Does Iman Wilkens have a point about Homer and the Trojan War?

by oskar_pelotrak

At the risk of getting laughed at / thrown out, I am curious about Iman Wilkens and his theory that Troy was not located in Turkey but in the Atlantic (he places Troy in England).

I grew up on a classical education (Latin, Ancient Greek in high school) though I was definitely not the best scholar and ended up pursuing other careers. But I read the Iliad, Aeneid, and Odyssey when I was young and was fascinated by Schliemann discovering Troy with barely more than his wits. But I was also quite aware of some of the problems with the site, that digs couldn't confirm it. And that 400 year timespan between the events and the first written account always boggled my mind, even if the poems were composed to be easily remembered.

Discovering Iman Wilkens and his theories was therefore fascinating for me. I didn't even know that, for example, Thucydides in 400 BC had raised concerns around anomalies in Homer's texts. Wilkens conclusions seem quite out there (though fun to read), no doubt, but he also raises good points I haven’t seen raised or answered. There seems to be little online on the subject. Wikipedia basically says nobody took him serious. The end.

I was curious if there is more research here. Or maybe some resources that explain the discrepancies and clarify why the story we all learnt in school must be the right one.

Quick recap of some of Wilkens’ discrepancies that I found most interesting:

  • Tides. Homer talks of tides not common in the Mediterranean
  • Weather. Homer talks of days of rain and even fog and snow.
  • Horses. Greeks and Romans did not use horses in battle (vaguely remember this from school too) but seems to be used in the Trojan war and Priam was said to have 3,000 horses
  • Homer talks of oysters which are found in the Atlantic
  • Schliemanns Troy location seems incorrect. Seems there is agreement here (age, size, location of plane etc)
  • Trees. Homer seems to refer to seasons and leaves falling from the trees and forests which doesn’t really fit Turkey.
  • The towns that supposedly went to war cannot have been big enough at the time to provide that kind of armada. Wilkens thinks the city names have the same origin as the ones that actually went to war (and were somewhere else).
  • Beards. Homer's heroes seem generally bearded which is less common for Greeks and later Romans.
  • The dead were cremated in big fires with sacrifices, including humans (Trojan prisoners? Achilles kills 12 at the funeral of Patroclus?) which is more reminiscent of Northern tribe religions (Wilkens talks about proto-Celts) than anything Greek.
  • The term “Greek” is never used by Homer (?)

There are a bunch more but these seem bigger, harder ones to explain away.

And again, Wilkens jumps to a host of conclusions that seem a bit whacky to say the least. But some of the thought experiments seem interesting. Or is the assumption that they don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, errors that made their way into the poems before Homer wrote them down? I would love get some pointers to learn more. Thanks!

PS: I refer to Wilkens' Where Troy Once Stood.

KiwiHellenist

No, no one takes Wilkens seriously. On the most general level this is because his idea is based on a mix of cherry-picked resemblances, arbitary hypotheticals, and outright misinformation. Some of the misinformation comes from over-reliance on translations: all translations fudge details to get across a point sometimes, and if you go putting lots of weight on the fudged details, it's not going to end well. See below for examples.

Moreover, this isn't a situation where there's a vacuum of evidence, and as a result we have to weigh up alternative speculations. On the contrary. We have copious textual, epigraphic, and material evidence. Ancient geographers tell us the exact location of Troy; ancient inscriptions tell us the exact location of Troy; nearby locations that Homer refers to are all in the vicinity of the real Troy; the cult of Ilian Athena that we see depicted in Iliad book 6 was a real thing in 7th century BCE Troy after Greek settlement, and is depicted in numerous coins and inscriptions found at the exact location of the real Troy and its vicinity.

Wilkens' argument is based on ignoring all of this, in favour of hypothetical possibilities.

On to the detailed points you raise.

Tides. Homer does not, in fact, refer to 'tides'. Some translators do, in phrases like 'the tide of battle', but that's evidence of the modern translator's taste for words, not of what Homer was thinking. There is no straightforward word for 'tide' in classical Greek. And where phrases describing tides do exist, we should also notice that ancient Greeks were perfectly well aware of the existence of Gibraltar and the ocean beyond, including in the Archaic period (both Homer and Hesiod refer to fantastic places and entities 'beyond the Ocean').

