By Robert John Langdon
The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice. - Mark
Twain
Where
Troy Once Stood is a book by Iman Wilkens,
that argues that the city of Troy was located
in England and the Trojan War was fought between groups of Celts.
The
standard view is that Troy is located
near the Dardanelles in Turkey. Wilkens claims that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey,
though products of ancient Greek culture, is originally orally transmitted epic
poems from Western Europe. Wilkens disagrees with conventional ideas about the
historicity of the Iliad and the location and participants of the Trojan War.
Copies of
his book ranked high on Bookfinder’s list of most-wanted out of print books
until 2005, when the latest revised edition was
published. His work has had little impact on professional scholars. Anthony Snodgrass, Emeritus Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge
University, has named Wilkens as an example of an “infinitely less-serious”
writer.
So what
evidence does Wilkens use to prove that Troy was in Northern Europe?
Wilkens
argues that Troy was located in England
on the Gog Magog Downs in Cambridgeshire. He believes that Celts living there
were attacked around 1200 BC by fellow Celts from the continent to battle over
access to the tin mines in Cornwall as tin was a very important component for
the production of bronze.
Wilkens
writes that there are similarities between the river names in the Iliad and present-day England: “Homer names no less
than fourteen rivers in the region of Troy.” The rivers Thames, Cam, Great Ouse
and Little Ouse, to name a few, can respectively be identified as Temese, Scamander, Simois and Satniois,
according to Wilkens. The revised edition of 2005 contains a “reconstruction”
of the Trojan battlefield in Cambridgeshire.
According
to Wilkens, St Michael’s Mount is the site of Scylla and Charybdis
Wilkens further
hypothesises that the Sea Peoples found in the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean
were Celts, who settled in Greece and the Aegean Islands as the Achaeans and
Pelasgians. They named new cities after the places they had come from, (similar
to the migration of many place names to North America), and brought the oral
poems that formed the basis of the Iliad and the Odyssey with them from Western
Europe. Wilkens writes that, after being orally transmitted for about four
centuries, the poems were translated and written down in Greek around 750 BC.
The
Greeks, who had forgotten about the origins of the poems, located the stories
in the Mediterranean, where many Homeric place names could be found, but the poems’ descriptions of towns,
islands, sailing directions and distances were not altered to fit the reality
of the Greek setting. He also writes that “It also appears that Homer’s Greek
contains a large number of loan words from western European languages, more
often from Dutch rather than English, French or German.” These languages are
considered by linguists to have not existed until around 1000 years after
Homer.
Wilkens
argues that the Atlantic Ocean was the theatre for the Odyssey instead of the
Mediterranean.
For example he locates Scylla and Charybdis at present day St Michael’s Mount.
St Michaels Mount - site
of Scylla and Charybdis?
To prove
his theory Wilkens produces archaeological evidence, for instance, the Isleham
Hoard in the battlefield, and etymological evidence, for instance, the location
of Ismaros in Brittany at Ys or the location of Homer’s Sidon at Medina Sidonia
in Spain. He also brings forth indications that Homer described locations
around the Atlantic, with distinctive topographical features.
Cádiz
would match the description of Ithaca; "There is in the land of Ithaca a
certain harbour of Phorcys, the old man of the sea, and at its mouth two
projecting headlands sheer to seaward, but sloping down on the side toward the
harbour... "
Wilkens believes that Havana’s topography greatly resembles
the description of Telepylos: The harbour, about which on both sides, a sheer
cliff runs continuously, and projecting headlands opposite to one another
stretch out at the mouth, and the entrance is narrow, "..., and the ships
were moored within the hollow harbour, for therein no wave ever swelled, great
or small, but all about was a bright calm...... "
Wilkens
mentions several sources for his ideas. Belgian lawyer Théophile Cailleux wrote
that Odysseus sailed the Atlantic Ocean, starting from Troy, which was situated near the Wash in England (1879).
Charles-Joseph de Grave thought that the historical and mythological background
of Homer’s work should be sought in
Western Europe (1806).
However,
this is not the only source that shows the story could be of a different
origin. The late Sir Moses Finley, Professor of
Ancient History at University of Cambridge, concluded that ‘we are confronted
with this paradox and that the more we know; the ‘worse off, we are’ and he,
therefore, suggested that ‘Homer’s Trojan War must be evicted from the history
of the Greek Bronze Age’. As it seems difficult to disagree with his
conclusion, we are, in my view, left with only two options: the great Trojan
War never took place in northwest Turkey and consequently; the Iliad is the
fruit of pure imagination, or else; the war did take place, but in another
country.
