Dutch author Iman Wilkens published "Where Troy Once Stood" almost thirty years ago and hardly anyone knows about it. Are there any reputable scholars today who take his ideas seriously? Troy is identified as Gog Magog Hills near Cambridgeshire and Mycenae as modern day Troyes. Argos and Egypt were both in northern France where many cities still retain the arg- prefix in their names.
You can read more about it here: http://www.gopher.nl/shop/title.asp?barcode=ISBN&id=9789051792089
Troy is identified as Gog Magog Hills near Cambridgeshire and Mycenae as modern day Troyes. Argos and Egypt were both in northern France where many cities still retain the arg- prefix in their names
I-What, uh, what did he say?
First of all, we know where Greece and Egypt are. They have not moved anywhere in the past few centuries and all of the monuments, cities and writings you could ever hope for are still lying around.
Here is a map of the ancient Mediterranean. Egypt on the northeast coast of Africa is in green, the regions of Greece are in purple and cyan. This Map of the Egyptian New Kingdom shows the location of Egypt in the Mediterranean and as a happy coincidence, you can see Mycenae as well. Argos is still located on the Eastern Peloponnese, far from northern France.
Fortunately, many ancient cities and temples have survived to the modern day and these fertile regions have been continually inhabited and documented from Antiquity to the modern day. This beautiful photograph from Giza, Egypt shows a sphinx in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza which was one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World.
Troy was always known to have existed somewhere around Anatolia but archaeologists discovered the actual city of Troy in modern day Turkey. This map shows the location of Troy.
We also know that Britain and northern France were not home to either Hellenic, Near Eastern or Egyptian cultures. Although trade between the Greek Mediterranean did begin to reach the more distant reaches of Europe in the Classical period, it was not until the Roman conquest of these regions that we see Mediterranean cultural influences begin to take hold. Given that large settlements comparable to the city-states of the Mediterranean and Near East were not present in these areas during early Antiquity, and the fact that they were poorly known to Mediterranean civilisations during the Bronze Age, identifying any of the famous kingdoms of the ancient Med/Near East would make absolutely no sense.
I have never heard of Wilkens before today but the man must be a poorly informed crackpot to believe that these ancient civilisations somehow teleported without a trace to their modern locations.
The beautiful thing about all this is that these ancient civilisations are waiting for archaeologists and tourists to visit at any time, and this has been a boon for historians. Unlike lost civilisations whose exact locations are unknown, Egypt, Greece and Troy are laid bare to the modern eye.
For more information, check out out the:
And for Gaul (France) and Britain during the Iron Age see the Iron Age Europe FAQ. If you have any follow up questions please feel free to ask!