Weather. Greece and Turkey do experience rain, fog, and snow, and they aren't confined to mountain tops.

Horses. Horses are never used for cavalry in Homer. They exclusively pull chariots. In real-world Greece, at the time the Iliad was composed, horses were used for mounted infantry (only Thrace had horses suitable for cavalry); that's also the function that Homer's chariots serve -- they aren't attack vehicles, they carry mounted infantry. The use of chariots is a false archaism, conveying the flavour of a dimly-remembered past by having a contemporary function (mounted infantry) provided by an archaic aristocratic instrument (chariots).

Oysters. Homer doesn't refer to oysters either. Iliad 16.747 refers to someone gathering tēthea, but it's a rare word and the sense is unclear; it could be any kind of shellfish. Liddell and Scott actually gloss the root word, τήθυον, as 'sea squirt', based on how a later writer uses it. Be that as it may, there are oysters native to the Mediterranean.

'Schliemann's Troy location'. There is nothing 'incorrect' about the location. Contrary to popular belief, Troy was never lost, and was a thriving city up until 500 CE; it continued to be inhabited on a smaller scale after that point until close to the Ottoman conquest of the Troad in the 1300s. Uncertainty only arose when Schliemann tried to conflate myth with reality, thereby casting doubt on the reality.

Trees. Here is a picture of Chios in autumn, one of the places that in antiquity claimed to be Homer's birthplace.

The armada is too big. Yes, and this is why most people think the war wasn't a real event, or at least not on the scale described -- similarly to how no one believes Herodotos when he says that Xerxes' army had two million soldiers. Ancient war reports habitually inflate figures.

Beards. This is a strange one, because ancient Greek men are almost universally depicted with beards, other than figures strongly associated with youth such as Apollo and Achilleus.

Cremation. There's only so many ways of dealing with dead bodies. That means you can't put much stock in resemblances. Cremation is also found in elite Aztec burials: that doesn't mean the Iliad is set in Mexico. Things like this are only 'reminiscent' in the same way that pyramids in Bolivia may remind you of pyramids in Sudan (and for a similar reason: there's only so many ways of stacking rocks).

The word 'Greek'. 'Greek' is a modern English word, so it shouldn't be surprising that Homer doesn't use it. Homer does however refer to Hellēnes, the word used for people of that country in both classical and modern Greek, as well as Panellēnes ('people from the whole Greek world'). Greece wasn't a nation in antiquity, so the norm was to refer to groups and states by cities (Athens, Sparta, etc.), regions (Thessaly, Phthia, etc.) or ethnicities (Achaian, Ionian, etc.). And this is exactly what Homer does. He refers to 'Thessalians', 'Achaians', 'Argives', 'Cretans' and so on. Hellēnes represents a grouping of all these into one bundle. Homer makes the word 'Achaian' in particular do a lot of work: that's primarily because of legendary migrations that supposedly took place between the Trojan War and the time the Iliad was composed. In those migrations multiple ethnic groups got moved around, including the Achaians, so Homer has to do some fudging to try to conjure up a pre-migration ethnographic map.

In closing, I'll re-emphasise my initial point: this kind of argument means chucking out everything that we do know about Troy from ancient evidence, and instead believing that arbitrary hypotheticals must be true, even when they conflict with the ancient evidence.

In reality, as I said at the start, we have copious documentary and material evidence that classical-era Greeks and Romans regarded their contemporary Ilion as the site of Homer's Ilios. With one exception -- Strabo -- who put Homer's Troy a few kilometres away (and thereby created some confusion in the late 1700s when a French diplomat decided to believe Strabo, and got even Strabo wrong).

Troy is firmly embedded in Greco-Roman culture, both contemporary Troy and the legendary Troy of the past. For an assessment of what Troy signified, I recommend Andrew Erskine's 2001 book Troy between Greece and Rome: local tradition and imperial power (Oxford).