And Professor P H Damste (Universities of Utrecht and Leuven)
“Valuable knowledge is to be discovered about the people of the Northwest
European coast around 1200 BC, how they navigated the oceans and a great war
between the Kings of continental Europe and the Trojan king in England, who
held a monopoly of tin mining in
Cornwall. Such
information is encoded in the Iliad and
Odyssey.”
And other
facts show that the story may not be as straightforward
as we once imagined for when we look at Northern Europe for signs of Troy, we
get some interesting facts such as an old legend that Britain was founded by Brutus who led survivors from
Troy here. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote in his Historia Regum Britanniae an
origin myth which traced the foundation of Britain back to the Trojans. This
account described how Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas of Troy, landed at
Totnes, subdued the race of giants who lived there, and gave his name to the
country he had pacified (Britain = Brutus).
The
Romans called the Celtic tribe that occupied this part of Essex the Trinovantes
or “Tri-novante” which means New Troy or
Troy of New.
The
Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales is an essay written by Felice Vinci, a
nuclear engineer and amateur historian, published for the first time in 1995.
The book, translated into several languages, submits a revolutionary idea about
the geographical setting of the Iliad and Odyssey. Felice Vinci started reading
Greek classics and learned about a passage from the De facie quae in orbe lunae
apparet, by Plutarch, which points out
the location of Ogygia. This island became the point of departure of Vinci’s
theory.
According
to his assumptions, the events told by Homer did not take place in the
Mediterranean area, as the tradition asserts, but rather in the seas of
Northern Europe, Baltic Sea and Northern
Atlantic. This theory has been widely taken
into consideration (both in Italy, where the author has been invited to present
it at some universities and high schools and the rest of the world) and has caused
heated debate among the academic community.
According
to Vinci, the Achaeans would have lived at the beginning of the 2nd millennium
BC on the coasts of the Baltic Sea and, towards the middle of the millennium,
since the climate had become harder, they would have moved southward along the
Dnepr, reaching the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea. The newcomers would have founded the Mycenaean cities
(the most ancient Mycenaean graves are rich in amber, a typical Baltic product,
whereas the latest ones are not) and would have named them with the names of
their previous settlements in Scandinavia, although not exactly in
correspondence of their location, because of the physical differences between
the two areas.
During
their migration, they would have brought with themselves their traditional oral
tales, which were poetic sagas set in their original homeland. Therefore, the
Trojan War would not have taken place around the 13th century BC, as it is
normally thought, but around the 18th century BC. Then the poems would have
been transcribed later, after 800 or 900 years of oral tradition.
In
support of the theory, it is important to remember that the Mycenaean’s are not
considered an aboriginal population, but are thought instead to have come to
Greece around the 16th century BC. Felice Vinci also reports the hypothesis
formulated in the late 19th century by the Indian expert Bal Gangadhar Tilak,
according to whom Indo-European populations would have lived around the Arctic
Circle in the past. On the other hand, the so-called ‘Linear B’ documents
appear to have been written in a language which was a precursor of what later
became Greek.
The main
topic of Vinci’s hypothesis is the incongruence between the geography described
by Homer and the conformation of the Mediterranean lands, already noticed by
Strabo. The geographical descriptions provided by the Iliad and the Odyssey, on
the contrary, perfectly adapts itself to Northern Europe, and the incongruity
regarding the Mediterranean localities would be due to the subjective application
of the old Scandinavian names. Furthermore, the description Homer gives of
climate would be more suitable for the Baltic regions.
According
to Vinci, Ulysses’ journey would have taken place along the coasts of Norway. After being held back in Ogygia (identified with one
of the Faroe Islands, following Plutarch’s passage mentioned above), the Odyssey
relates that, after seventeen days on the sea, Ulysses reached Scheria, home of
the Phaiakians, described as a high rocky coast and densely wooded: this
region, impossible to locate in the Mediterranean area, could be instead
identified with the environs of Bergen, at the mouth of river Figgjo, where
several Bronze Age objects have been founded (Scheria is never mentioned in the
Odyssey as an island).
The new
position would explain why Ulysses had noticed that the sea used to flow back
into the river: this phenomenon is due to ocean tides and does not occur in the
Mediterranean. Other places visited by Ulysses
could be located on the Norwegian coasts, too: Circe’s island, Aeaea, and the
places she describes (the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis) may be placed in the
Lofoten archipelago, where tides on the ebb create the so-called maelstrom,
corresponding with the Scylla whirlpool which swallowed up Ulysses’ ship and is
described as forming three times a day, just like the maelstrom. In the
end, Aeolus’s island would be located somewhere in the Shetland archipelago,
where winds exceeding 200 km/h often blow.
