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In his influential book, "Troy and Homer," German classicist Joachim Latacz argues that the identification of Hisarlik as the site of Homer's Troy is all but proven. Latacz's case is based not only on archeology, but also on fascinating reassessments of cuneiform tablets from the Hittite imperial archives. The tablets, which are dated to the period when the Late Bronze Age city at Hisarlik was destroyed, tell a story of a western people harassing a Hittite client state on the coast of Asia Minor. The Hittite name for the invading foreigners is very close to Homer's name for his Greeks...

Ancient Troy was much bigger than previously thought, and may have housed as many as 10,000 people, new excavations have revealed. The lower town, in which most of the population would have lived, may have been as large as 40 hectares (100 acres), according to Professor Ernst Pernicka... Excavations by the late Manfred Korfmann showed that this Troy was just the citadel and that a much larger lower town lay south of it enclosed by a rock-cut ditch (The Times, February 25, 2002). Professor Pernicka's continuation of Korfmann's work has confirmed the substantial nature of this defensive work, which was...

The language of the southwestern littoral of Anatolia - which includes Arzawa - was Luwiyan, which, like Kneshian, was a member of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family. For diplomatic correspondence, however, Arzawa used Kneshian - even when writing to the Egyptian king! It appears that this diplomatic faux pas was a result of Arzawa's provincial character; Kneshian was the language required to deal with the other states of Asia Minor, and especially with Hattusas.

Sick Rams Used as Ancient Bioweapons Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News Once, a Weapon Nov. 28, 2007 -- Infected rams and donkeys were the earliest bioweapons, according to a new study which dates the use of biological warfare back more than 3,300 years. According to a review published in the Journal of Medical Hypotheses, two ancient populations, the Arzawans and the Hittites, engaged "in mutual use of contaminated animals" during the 1320-1318 B.C. Anatolian war. "The animals were carriers of Francisella tularensis, the causative agent of tularemia," author Siro Trevisanato, a molecular biologist based in Oakville, Ontario, Canada told Discovery News....

Schliemann's identification of Troy with a place near Turkey's Aegean coast called Hisarlik is more certain than ever. He wasn't the first to make the connection, but his excavations in 1870 proved the Bronze Age city was prosperous enough to match Homer's description... Among the subdued lands, Hittite texts tell us, was a place called Wilusa. Since the 1920s, shortly after Hittite was deciphered, some have identified Wilusa with Troy (Ilios in Greek, possibly Wilios before Greek lost its W sound)... several Hittite texts... use the place-name "Ahhiyawa," currently thought to refer to one or more Greek-speaking kingdoms. Ahhiyawa is...

(AP) -- Archaeologists in Greece have discovered a rare 2,700-year-old piece of fabric inside a copper urn from a burial they speculated imitated the elaborate cremation of soldiers described in Homer's "Iliad." The yellowed, brittle material was found in the urn during excavation in the southern town of Argos, a Culture Ministry announcement said Wednesday "This is an extremely rare find, as fabric is an organic material which decomposes very easily," said archaeologist Alkistis Papadimitriou, who headed the dig. She said only a handful of such artifacts have been found in Greece. The cylindrical urn also contained dried pomegranates -...

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......

Archaeologists seek hints on 4000-year-old civilization in Tekirdað Wednesday, July 19, 2006 ANKARA - Turkish Daily News Archaeologists working on an ancient Thracian site in Tekirdað said on Monday they have unveiled part of an ancient city named Heraion Teichos, which is thought to date back to 2000 B.C. The excavation team of Mimar Sinan University's Archaeology Department has been working to unearth the ancient city, located near Tekirdað's Karaevli village, for the last six years. Head of the excavations, Associate Professor Neþe Atik, told the Doðan News Agency on Monday that they were the first team to conduct the...

It was then that Swiss scholar Emil Forrer deciphered newly discovered writings from the Hittite Empire to the east, finding two place-names—Wilusa and Taruisa—that sounded convincingly like the Hittite way of writing "Wilios" (the Greek name for the site was "Ilion") and "Troia" (Troy). He also found a treaty, from the early 13th century BC, between the Hittite king Muwatalli and a king of "Wilusa" named Alaksandu. The king’s name, Forrer added, recalls the name of the Trojan prince Alexander—called Paris in Homer’s Iliad. Critics pooh-poohed, conceding that a place named Wilusa may have existed, but where was it on...

While Hughes explores the Late Bronze Age reality behind the story of Helen, she takes in some of the most beautiful scenery of the ancient world, from the magnificent citadel at Mycenae to the spectacular site of the shrine to Helen, high in the hills above Sparta. She also tastes the food of the ancient world -- based on the latest archaeological research -- and discovers how the conflict in Helen's name would really have been fought. Working with weapons experts and accurate replicas of chariots pulled by local gypsy horses, Hughes experiences firsthand how chariots and archers battled beneath...

