In Search of the Trojan War
by Michael Wood
the book
Posted on 05/03/2007 10:59:47 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
I now regard as established that Ahhiyawa of the Hittite texts refers to a Mycenaean Greek kingdom not located in Asia Minor. Those who wish to wait for the proverbial "smoking gun" may do so, but the circumstantial evidence is now overwhelming. The alternative hypothesis of Hajnal (2003: 40-42) of Ahhiyawa as a small city state of Cilicia is not credible. Hittite references show that Ahhiyawa was a formidable power influential in far western Asia Minor. I leave to others the problem of determining just which Mycenaean kingdom (or kingdoms) should be identified with the Ahhiyawa of the Hittite texts... I find it equally implausible that any Hittite king would have made the accommodation of importing and employing Linear B scribes just for the purpose of reading or composing texts in Greek. The situation here is very different from that of Akkadian, for which the Hittite king had many reasons for employing scribes fluent in the language.
(Excerpt) Read more at unc.edu ...
The region later known as the Troad was called Wilusa by the Hittites. This identification was first put forth by Emil Forrer, but largely disputed by most Hittite experts until 1983 when Houwink ten Cate showed that two fragments were from the same original cuneiform tablet and in his discussion of the restored letter showed that Wilusa was correctly placed in northwestern Anatolia. According to Trevor Bryce, Hittite texts indicate a number of Ahhiyawan raids on Wilusa during the 13th century BC, which may have resulted with the overthrow of king Walmu. -- Troas, Answers.com (this text no longer appears there)
In Search of the Trojan War
by Michael Wood
the book
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See, this one really *is* a bit dry for a topic. Even this:
Scientists: Bison in Illinois earlier (aren’t you relieved?)
South Carolina homepage (thestate.com) | Tue, Aug. 30, 2005 | Associated Press
Posted on 09/03/2005 10:17:31 AM EDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1476377/posts
...has 13 big posts (a number of which are mine, but still).
Bump. Now there’s five responses.
You’re right. It’s only a matter of time. And there’s that link to the unquotable source, regarding Aeneas...
The Dorak Affair's Final ChapterThere were drawings of an ancient comb with a dolphin motif, of jewel boxes again decorated with dolphins, of a vase in the shape of a bird of gold and silver; there were sketches of the gold leaf covering which was said to have extended over the surface of the wooden throne which could have been a present from Egypt, details of the rug which had disintegrated when the tombs had been opened, and even rubbings of the sword blade etched with ships and of a sherd of alabaster which had been marked with hieroglyphics. And every one of these drawings had been annotated in Mellaart's hand... Earlier this week in phone conversations I had with David Stronach, Professor of Near East Archaeology at the University of California - Berkeley, Stronach disclosed that Jimmie Mellaart invented Dorak. He called it a "dream-like epsidode"... But most important of all in relation to the Dorak mystery, Stronach's was the other handwriting Pearson & Connor refer to above in Mellart's memoirs.
Opinion: Suzan Mazur
Monday, 10 October 2005
Is there any truth in the rumour that scholars have fabricated or falsified evidence in order to disprove CoD?James Mellaart (1991/2), a famous archaeologist and, until recently, a lecturer at University College London... claimed to have access to an unpublished cuneiform text which gives a list of synchronisms between Lydia (a kingdom in western Turkey in classical times) and Assyria, running back 21 generations from the 7th century BC through to the Late Bronze Age. According to Mellaart it confirmed the conventional chronology and made "short shrift" of our model... Despite his best efforts, Professor David Lewis, an eminent epigraphist at Oxford, could find no trace of such a tablet. Other scholars, such as cuneiform expert Professor David Hawkins of the School of Oriental and African Studies, are confident that the text is simply not real. With evident embarassment, the editor of the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society, which had carried Mellaart's review, published a note, alongside letters from ourselves (James & Kokkinos 1992/3) and Lewis, stating that Mellaart's "alleged documents... should not be cited as valid source material." (Gibson 1992/3, 82). And there this extraordinary episode ended. Mellaart does not appear to have mentioned his tablet since.
This has something to do with archaeologists trying to find historical references in other cultures concerning interaction with ancient Troy, yes?
Emil Forrer first identified the Achaeans (Homer’s usual identifier for the Greeks) in the Hittite archive. That was back circa 1930. The stench of Arthur Evans and his non-Greek Minoan thallosocracy still hung over everything, and in some places still does. There remains a sort of manic response to Schliemann — less than ten years ago there were a couple of (alleged) researchers who claimed that the so-called Mask of Agamemnon had been faked by Schliemann. That’s a form of mental illness, whatever his failings may have been.
Anyway, Forrer’s identification was rejected. It first started to revive for real thanks to the efforts of Michael Wood. In the DVD set, Wood said something interesting. He thought that Schliemann’s rubbish tips at Hissarlik would be a great place to sift through to see if any tablets were tossed. If there had been an archive of some sort (even a small one), it probably would have been in the citadel, which is something Schliemann mostly destroyed in his first excavation of the site.
There’s still debate obviously about whether the Trojan War was historical, but all the evidence points to its historicity. This doesn’t mean that Washington threw a coin across the Delaware, or chopped down the cherry tree, only that the documentary evidence that a war was fought by the Mycenaean Greeks in Troy.
Emil Forrer was correct. I was first turned onto this (I guess) by Michael Wood, who discusses Forrer and the Hattusas archive in his In Search of the Trojan War.ANE Digest Number 357There is an Akagamunas (Akaiamunas?), apparently the Achaian king, appearing in the hethite correspondence. He was tentatively equivalated, I think by Forrer, with the homeric Agamemnon. Most of Forrers equation are today in low esteem, even if his name is still among the leader hethitologists. There are no objective grounds against this very equation but only natural skepsis. Should one hold his equation, one gets Akaiamunas/Akaiamenon >> Agamemnon. This as Idomeneos and Menelaos (variant of the lawagetas) would thus be just titles, no personal names.
From: Banyai Michael Leonberg
Date: Fri, 25 Dec 1998
"These vague resemblances do not look like mere chance; Achaiwoi/Ahhiyawa; Alaksandus/Alexandros [Paris]; Wilusa/Wilios; Taruisa/Troia: each in isolation presents problems, but four resemblances is pressing coincidence too far." (p 207, italics in original)Wood also mentions Tawagalawas which IMHO could be Achilles (Ta-Agalawas) and Etewokleweios which IMHO could be Eteocles.
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Just an update.To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list."Was There a Trojan War?"A long letter from a Hittite king, probably Hattusili III (who ruled circa 1267-1237 B.C.), to the king of Ahhiyawa mentions that Wilusa was once a bone of contention between the two. The location of Ahhiyawa has been controversial since its earliest recognition in the Hittite texts in the 1920s. The scattered references to it suggested that it lay across the sea and that its interests often conflicted with those of the Hittites. What is now known of the geography of western Anatolia makes it clear that there could be no room on the mainland for the kingdom of Ahhiyawa. Furthermore, the references to the political interests of Ahhiyawa on the west coast mesh well with increasing archaeological evidence for Mycenaean Greeks in the area, so that it is now widely accepted that "Ahhiyawa" is indeed the Hittite designation for this culture. |
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Perhaps Washington threw the coin across an upper branch of the Potomac, or maybe the nearby Rappahannock. Perhaps likely he skipped it across. The story is supposedly based on a story told by one of Washington’s step-grandsons. In any case it was not the Delaware!
Nor is the coin throw story part of Parson Weems’ childhood legends made up about young Washington which include the ‘will not tell a lie’ tale as to who chopped down the cherry tree.
Thanks! It’s on YouTube as well, I think.
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