Other
Greek mythological tales are set in the
same region. Among these, the Argonauts’ journey, who are said to have reached
Colchis sailing eastwards and arriving then at Aeaea, from where they came back
to Greece going westwards. The identification of Colchis in the Black Sea and
of Aeaea in the Tyrrhenian Sea would force to hypothesize for the Argonauts an
improbable itinerary by ship in Continental Europe, along the rivers the Danube, Po
and Rhone. The navigation would be instead the memory of an ancient
counter-clockwise circumnavigation of Scandinavia starting from the Baltic Sea,
crossing Lapponia overland along the rivers which run through it and reaching
Lofoten, where Aeaea was identified.
According to what Circe tells Ulysses, Argonauts chose for their journey home
the course passing through the Wanderers Rocks, which are to be identified with the narrow straits covered
by the streams between the islands and the mainland.
Another reference to an ancient Nordic setting can be found,
according to Vinci, in an assertion by Plato in his dialogue Critias, where the
philosopher reminds him that Athens used to rise formerly in a flat fertile
zone, not harsh and mountainous: this particular is presented in the book as a
reference to the ancient Baltic Athens.
So how is
it possible that Troy was in Northern Europe?
The
climate described by Homer is cold and stormy: mist and the wind often appear, and storms are heavy. The
characters are often covered with thick cloaks and are never described as sweating because of the heat. Although in the period normally chosen to date the
Trojan War (8th century BC) the average temperature was lower than it is
nowadays, the Homeric weather conditions are difficult to adapt to the Aegean
area, especially considering that the events are likely to have happened in
summer, instead, this description would be perfect for the Prehistoric Baltic
regions when temperatures in Northern Europe were by far higher than now: the
drop in temperatures at a later time would have forced Achaeans to migrate
southwards.
Some
passages of Iliad’s and Odysseys can be
interpreted as a description of typical Nordic phenomena. For example, in the great battle between Achaeans and
Trojans, linchpin of Iliad’s central books, the time of noon is quoted at two
different moments; this wouldn’t be a mistake: the battle would have simply
continued for two consecutive days, thanks to the midnight sun, which let the
warriors carry on fighting. Other references to this phenomenon are the
exceptional duration of the day among the Laestrygonians and Ulysses’
uncertainty when trying to find his way to Aeaea
since he cannot figure out where the sun rises and where it sets.
In
Homeric poems and among the Vikings, it is possible to find similar features
regarding traditions, mythology and literature. The custom of assembling for a
meeting, the majestic convivial banquets and the kind of exile imposed to
unintentional homicide. In addition, the Achaean
ships would have in common with the Viking ones the dismountable mast,
considered useful, especially in the Northern seas to avoid the formation of
ice, and the double bow, which allowed oarsmen to travel backwards too (a
reference to this aspect might be the Greek term meaning “curved on both
sides,” frequently used by Homer; the same feature is described by Tacitus
concerning the Germans.)
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Viking Assembly |
Moreover,
the Greek aoidos would be similar to the
Old Norse skald, as Homer would often make use of a figure of speech known as
'kenning' in Nordic literature. Also, some
mythological figures would be similar in the two cultures (for example, Ulysses
to the archer Ull in an Icelandic saga and Hamlet, main character of an ancient
Danish legend reported in Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum), as well as many
divinities: Aphrodite corresponds with Freyja, Ares with Thor, Zeus with Wotan
and the Keres (who come down on the battlefield to take the souls of dead
warriors, with the Valkyries).
And as
pointed out by Wilkens:
• The
Achaeans built 1186 ships for their attack on Troy; they could have travelled
the short-distance overland far quicker
and cheaper if Troy really had been in
the Turkish setting.
•
Odysseus claimed to have got home by travelling as a passenger on a ship going
from Crete to Sidon (present day Saïda in Lebanon), but that is the opposite
direction he needed to go in the Mediterranean setting.
•
Agamemnon tells us it took him a full month to sail from his kingdom Argos to
Ithaca; we know the trip takes less than 24 hours in the Mediterranean setting.
• The
mythical location for Troy in Turkey is far too small to accommodate the
invading army of about 100,000 men and the long pursuits in horse-drawn
chariots.
• The
extensively travelled Greek geographer Strabo who lived 2000 years ago (1200
years after the Trojan War) believed that some of the ports of call in the
Odyssey should be found in the Atlantic
because of the mention of tides that do not exist in the Mediterranean.
So Troy
was not in the Mediterranean - but was it in Britain or somewhere even more
revolutionary?