A society that does not value its warriors will be destroyed by one that does. A low-budget movie with no recognized stars that presents a cartoonish version of an event that happened long ago and far away is a surprising box office hit. The movie is "The 300," about the battle in 480 B.C. at Thermopylae between Greeks and Persians. Its opening grossed more than $70 million, more than the next 10 highest grossing movies playing that weekend combined. "The 300" has been denounced by the government of Iran, and the battle it describes was cited by former Vice President...

MOSCOW (AP) - A legendary collection of gold objects from ancient Troy seized by Soviet troops in Berlin in 1945 should become Russian government property, a top Russian cultural official said in remarks published Saturday. But Anatoly Vilkov, deputy chief of the Russian agency that preserves the nation's cultural legacy, stopped short of ruling out the objects' return, as quoted by the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets. The gold collection - excavated by amateur German archaeologist Hermann Schliemann - will be made federal property after it is inventoried, he said. It could be exhibited in Germany but only if its return is...

The classical Greeks were really nothing like us — at least that now seems the prevailing dogma of classical scholars of the last half-century. Perhaps due to the rise of cultural anthropology or, more recently, to a variety of postmodern schools of social construction, it is now often accepted that the lives of Socrates, Euripides, and Pericles were not similar to our own, but so far different as to be almost unfathomable. Shelley’s truism that “We are all Greeks” has now become, as we say, “inoperative.” M. I. Finley, the great historian of the ancient economy, spent a lifetime to...

A spectacular result of the new excavations has been the verification of the existence of a lower settlement from the seventeenth to the early twelfth centuries B.C. (Troy levels VI/VIIa) outside and south and east of the citadel. As magnetometer surveys and seven excavations undertaken since 1993 have shown, this lower city was surrounded at least in the thirteenth century by an impressive U-shaped fortification ditch, approximately eleven and a half feet wide and six and a half feet deep, hewn into the limestone bedrock. Conclusions about the existence and quality of buildings within the confines of the ditch...

The other day, apropos of the Metropolitan Museum's fine, new light-washed galleries for Greek and Roman art, a friend e-mailed to me a passage by Virgil. In it Aeneas, fleeing the Trojan War, arrives in Carthage and finds a temple for Juno under construction. He pushes open the temple's big bronze doors ("which made the hinges groan," Virgil reports) and "for the first time he dared to hope for life." He's astounded by the skill of the craftsmen and by the nobility and precision of a painting of the war. He starts to cry. "It was only a picture, but,...

Most people think the modern-day Ionian island of Ithaki is the location. But geologists are this week sinking a test borehole on nearby Kefalonia in an attempt to test whether its western peninsula of Paliki is the real site. The scientists hope to find evidence that the peninsula once stood proud, separated from Kefalonia by a narrow, navigable marine channel. It is only within the last 2,500-3,000 years - and long after Homer's time - that the channel has been filled in, the team contends. "We can't prove the story of the Odyssey is true, but we can test whether...

In his new novel, 'The Fall of Troy', Peter Ackroyd recreates the19th-century excavation of one of antiquity's greatest sites which was led byan archaeologist whose methods have always provoked controversy.. Some details about Heinrich Schliemann's life are documented but not too much should be taken for granted about a man so adept at presenting grand conclusions based on dodgy evidence. The location of the Homeric Ithaca remains in dispute and what Schliemann did find on modern Ithaca was no palace; the treasure he unearthed at Troy has since been dated to more than a thousand years before Homer's Trojan war;...

Virgil's demi-god city 'found'Castor and Pollux fought Aeneas at Amyclae (ANSA) - Rome, April 6 - Italian archaeologists believe they have found an ancient city where the demi-gods Castor and Pollux fought Aeneas, the Trojan hero whose descendants founded Rome . Lorenzo and Stefania Quilici of Bologna and Naples universities claim the large, massive-walled settlement dating from the VI to III Century BCE was the city of Amyclae, believed by Renaissance scholars to be somewhere near Lake Fondi between Rome and Naples . "The road there is a perfectly preserved stretch of the ancient Via Appia," said Lorenzo Quilici ....

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 ...

Palace of Homer's hero rises out of the myths From John Carr in Athens ARCHAEOLOGISTS claim to have unearthed the remains of the 3,500-year-old palace of Ajax, the warrior-king who according to Homer’s Iliad was one of the most revered fighters in the Trojan War. Classicists hailed the discovery, made on a small Greek island, as evidence that the myths recounted by Homer in his epic poem were based on historical fact. The ruins include a large palace, measuring about 750sq m (8,000sq ft), and believed to have been at least four storeys high with more than thirty rooms. Yannos...