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Where Troy Once Stood

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Wikipedia

Where Troy Once Stood is a book by Iman Wilkens that argues that the city of Troy was located in England and that the Trojan War was fought between groups of Celts, against the standard view that Troy is located near the Dardanelles in Turkey. Wilkens claims that Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, though products of ancient Greek culture, are originally orally transmitted epic poems from Western Europe. Wilkens disagrees with conventional wisdom 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 among professional scholars. Anthony Snodgrass, Emeritus Professor in Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University, has named Wilkens as an example of an "infinitely less-serious" writer. The title of his book comes from the Roman poet Ovid:

Now there are fields where Troy once stood...

Iam seges est, ubi Troia fuit…

(Ovid, Heroides 1.1.53)

Wilkens' arguments

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 in 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, naming the Isleham Hoard as archaeological finding in the region.

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 came 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, relatively 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 and mentions Cádiz as location of Homer's Ithaca.

Sources

The writers that are mentioned by Wilkens as main sources for his ideas are the famous German writer Johann Heinrich Voss, who in 1804 wrote that the Odyssey most probably describes certain landscapes in the British Isles and Belgian lawyer Théophile Cailleux, who wrote that Odysseus sailed the Atlantic Ocean, starting from Troy, which he situated near the Wash in England (1879).

Reviews

M.F MacKenzie states that this book "presents a compelling argument" and "makes for interesting reading." However, he notes that the book would not "be well received by serious classicists."
The book is gently mocked by Maurizio Bettini, but other than that and its casual dismissal by Professor A M Snodgrass, it appears to have been ignored by scholars.
In The Independent's "Building a library" series the work is recommended for those who "have had enough of scepticism" about the Trojan War legend.

Author

Iman Jacob Wilkens was born in the Netherlands in 1936, and educated in Economics at Amsterdam Municipal University. Since 1966 he has been living in France where for more than thirty years he has done research on Homer. On 26 May 1992 he gave a lecture, " The Trojan Kings of England", to the Herodoteans, a student classical society of the University of Cambridge.

Popular culture

Clive Cussler's 2003 Dirk Pitt Novel "Trojan Odyssey" uses Iman Wilkens' theory as a backdrop.

Notes

Bibliography

External links

Maps

Map of the geography of the Odyssey based on the ideas of Iman Wilkens

Publication history

First published in Great Britain in 1990 by Rider / Century Hutchinson, London ISBN 0-7126-2463-5
Paperback published in Great Britain in 1991 by Rider / Random Century, London ISBN 0-7126-5105-5
Published in the USA in 1991 by St Martin's Press, New York ISBN 0-312-05994-9
Book-club edition in Great Britain in 1992 by BCA, London ISBN 0-7126-4094-0
Published in the Netherlands (in Dutch translation) in 1992 by Bigot & Van Rossum, Baarn ISBN 90-6134-381-X
Published in the Netherlands (Revised edition in Dutch translation) in 1999 by Bosch & Keuning (Tirion), Baarn ISBN 90-246-0461-3
Published in the Netherlands in 2005 (Revised edition in English) by Gopher Publishers, Groningen ISBN 90-5179-208-5