Plato’s
student, Aristotle, believed that ancient Troy and Atlantis were somehow
connected. One of Aristotle’s students, Theophrastus (circa 330 B.C.), wrote
that the Atlantis story was factual, as did the Syrian philosopher Poseidonios
(circa 90 B.C.). Strabo, a Greek historian
writing in about 20 B.C., wrote a lengthy comparison between Troy and Atlantis’
geographical descriptions.
Plato has
always been seen as the source of creditable information for he is not a ‘story
teller’ like some other historical writers, he is fundamentally a philosopher,
whose writings are still studied even now, some 2,000 years after his death at
the most famous and prestigious universities throughout the world. This man is
not prone to fantasy or exaggeration, his writings. Therefore, must be accepted
as true evidence that once in the distant past an
great ancient civilisation, did, in fact, exist, and that they changed
the course of humanity in ways which I
believe we do not fully understand to date.
Consequently,
we need to look at the probability that Plato’s ‘Atlantis’ is a genuine
reference to this land, as it is the oldest written source and may give us
clues of how this civilisation lived and traded. Fortunately, for us, Plato gave some detail about this
civilisation, such as how they lived and what they believed, which will allow
us to compare what we know; from the landscape
and archaeological finds and looked for
other areas of investigation the texts might reveal.
Plato’s most famous line from ‘Timaeus’, a dialogue between
Critias and Socrates, where ‘Critias’ tells a story, he learned through his
family, about the Greek statesman ‘Solon’, whilst he was studying with the most
scholarly of Egyptian priests during a visit to Sais in Egypt in about 590BC. The priests claimed to have
access to secret records about a lost civilisation called ‘Atlantis,' which only they were allowed to
read, for it was written on the pillars
within their most sacred temple. Now Sais was one of the oldest cities in the
old kingdom, and the city’s patron goddess was ‘Neith’, whose cult is attested
as early as the 1st Dynasty, ca. 3100- 3050 BCE.
Plato - he described in detail this ancient civilisation known to the Greeks as Atlantis
The
Greeks, such as Herodotus, Plato and Diodorus Siculus, identified her with
Athena and hence postulated a primordial link to Athens. Diodorus recounts that
Athena built Sais ‘before’ the ‘deluge’ that supposedly destroyed Athens and
Atlantis. While all Greek cities were destroyed
during that cataclysm, the Egyptian cities, including Sais survived. As we can
see from this connection, the deluge has incredible importance to ancient
civilisations, clearly indicating that any prehistoric civilisation that wanted
to ‘stay alive’ would possibly build boats, not for some, but for everyone.
Sadly,
the city of Sais has been recently destroyed by farmers who used the house and
temple mud bricks, as free fertiliser for the fields – to this date, the temple and its writings have never been found.
The most famous line from Plato’s dialogue is “in front of
the mouth which you Greeks say ‘the pillars of Hercules’ there lay an island
which is much larger than Libya and Asia together” translated by W.R.M. Lamb
1925 or “in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of
Hercules; the island was bigger than Libya and Asia together” B. Jowett 1871.
This
single sentence has caused no end of the debate
about the location of Atlantis. Some suggest that ‘the pillars’ can refer to
water flows, thus allow the speculation (which is current) that Atlantis is a
Greek Island. Others suggest (including myself) that the ‘pillars of Hercules’
is the mouth of the Mediterranean between Morocco and Spain. Now this is a case
of translation and interpretation; the word ‘mouth’ is sometimes called ‘strait,' in
other quotations Plato refers to the Mediterranean Sea as “within the straits
of Hercules.”
According
to some Roman sources, while on his way to the island of ‘Erytheia’ Hercules
had to cross the mountain that was once Atlas (the Atlas Mountains are in
Northern Africa overlooking the Mediterranean), instead of climbing the great
mountain, Hercules used his superhuman strength to smash through it. By doing
so, he connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea and formed the
Straits of Gibraltar. However, the best evidence is in the name itself
‘Atlantis’ for Herodotus (an ancient Greek historian, 484 BC – c. 425 BC) in a
time before Plato’s writings calls the Sea outside the Pillars of Hercules the
‘Atlantis Sea’ (Cyrus, 557-530 BC: Book 1). Moreover, even today we call it the
Atlantic Ocean and in history C’s and S’s are commonly transposed.
So we
left with a clear understanding that Atlantis was in the Atlantic Ocean, but
then come the next problem with this description “the island was bigger than
Libya and Asia together” this is where most Atlantis claims fall flat. Libya
was well-known in Plato’s time as a big country as it bordered the
Mediterranean, but the reference to Asia cannot be the Asia we know as it was
unknown to the old world and the Greeks. Therefore,
the Asia that Plato was referring to, is
now called Asia Minor.
