Posted on 02/24/2002 4:46:17 PM PST by blam
February 25, 2002
Recent finds prove that Homer's stories were more than myth
By Norman Hammond, Archaeology Correspondent
A CYNICAL scholar once noted that the reason that academic disputes were so bitter was that the stakes were so small. In the real world maybe, but Troy has been a battleground for 3,000 years not because of mundane matters of funding and status but because of its grip on our imaginations.
There may or may not have been a decade’s siege on the edge of the Dardanelles around 1100BC, pitting Late Mycenaean Greeks against their neighbours and possible distant kin: but three centuries later Homer proclaimed so, and the believers have outnumbered the sceptics ever since.
The Romans were believers: on the western skyline of their city of Ilium, built as we now know over most of the Bronze Age settlement, they raised two tumuli as cenotaphs for Achilles and Patroclus to make up for those no longer extant. In the area around the Scaean Gate, where the Trojan women washed and Hector came to meet Achilles’ challenge, the Romans cleaned the place up and made it into what a 2nd-century tourist would have expected to see.
A similar belief in Homer’s essential veracity spurred Heinrich Schliemann to go to the site and take on the Ottoman Empire for the right to rediscover Troy. Although his finds made him famous (though his mendacity has rendered him notorious a century or so later), Schliemann’s “nine cities” were always discouragingly small.
You can walk across the Hisarlik mound in a couple of minutes and round it in ten: how could this be reconciled with Achilles’s long pursuit of Hector and his victory lap with the hero’s corpse trailing in the dust behind his chariot? These and other doubts convinced the sceptics that the Trojan War was pure fiction.
In opposition were the diehard literalists — and then, as Mycenaean scholarship unfolded the mysteries of the Bronze Age over the past century, a “third way” emerged. There had been a Troy, there had been a war between the Aegean Greeks and a powerful polity on the Anatolian shore; but Agamemnon and Achilles, Hector and Helen, were brilliant personae giving verisimilitude to this bald ancestral memory.
Into this arena came Manfred Korfmann, well-trained, well-funded and well-organised. I visited his dig at Troy three years ago and was impressed by the professionalism of the whole operation. Banks of computers processed data from the trenches beneath a marquee beside the Hisarlik mound and remote-sensing gear probed the soil to provide an underground map of the vanished Roman city and what lay beneath it.
What Korfmann found was stunning: below the Roman streets a rock-cut ditch snaked around south of Hisarlik, enclosing an area six times larger. Several yards wide and deep, it would plausibly have had a rampart along its inside edge: Schliemann’s Troy was just the citadel, not the city.
Suddenly, Homer made sense: a town large enough to besiege rather than overrun, a circuit of walls around which heroes could chase for hours. The overall layout of Troy, with its upper and newly found lower towns, is strikingly like Mycenae and many other Aegean Bronze Age communities. Professor Korfmann’s discovery reconnected Homer with the monuments.
Whether he is right about everything, I don’t know, but the dispute fits into a common academic pattern in which neither side is demonstrably wrong and both may be right in some measure.
In the 1950s Dame Kathleen Kenyon and Professor Robert Braidwood squared off over whether the earliest Neolithic farmers were in the Jordan Valley at Jericho or in northern Iraq at Jarmo. In East Africa the Leakeys, first Louis and Mary, then Richard and now a third generation, have faced a motley opposition from rival palaeoanthropologists over who or what is the oldest human ancestor.
In the world of al-Qaeda, such arguments may seem trivial, but they concern not just the here and now; they tap into our deepest longings to know where we come from and how we got here.
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