In early April a long-awaited paper by Nikos Kokkinos was published: "Ancient Chronography, Eratosthenes and the Dating of the Fall of Troy", in Ancient West and East 8 (2009), pp. 37-56. It argues that the 'original' date for the Trojan War reckoned by the earliest Greek chronographers was c. 940 BC, not c. 1200 BC (or variants slightly higher and lower) as offered by later writers. The article includes an important Appendix (pp. 49-51) discussing how an ancient Greek 'high' estimate for the Trojan War (by Timaeus of Tauromenium) influenced the chronology of the Hellenised Egyptian writer Manetho in drawing up his chronology for Egypt. Manetho's dating system came to form the backbone of the modern reconstruction of Egyptian history and thence for Mycenaean pottery and the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean, including Troy. So, in marvellously circular fashion (and not by a 'happy coincidence'), an ancient Greek 'high' estimate was returned to Greece by Egyptologists (such as Flinders Petrie), helping to create the archaeological Dark Age in the Aegean. Future articles by Nikos, as part of the continuing CoD Ancient Chronography Review, will discuss further the 'low' chronology that was current in the ancient world, all too often overlooked by classicists. The earliest known depiction of the Trojan Horse: detail from the neck of a Cycladic relief-amphora found on Mykonos (conventional date ca. mid-7th century BC).