‘Asia
Minor is a geographical location at the westernmost protrusion of Asia, also
called Anatolia, and corresponds to the western two-thirds
of the Asian part of Turkey. It is a peninsula bounded by the Black Sea to the
north, Georgia to the north-east, the Armenian Highland to the east,
Mesopotamia
to the south-east, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and the Aegean Sea to
the west.’
The size
of this ‘island’ is consequently, a major
problem for historians to date, as the only two island possibility is the
Caribbean in America or a continent that was once in the middle of the Atlantic
Ocean that has disappeared without a trace.
Well, the islands of the Caribbean are far too small and the trek across the
middle of the Atlantic Ocean without landmass to guide the ships eleven
thousand years ago quite daunt to be
truly feasible with ‘Bronze Age technology’ as Plato suggests.
This is why the
search has failed, to date, and all various ‘silly’ hypotheses based on the
Mediterranean make news headlines. If we look again at this passage and the
exact wording of Atlantis, we find something most researchers have overlooked
in the translation, and it’s the word ‘island,'
the original Greek word is ‘nesos’ which can mean either island or peninsula.
If we are
looking for a ‘Peninsula’ (which is a piece of land that is bordered by water
on three sides but connected to the mainland.)
that is outside the Mediterranean, then there are only two possibilities -
Africa or Europe. These are both outside the Pillars of Hercules and can be easily navigated by sticking to the
shorelines. The African continent as shown no signs of any peninsula on its
Atlantic side that has disappeared in the
past 10,000 years - but Europe has!
If we
look at a map of Europe at the end of the Ice Age, we notice that the water
levels were about 160m lower than today, so much lower that extra coastlines are added to both Spain and France.
However,
when we look at the British Isles, we notice Britain has completely vanished. The Britain Isles has replaced a massive new landmass
protruding into the Atlantic Ocean, for the English Channel, Irish Sea and the
North Sea as we know it a single land mass, has replaced today. Moreover, the
waters to the west of Ireland and North West from Scotland have also been
reclaimed from the sea.
The peninsula that existed directly after the last ice age
This
peninsula which includes to the North East Norway, Sweden and Finland, to the east Denmark and the Baltic Sea, creates
a continent about the same size of Libya and Asia Minor, which correlates to
Plato’s writings.
We know
from our history that the rising of sea waters over the last 10,000 years the
caused flooding that created the island nation we know today. But, do the
writings contain any other information, which will allow us to confirm this
peninsula is the land mass Critias is talking
about?
Plato adds, “yonder (beyond the pillars of Hercules) is a
real Ocean, and the land surrounding it may most rightly be called, in the
fullest and truest sense, a continent” in this sentence the ‘island’ is turned
into a ‘continent’ so this proves that the translation of ‘nesos’ is peninsula not
island and in today’s terms, we are looking at a land mass that incorporates
British Isles, Scandinavia and the Northern European countries of France,
Germany, Holland, Belgium, Poland, Netherlands, Denmark, Lithuania, Latvia,
Estonia and the Baltic, North and Irish seas, that were at time land masses.
So if
Atlantis was in the North Sea where ‘Doggerland’ used to exist, was Troy the
name of its main city on this Island/Peninsula as suggested by Aristotle’s
school?
Plato
wrote of a city of five stades (925m)
diameter that was surrounded by several
circular structures - concentric rings - some consisting of Earth and the
others of water. These types of constructions are found all over Northern
Europe, and I believe to be the ‘architectural blueprint’ for this society.
In
archaeology, they (for reasons better known to them) call these sites ‘causeway
enclosures.'
A
causewayed enclosure is a type of large prehistoric earthwork common to the
early Neolithic in Europe. More than 100 examples are recorded in France and 70
in England, while further sites are known
in Scandinavia, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Ireland
and Slovakia.
The term
“causewayed enclosure” is now preferred to the older term causewayed camp as it
has been demonstrated that the sites did
not necessarily serve as occupation sites.
Causewayed
enclosures are often located on hilltop
sites, encircled by one to four concentric ditches with an internal bank. In
general, enclosures located in lowland areas are larger than hilltop ones.
Crossing the ditches at intervals are causeways, which give the monuments their
names. It appears that the ditches were excavated in sections, leaving the wide
causeways intact in between.
They
should not be confused with segmented, or causewayed ring ditches, which are
smaller and are thought to relate only to funerary activity, or with hill
forts, which appeared later and had a definite defensive function. Concerning defensive functionality, however,
evidence of timber Palisades has been found at some sites such as Hambledon
Hill.
