Academic armies come to blows in battle of Troy
By Philip Howard
A NEW Trojan war only slightly less vicious than the original has broken out among archaeologists over the size of the fabled city of Homer’s Iliad.
Such are the passions raised that when the two armies of academics met in Germany last week to resolve their differences, their symposium ended in an unseemly bout of fisticuffs. This new battle for Troy is over the excavations at Hisarlik conducted since 1988 by an international team led by Manfred Korfmann of Tübingen University.
One army, led by Professor Korfmann, believes that the city was a sprawling, metropolitan and trading settlement, with a citadel and a royal palace. The other side argues that the archaeological discoveries at Hisarlik from 1300 to 1200BC reveal Troy to have been a trivial nest of pirates at the margin of civilisation.
The citadel mound was first identified as the historical Troy, the inspiration of Homer’s legendary, literary city, by Charles Maclaren in 1820. After soundings by Frank Calvert in 1863 and 1865, it was excavated by Heinrich Schliemann between 1870 and 1890.
Korfmann, like Schliemann and Sir Mortimer Wheeler, is no anonymous potsherd about his digging. He has been vastly successful at raising money. DaimlerChrysler sponsors him at about £300,000 a year. Two exhibitions are must-sees in Bonn: one on the Hittites, the other entitled Troy: Dream and Reality. The public are fascinated by Korfmann’s computer-generated reconstructions of the topless towers of Ilium.
But Korfmann’s research and claims have been disparaged by his colleague at Tübingen, the ancient historian Professor Frank Kolb, and Dieter Hertel, Professor of Classical Archaeology at Munich University.
Unforgivable accusations are being made. Korfmann is accused of exaggeration to the point of falsification and charlatanism. He has been compared (unfavourably) with the batty Erich von Daniken, who made a cult out of the lost city of Atlantis and little green men with wickerwork heads from outer space.
Accordingly, last weekend Tübingen University summoned a “scientific symposium on the meaning of Troja in the late Bronze Age”. Its goal was to debate the charges levelled by Professor Kolb against Professor Korfmann.
Professor Kolb was invited to retract his charges and apologise. But the proper academic atmosphere broke down, Professor David Hawkins, of the School of Oriental and African Studies, attended the conference as one of the British delegates. He holds the only chair of Ancient Anatolian languages in Britain and is an expert on the Hittites, who ruled prehistoric Asia Minor.
Professor Hawkins, shell-shocked on his return, says: “The charges against Professor Korfmann are being made with a vehemence and a degree of personal vituperation that suggest that they are motivated by something other than an academic pursuit of truth.”
The charges focus partly on Korfmann’s excavations in pursuit of the lower city (the slums outside the citadel) and partly on his imaginative and populist computer-generated record of the area.
The witnesses for the prosecution, professors of prehistory, presented their case in measured terms. But the prosecuting counsel attacked the archaeology with intemperate language(Ahew), according to Professor Hawkins, “well beyond the academically acceptable”. While the final session was on air, fisticuffs broke out.
Over the past 15 years the geography of Ancient Anatolia has been emerging from the dust and ashes of prehistory.
In 1998 Professor Hawkins helped to to pin down the location of the city known as Troy when he published the key Hittite inscription that located the places that the Greeks named Sardis and Ephesus. His work meant that Wilusa, the other Western centre named in Hittite treaties, was almost certainly a major settlement in the Troad (the region around Troy). That work helped to identify what the Romans called Ilium and what the Turks call Hisarlik. That is what we (apart from Professor Kolb) call Troy.
The mound at Hisarlik was occupied from about 3000BC to AD1200. It has revealed well over 46 building phases, conventionally grouped into nine bands, sometimes misleadingly called “cities”. There is evidence of fire and destruction. Stones and mudbrick were continually recycled for each new phase.
The citadel at the top of the hill was sliced away in Hellenistic or Roman times to create a platform for the Temple of Athena. Reading the past here is harder than reading a manuscript palimpsest. The argument over the site of Troy is important to prehistory. But Achilles and Patroclus, Hector and Priam are too important and too human to be left to the archaeologists.
He has proposed to Korfmann that he do a ground penitrating radar mapping of the Troy site, mainly to prove or disprove his, Zanaggers, interpertation of satilite photos of the area, the area is much more complex than imagined. Korfmann labled him a nutcase, I have read alot of Zanaggers stuff and he is a very bright young man and primarily a geologist.
I can never remember is it 2 ns or 2gs, I am away from my files. Read the "Flood from Heaven".