Sunday, March 21, 2010

The History of Troy

For centuries Troy was thought to be a myth created by Homer or whoever composed the Iliad. No one knew where it was, so there was no archeological evidence to prove it was real. Then, in 1868, the wealthy German businessman Heinrich Schliemann discovered the remains of the lost city.

There is not a single Troy, but rather several piled on top of each other. In all we have,

Troy I -- 3000-2600 B.C.

Troy II --2600-2250 B.C. - richest of the first five

Troy III -2250-2100 B.C.

Troy IV --2100-1950 B.C

Troy V ---1900-1700 B.C.

Troy VI --1600- 1400 B.C. - the most advanced fortress (destroyed by earthquake). Only one arrowhead found.

Troy VIIa 1300-1190 B.C. - shrunken recovery of VI in 1300 B.C. destroyed by man in 1200. Mycenaean pottery found here.

Troy VIIb 1190-1100 B.C. - short-lived

There is no evidence of Troy before the beginning of the Bronze Age, and most likely began at the end of the line of Mesopotamian influence. The early city is referenced in Hittite texts implying at least a trade relationship between those two cultures. The successive Troys formed a stready march through time -- as devastating as each destruction may have been, a new one rose soon after.



As you can see from the diagram above, the fortress of Troy was actually quite small; unlike the massive city depicted in the movie Troy.

Troy VIIa is the stage chosen by scholars as the player in the Trojan War. There is a problem with the opponent, however. During this period Mycenae itself was under attack from the north so it seems unlikely that it could muster an attack on Troy of the magnitude described in the Iliad. Who then attacked Troy?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

My theory on the origins of the Proto-Germanic people:

http://www.keyoghettson.com/2010/11/proto-germanic-people_30.html

Best regards - Keyo Ghettson

Unknown said...

Have you, I am sure you have, heard of the book "Homer in the Baltic" by Felice Vinci.

At first, while reading the review, it seemed plausible until I got to his inane etymologies, comparing, most modern North-Gmc, modern-day Baltic (a distant Indo-European "IE" cousin to Gmc)then to modern non-IE, Fenno-Ugric, Finnish & Estonian. I cannot comment much on Uraic, Altaic or any other non-IE tongue, but I do consider myself an expert in Germanic philology, Germanic comarative philology, Gmc morphology, Gmc etymology sub-specializing modern, medieval ancient and proto-North-Gmc,Swedish, Anglo-Saxon and pre-Anglo-Saxon philolgy Norw, Dan, I speak fluent Swedish (that means I can understand, speak, write Norwegian and I can read Danish)I can get by conversationally in all living Nation standard Gmc tongues and in ancient, prehistoric Gmc, PGmc, Ingvaeonic (which I don't consider as a subset of West-Gmc, but a separate Gmc sub-family of its own.) Gundmund Schuette alluded to this, he called the Ingvaeonic languages, "Peninsular Germanic", if memeory serves me right, it's been over 20 years sin I read it, in his magnum opus, "Our forefathers : The Gothonic nations : A manual of the ethnography of the Gothic, German, Dutch, Anglo-Saxon, Frisian and Scandinavian peoples" (Cambridge [Eng.], University Press, 1929-33)
To get back on the subject, I was appalled at how egregious his etymologies were, it is as if the man's never heard of "Grimm's Law" & had no linguistic knowledge at all. He ignores the known toponyms etymologies, most of which I looked up at the Svenska Akademiens toponym website. I believe he knowingly, Like Thor Heyerdahl in his last, assnine book, "Hunt for Odin" committed intellectual fraud. I mean he compares modern Swedish, an extremely distant IE cousin to Hellenic, here early-Achaean/Homeric Greek and compares ancient forms to modern forms without regard to the known sound-change laws that have occurred in the intervening 3000 years, a linguistic eternity.
He compares the small island just north of Gotland "Fårö" to "Pharos" which to Swedes looks like "Sheep-island" "sheep" (får is the regular word for living sheep, as opposed to "lamm") But the word "får" here just by happenstance looks like the word for "sheep", it comes from early Gotlandic-Norse, "*faru" (journey, cognate to "fare") which was also the exact same spelling in Old English (OE) the much-attested strong, fem, a-stem "faru" same meaning. The final 'u' caused u-umlaut both in Swedish and modern-English, e.g., OE 'saru' & ProtoNorse *saru, cause the 'a' in both tongues to mutate to an 'o' sound, Eng. 'sore', Sw, 'sår'. Besides, the damn place did not get that name not until the 16th century. His joke of an etymology, borders on fraud or shows extreme, extreme ignorance of IE, Gmc and Hellenic phonology, comparative linguistics and philology. Any 12-year-old, with a decent dictionary could have looked up the etymologies himself. I cannot believe that F. Vinci, PhD, a man smart enough to be a nuclear engineer and a classicist could have unwittingly made so many, dozens and dozens of utterly gigantic errors of the first order." K.S.Doig proto-germanic.com
Below is the link to my critique of his theory and book by me.

http://www.proto-germanic.com/2011/05/etymologies-that-vinci-gives-are-100.html

Unknown said...

A few corrections from my comments made on 28 Aug 2011.

The small Swedish island, "Fårö" is from Gutnish ('Gutnish', in Sw, 'gutamål' [Sw doesn't capitalize languages, nationalities, even proper-nouns, used as an adjective, e.g., "He was a greek christian who spoke icelandic & had suffered from balkanization."] While it is true as I'd stated in my earlier comments, 'får' means 'sheep' {singular & plural, e.g., "ett 'one' får" or "hundra får". This is so common of neuter-nouns, we still retain the zero-inflected plural forms for modern-English nouns, descended from Old-English "OE" neuters; e.g., "deer" 'déor', "sheep", 'scéap', etc.} But in Gutnish, a NGmc language closely related to Swedish, "får" means 'path/trail', in Old-Gutnish, 'fáru', same meaning. It just so happens that the OE/West-Saxon, c. 900AD, was identical 'fáru', both strong, thematic, a-stem, feminine nouns, made into nouns from the verb Proto-Germanic "PGmc" [infinitives shown] *faranan, NGmc 'fara', OE 'faran'. Whence we get the modern word, .s, "fare", the noun, as in "How much $$ is the boat-fare?" & the verb "fare", as in "farewell". Also "ferry", Sw "färja". Cf. High-German "fahren", Dutch "varen".

Ken Doig
protogermanic.com (note, no hyphen)