If we
look at one of these ‘sites’ such as ‘whitehawk’
on the South Downs near my house, we find the description sounds remarkably
like Plato’s description of Atlantis’s main city. Whitehawk Camp is one of the
earliest sites of human habitation in England. It is the remains of a Neolithic
causewayed camp inhabited sometime around 2700 BCE and is a scheduled ancient
monument. It has been described as one of the first monuments in England to be identified as being of national importance,
and one of the most important Neolithic sites in the country.
How the archaeologists see Whitehawk - with DRY ditches?
It is one
of only twelve remaining examples of a causewayed hill camp from the Windmill Hill
culture in Britain and one of three known to have existed in the South Downs.
It reaches 396 feet above sea level and measures 950 feet by 700 feet. It is
made up of four concentric ditches broken up by causeways. The first written
mention of the camp (as “White Hawke Hill”) was in 1587.
It was
the first scheduled ancient monument in Sussex. It was excavated three times
between 1929 and 1935. The 1932 excavation was carried out by Cecil Curwen, and found the remains of humans buried
with fossilised sea urchins. The 1935 dig
was a rescue dig by students of Mortimer Wheeler, when a road was driven through the camp. Much of the camp was, by that time,
leveled under Brighton Racecourse and allotments.
The
remains of four complete burials were found,
including the bodies of an eight-year-old child and a young woman buried
alongside the remains of a newborn child, as well as some other human bones.
Furthermore, found in the infill of the circular ditches were many flint tools,
pot shards and animal bones. Only part of the causewayed enclosure has been
investigated by archaeologists.
Sadly,
not much left after the racecourse ran through it!
As Plato described Atlantis - with concentric circles filled with water
But it
has the four ‘concentric circles’ that Plato talks about and is three times
smaller than the great city of Atlantis that one would imagine. But from this
type of ‘unique’ construction, another ancient legend has come to light called
a ‘Troy Town’
Many turf mazes in England were named Troy Town, Troy-town or
variations on that theme (such as Troy, The City of Troy, Troy’s Walls, Troy’s
Hoy, or The Walls of Troy) presumably because, in popular legend, the walls of
the city of Troy were constructed in such a confusing and complex way that any
enemy who entered them would be unable to find his way out. Welsh hilltop turf mazes (none
of which now exist) were called “Caerdroia,”
which can be translated as “ the City of Troy” (or perhaps “castle of turns”).
W. H.
Matthews, in his Mazes and Labyrinths (1922), gives the name as “Troy-town”.
More recent writers (such as Adrian Fisher, in The Art of the Maze, 1990)
prefer “Troy Town.” The name “Troy” has been
associated with labyrinths from ancient times. An Etruscan terra cotta
wine-jar from Tragliatella, Italy, shows a seven-ring labyrinth marked with the
word TRUIA (which may refer to Troy).
Of the
eight surviving historical turf mazes in England,
three have “Troy” names. “The City of Troy” is a small but well-maintained
roadside maze near the small villages of Dalby, Brandsby, and Skewsby, not far
from Sheriff Hutton in the Howardian Hills of North Yorkshire. “Troy,” a beautiful maze in a private garden at Troy
Farm, Somerton, Oxfordshire is rather larger, and “Troy Town” maze on St Agnes,
the Isles of Scilly, is a small maze of turf and small stones and is reputed to
have been laid down in 1729 by the son of a local lighthouse keeper.
All three
follow the classical labyrinth pattern (as found on coins from ancient Knossos)
rather than the medieval variation. Unfortunately, it is not known when the
first two of these turf mazes were originally
constructed. So we have evidence in the Iliad
that the location of Troy was in a colder climate far away from Greek and
through archaeological evidence, we see that towns like Troy, we built in the
Northern Europe that still exist today.
Troy Town and the associated maze
If this
is not compelling evidence enough - there is more!!
If we
look at the people of Homer and Troy, something quite peculiar is found:
The
Achaeans seem blond while the Trojans seem to have dark hair.
The Achaeans
(also called the “Argives” or “Danaans”) - A scholarly consensus has not yet
been reached on the origin of the historic Achaeans about the Homeric Achaeans and is still hotly debated. Former
emphasis on presumed race, such as John A. Scott’s article about the ‘blond
locks’ of the Achaeans as compared to the dark locks of “Mediterranean”
Poseidon.
Achilles - The son of the military man
Peleus and the sea-nymph Thetis. The most powerful warrior in The Iliad,
Achilles commands the Myrmidons, soldiers from his homeland of Phthia in
Greece. Proud and headstrong, was blond “and seized the son of Peleus by his
yellow hair” (I:197).
