DREAM / The Prime Minister resigns and wakes up under the Parisian bridge!

 Kliko këtu për të tjera
Voxpress:

Troy, Helen, war, Odyssey: What is really true in the Iliad?

2022-09-04 20:26:07Histori SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

 

Troy, Helen, war, Odyssey: What is really true in the Iliad?
Last Fresco of the Eight Hundred: Achilles, enraged at the killing of Patroclus, challenges and kills Hector, son of King Priam, and drags his body around the walls of Troy.

 

The story of Troy and the heroes who fought is well known. But did it really happen as in the Homeric poems? Confirmations (and refutations) of archeology to understand how much truth there is in Homer's poems.

Is Homer right? Has he told us the real story? There are many who ask and the answer is still debatable... But today we can say that much of what has been told in the Iliad, the story of the siege and the fall of Troy, are the fruit of fantasy. Although there is something true.

THE END OF AN ERA. The fall of Troy for example is history. The Late Bronze Age occurred (1300-1200 BC), when the political and economic system of the Mediterranean was being transformed, mass migrations, internal wars inaugurated the beginning of the Iron Age.

 

Troy, Helen, war, Odyssey: What is really true in the Iliad?
Reconstruction of what a road should look like in the ancient city of Troy

 

The transition was not without pain. Many rich cities, such as Troy, Mycenae and Tiryns were destroyed and abandoned, talked about for centuries. Homer himself (or he who wrote under his name, since some doubt whether he really existed) showed the end of these powerful city-states at a distance of 400 years.

Q YOUR TRADING CITY. According to archaeologists, Troy was located not far from today's Canakkale (Gallipoli), in Turkey, near the Dardarnel Strait. It was populated (about 10,000 inhabitants) and rich. The ancient Greeks called it Ἴλιος or Ilios, while the Hittites themselves, the warrior people who controlled it, called it Vilusa. For both sides, the dominance of this city was strategic to manage and control trade in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

EVERYONE AT WAR . No historical evidence confirms that Vilusa (Troy) fell to the Mycenaeans as Homer tells. So it was not the Greeks led by Agamemnon (the son of the king of Mycenae) who destroyed it. The British Frank Calvert had excavated in this region before the German. The history of this city, whose genesis begins 3000 years before our era and continues until antiquity, was difficult to determine on the basis of the discovered data. Calvert had suggested to Schliemann that he continue the excavations where he had left off. In 1872 Schliemann was sure: the thick walls he had excavated belonged to the time of Troy.

Troy, Helen, war, Odyssey: What is really true in the Iliad?
Troy's quest has spanned centuries. But no one has been able to bring evidence of the Trojan wars since Homer's time. Until 1871, when Schliemann, then 49 years old, brought the first evidence for the existence of Troy in Northwest Turkey. Heinrich Schliemann was not the first, who believed that this city is located exactly there, as Homer himself described it.

The geographical discoveries of the last century have meanwhile confirmed the existence of Troy, which had a complex political system, the same as that described by Homer. According to some texts discovered in the Hittite capital (Hattusha), Vilusa was a powerful city ruled by King Alaksandu – who may correspond to the Trojan prince Parides, whose childhood name according to Homer was Alexander. Decades of excavations have revealed skeletons, spears, arrows and footprints that pointed to a violent epilogue for the city and its inhabitants, most likely the next war.

IT WASN'T A WOMAN'S FAULT … The cause of the final war of the Iliad was not a woman named Helen, the wife of the king of Sparta, Menelaus, kidnapped by the Trojan prince Paris. Instead of this history, the Hittite archives show that the Greeks had undertaken a series of military campaigns in western Turkey, with raids and mass kidnappings of people who were then sold into slavery.

This provoked inevitable tensions, possibly even a war, which seems to be confirmed by a document that alludes to a peace signed around 1200 BC between the Greeks and the Hittites precisely for the city of Troy.

Troy, Helen, war, Odyssey: What is really true in the Iliad?

THE TROJAN HORSE. Some facts shown in the poem may have been imagined or simply misunderstood. The myth of the Trojan horse, the horse used by the Greeks to enter the city, has long been debated.

In 2016, the marine archaeologist of the University of Aix-en-Provence in Marseille, discovered in a study that the machine used by the Greeks to subjugate Troy was not a wooden horse, but a Phoenician ship with a horse's head, which was called a "hippos". quite used ships at that time.

And this is where the myth or mistranslation of the authors was born.

According to the Italian archaeologist, the wooden horse, whose belly was filled with Greek warriors, who then conquered Troy, was not at all like that, but it is a mistake in translation.

According to him, not only is it not about a horse, but the dimensions of the mechanism that served to hide the warriors are hyperbolized.

According to Tibon, it is more likely that a large-sized ship could have kept in its "belly" the Greek warriors, who found it easy to get out to start the battle.

HOW LONG DID THE SIEGE LAST? Even the length of that bloody military campaign is subject to debate. In the Iliad it is said that the attack lasted about ten years. But for some scholars it may have lasted even longer, possibly spanning generations, so much so that the war left such a deep imprint on their imaginations.

It is difficult to say that some of the heroes of the Iliad really existed. But in 2010, Professor Atanasio Papadopoulos, from the University of Ioannina, made a discovery.

Papadopoulos said that he and his team of archaeologists, who had been excavating north of Ithaca for 16 years, had found parts of what they described as the palace of Odysseus (Ulysses), implying that some of the protagonists of the heroic poems were real.

It is not excluded that other excavations may bring important details, but for now these are facts.

However, the fact that everyone agrees on is the great and deep value of these poems, to the point that even Giacomo Leopardi has commented in this way: "Everything has been perfected since the time of Homer, but not poetry"./ Focus Storia/Vox News

Galeria fotografike (
)


Në përputhje me standarded JTI

Video

SHIKO KANALIN NE YOUTUBE
×