite in the opposite direction. As to Ithaca itself, it is described as the westernmost of a group of islands while it is also situated close to the mainland, with the tiny island of Asteris close by. As none of these descriptions and none of the other details mentioned by the poet correspond to the present island of Thiaki, or to any of the other islands in the region, the problem of identifying Homers Ithaca has never been solved, despite the efforts of countless scholars. Most surprising is also the story where Agamemnon recounts that it took him a full month to sail from his kingdom Argos, taken to be in the northeastern Peloponnese, to Ithaca, when we know that in Greece the trip takes less than 24 hours. One may also wonder why the Achaeans built 1186 ships for their attack on Troy in Turkey as it would have been much cheaper, quicker and far more convenient to approach northwest Turkey overland via Thessaly. What is more, they were clearly afraid to cross the sea, despite the fact that sailing in the Aegean is rather a question of island hopping as one is seldom out of sight of the next island. But Iphigenia had to be offered to secure a fair wind and Menelaus even invoked the gods to show him the best course to sail from Lesbos to Euboea. But when he hears that his brother Agamemnon was assassinated by his wife, he apparently sees no particular difficulty in making the enormous detour to Egypt to build a burial mound for his dead brother in this country which, in fact, was ruled by the Pharaohs and certainly not by Agamemnon or any other Greek king. If the Achaeans were afraid to cross the Aegean Sea, one also wonders why Paris, after the abduction of Helen, on his way from Greece to Turkey, would have made the enormous detour via Sidon in Lebanon to buy some embroidered cloth for her. Another story that defies explanation is about a merchant sailing from Taphos with a cargo of iron to Temese, as it is impossible to identify these names with coastal cities or with any mining region in the Mediterranean, as many commentators have noticed. We are also informed about a place with a very healthy climate called the island of Syria, situated about six days sailing north of Ortygia, which could not be identified either, apart from the fact that such a north-south distance is too great for the Mediterranean. One also wonders, for instance, how Menelaus ship could drift from Cape Malea southwards to Crete in a storm blowing from the south ! The list of inconsistencies in Homers geography is very long indeed and this is also true for the descriptions of the city of Troy and the Trojan plain. The ruins at Hissarlik in northwest Turkey, which Heinrich Schliemann took for those of Homers Troy, despite the doubts expressed by the scientific community ever since, can hardly be those of the great capital with the wide streets of Priams kingdom, which, according to Homer, had a garrison of 50,000 warriors. The ruins of Hissarlik are those of a very small village, about the size of the Place de la Concorde in Paris, but the layers VIIa and b, which correspond to the time of the Trojan War, are particularly poor hamlets. What is more, the so-called Treasure of Priam was found in a layer that is about a millenium too old. The Trojan plain in Turkey is also far too small to contain all the rivers mentioned by Homer, or all the cities destroyed by Achilles. In fact this plain, which was even considerably smaller 3200 years ago, does not provide enough space for the installation of an invading army of about 100,000 men and still leave enough room for the long pursuits with the horse-drawn chariots. Since Homer speaks of the horse-taming Trojans and of Troy rich in horses one would expect archaeologists to have found many skeletons of horses, which is not the case.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 19:43:31 +0000
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