Brad Pitt - blond and blue-eyed just like most Greeks?
Agamemnon
(also
called “Atrides”) - King of Mycenae and
leader of the Achaean army; brother of King Menelaus of Sparta. Arrogant and
often selfish, Agamemnon provides the Achaeans with strong but sometimes
reckless and self-serving leadership. It shows no description to make us
believe he is from Northern Europe, yet his younger brother is described as “red-haired Menelaus who hurled
his spear and struck him on the belt as he turned to run, the bronze blade
passing through him. He fell with a crash, and Menelaus dragged the corpse away
from the Trojans into the Greek lines.”
Odysseus - A fine warrior and the
cleverest of the Achaean commanders. Along with Nestor, Odysseus is one of the
Achaeans’ two best public speakers. The Odyssey describes him (VI, 231) as
light-skinned, and in another place (XIII, 397, 431), his head-hair is called
blond. According to hair colour, Odysseus
is also described by the Odyssey (VI, 231; XVI, 175; XXIII, 157/58) as “brownish.”
This “hyacinth colour” is, however, as Wilhelm Sieglin
has shown, to be described as “reddish,” because the hyacinth was cultivated in Hellas as a sub-type with
reddish blooms.
Odysseus with his red hair - another Greek attribute?
Menelaus - King of Sparta; the younger
brother of Agamemnon. While it is the abduction of his wife, Helen, by the
Trojan Prince Paris that sparks the Trojan War, Menelaus proves quieter, less
imposing, and less arrogant than Agamemnon. Though he has a stout heart,
Menelaus is not among the mightiest Achaean warriors. It was described as “the blond Menelaus” both in The Iliad (a minimum of
fourteen times, III: 284, IV: 183, 210, X: 240, XI: 125; XVII: 6, 18, 113, 124,
578, 673, 684, XXIII: 293, 438) and The Odyssey. Peisander described him
as “blond of big blue eyes.
Idomeneus
- King of Crete and a respected commander. Idomeneus leads a charge against the
Trojans in Book 13; his hair was ‘flecked with grey’.
Helen - Reputed to be the most
beautiful woman in the ancient world, Helen was stolen from her husband, Menelaus,
and taken to Troy by Paris. Iliad 3.121: “white-armed Helen.” The passage
immediately following that line describes the embroidery of the purple linen
piece which Helen is wearing in the scene. It is
described by Homer as; Odyssey 22.224: “high-born Helen of the white arms”;
Iliad 3.171: “Helen, fair among women”; Iliad 3:228: “long-robed Helen, fair
among women”; Odyssey 4.120: “Helen, like Artemis of the golden arrows”;
Odyssey 4 in between Lines 296 & 306: “long-robed Helen, peerless among
women”; Odyssey 15 in between Lines 92 & 109: “Helen, the beautiful lady”;
Odyssey 15 in between Lines 120 & 130: “fair-cheeked Helen”; Iliad 13 in
between Lines 754 & 774, & Odyssey 15.56: “fair-tressed Helen”
"fair-tressed" Helen of Troy
Briseis - A war prize of Achilles. When Agamemnon is forced to return Chryseis to her father, he appropriates Briseis as compensation, sparking Achilles’ great rage. She is described as being very clever and beautiful with blonde hair, blue eyes and fair skin.
Briseis - Blonde hair, Blue Eyes and Fair skinned, just part of your average Greek family?
Meleager was a hero venerated in his
temenos at Calydon in Aetolia. He was already famed as the host of the
Calydonian boar hunt in the epic tradition that was reworked by Homerand is described as “the blond Meleager”
by Homer (Iliad, II: 642), and in his Argonautica Apollonius of Rhodes also
describes him as blond.
Agamede was, according to Homer, a Greek
physician acquainted with the healing powers of all the plants that grow upon
the earth. She was born in Elis, the eldest daughter of Augeas, King of the
Epeans. Hyginus makes her the mother of Belus, Actor, and Dictys, by Poseidon,
and she becomes a sorceress figure, much
like Circe or Medea. She has blonde hair and is familiar with all herbs Homer
Iliad 11, 740-741.
And lets us not forget how the ‘Gods and Heroes’ looked in Greek Mythology.
Zeus - King of the gods and husband
of Hera, Zeus claims neutrality in the mortals’ conflict and often tries to
keep the other gods from participating in it. Although a description is not
forthcoming from mythology, he was the father of both Helen and Athena both
blue-eyed blondes, as his wife Hera was one of his three sisters - we can take
it as read that they were all blued blondes.
And let
us not forget Zeus - King of the Gods with the blue-eyes he gave his daughters
Hera -
Queen of the gods and Zeus’s wife, Hera is a conniving, headstrong woman. She
often goes behind Zeus’s back in matters on which they disagree, working with
Athena to crush the Trojans, whom she passionately hates - a blonde, mother of
blue-eyed Helen and Athena.
Athena - The Goddess of Wisdom, purposeful
battle, and the womanly arts; Zeus’s daughter. Like Hera, Athena passionately
hates the Trojans and often gives the Achaeans valuable aid - The Iliad
describes Athena as blue-eyed, and in fact, refers to her fifty-seven times as
Zeus’ blue-eyed daughter Athena.
Apollo - A son of Zeus and twin brother
of the goddess Artemis, Apollo is the god
of the sun and the arts, particularly music. He supports the Trojans and often
intervenes in the war on their behalf. Apollo is
described by Alcaeus as “fair-haired Phoebus.” Phoebus is Apollo. On the
other hand, Alcman of Sparta, Simonides (paean
to Delos, 84), and an anonymous author, call Apollo “of golden hair,” The
famous Sappho of Lesbos speaks of “golden-haired Phoebus” in his hymn to
Artemis.
Aphrodite - Goddess of love and daughter
of Zeus, Aphrodite is married to Hephaestus but maintains a romantic
relationship with Ares. She supports Paris and the Trojans throughout the war,
though she proves somewhat ineffectual in battle. Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus,
goddess of love, beauty and female eroticism, is always described as a blonde. Its conventional title is almost always “Golden
Aphrodite.” Ibycus (in Ode to Polycrates) calls Aphrodite “Cypris of blond
hair.” Aphrodite held the title of Cypris (Lady of Cyprus) because the Greeks
believed she was born in Cyprus, where she was
particularly revered. In Hesiod’s Theogony,
she is called “Golden Aphrodite” (824,
962, 975, 1006 and 1015) and “very golden Aphrodite” (980). In Homer’s Iliad we
have “Aura Aphrodite” (IX: 389), and in The Odyssey as “golden haired.”
Artemis - Goddess of the Hunt, daughter of Zeus, and twin sister of
Apollo. Artemis supports the Trojans in the war. Artemis, the sister of Apollo,
is described by Sappho and Anacreon (Hymn to Artemis), as “blond daughter of
Zeus.”
Demeter - is often described simply as
the goddess of the harvest, she also presided
over the sacred law and the cycle of life
and death. She and her daughter Persephone were the central figures of the
Eleusinian mysteries that predated the Olympian pantheon. Ovid, Fasti 4. 417 ff (trans.Boyle) (Roman poetry C1st B.C. to
C1st A.D.); “To a sacred feast; the blonde goddess [Demeter] came.”
In fact,
if we look beyond homers Iliad and
Odyssey at all written descriptions of the Greek gods, we get an interesting
list of non-Greek looking Gods:
Athena - Long, dark curly hair and clear
blue eyes.
Artemis- Long, wavy brown-red hair and emerald eyes.
Aphrodite - Long, white-blonde hair and sky-blue eyes.
Ares - Very tall with short brown
hair and amber eyes.
Apollo - Blonde hair blue eyes.
Dionysus - Long brown hair (about to
ears) and hazel eyes.
Demeter - Long brown hair and brown
eyes.
Hephaestus - Tangled dirty blonde hair and
sage green eyes.
Hera - Light brown hair and blue
eyes.
Hermes - Short, wavy blonde hair and
blue eyes.
Hestia - Irish red hair and blue eyes.
Poseidon - Short, crew cut brown hair and
sea colored eyes.
Zeus - Long (shoulder length) curly
silver hair and sky-blue eyes.
So the evidence is overwhelming that Troy was, in fact, not
in the Mediterranean but the capital city of Atlantis and based in Northern
Europe, probably on an island that we have geologically proven to have been
engulfed by the time that Plato suggested in his works ‘Timaeus’ and ‘Critias’
in about 9000BC now called ‘Doggerland’. Who were the ancestors of the Scandinavian ‘blonde
and blue-eyed’ discontents that live there today?
But yet there is still one more intriguing piece of evidence
from the tail of Troy that confirms our suspicions for the famous line “Is this
the face that launched a thousand ships” was not only referring to the blonde
blue-haired Helen of Troy’s daughter of the Blue-eyed God Zeus but also
indicating that a nation in history had over a thousand ships, for to date no
nation in history had that number of warships except one!
Plato in
his dialogues talks of the great advanced
nation of Atlantis with its twelve hundred ships - surely the final piece of
the Trojan jigsaw?
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