Where Troy Once Stood

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Gog Magog Hills

Where Troy Once Stood ( dt. Where Troy once stood ) is a book by Iman Wilkens from 1990. This represents Wilkens the theory that the Homeric epics Iliad and Odyssey, the origin of the substance according to Western Europe , namely originally Celtic were origin the city of Troy was not on the Hellespont or elsewhere in Asia Minor , but in the Atlantic area , on the North Sea coast of England . Wilkens thus joins those authors who suspect the acts of Homer's epics to be a Greek material from another culture and then seek to prove the scene of the Trojan War in England ( Théophile Cailleux , 1879) or Finland ( Felice Vinci , 1989).

title

The title of the book refers to a well-known formulation by the Roman poet Ovid , which evokes the disappearance of Troy from the surface of the earth as a picture of transience: "iam seges est ubi Troia fuit" ( Heroid. 1,53; " Seed fields are now where Troy once stood ").

author

Iman Jacob Wilkens, who has otherwise not emerged as an author, was born in the Netherlands in 1936 and died in France in 2018 . He studied economics at the University of Amsterdam . From 1966 until his retirement in 1996 he lived and worked as an economist in Paris , France. According to his own account, his preoccupation with the creation of Homer's epics goes back to his school days.

Theses and arguments of Wilkens'

A starting point for Wilkens' geographical reinterpretation of Homer's epics is the view, which has sometimes been expressed in older literature, that some of the geographical and climatic conditions mentioned by Homer (river landscape, cold, misty and stormy sea, according to Strabon's interpretation of Ilias H 422 also tides ) did not go well with the conditions on the Hellespont and in the Mediterranean area, but rather pointed to North Atlantic conditions. Wilkens also feels that the archaic, heroic character of Homer's heroes, who go out in ships for war and plunder, is atypical of Greek culture and more characteristic of Nordic peoples, whom he modeled for ancient times according to popular ideas of medieval Vikings .

St Michael's Mount

In the assumption of a primordial or protoceltic substratum of the Homeric plot and an East English setting, Wilkens' approach is in essential outline already presented by Théophile Cailleux, a Belgian lawyer and author of several books on the Celtic origins of European peoples, who in the 19th century Trojan War as an intra-Celtic conflict in which Celts in East Anglia in the area of The Wash and the Gog Magog Hills were attacked by mainland Celts. Wilkens locates Troy in the same region close to Cambridge , especially on Wandlebury Hill in the Gog Magog Hills, and from there finds aural equivalents to most of the names of places, rivers and peoples in Homer's description, some of which are also assigned have already trained at Cailleux. The Thames , Cam , Great Ouse and Little Ouse rivers are identified as Temesa (according to Wilkens not only the name of a settlement but also of a river), Skamandros , Simoïs and Satnioeis . Mycenae is located in France , in the city of Troyes , so renamed by the victors in memory of the fall of Troy , Delphi in Delft , Ithaca in Cádiz , the Cyclops in Cape Verde , Calypso in the Azores , the Phaiaks in the Canary Islands , Skylla and Charybdis near St Michael's Mount in Cornwall , and Egypt with the cenotaph of Agamemnon , which Homer occasionally appears to be geographically dislocated, can be found in Normandy , according to Wilkens .

Cadiz

According to Wilkens, the ancient Celtic Trojans were found on Wandlebury Hill around 1200 BC. Attacked by the ancient Celts of mainland France who wanted to gain access to the tin supplies in Cornwall , which are important for bronze production . According to Wilkens, the genesis of Homer's poems about this event must be imagined in such a way that Homer came from the present-day Dutch province of Zeeland , but, as Cailleux assumed, lived in Spain and created his works there as oral poems, which were then written by ancient Celtic peoples imported as an oral tradition during the settlement of the Greek-Aegean region and there after the development of a Greek writing culture around 750 BC. In the course of this process, however, because the original locations and names were no longer clearly known, had been adapted to the circumstances of the new home.

reception

In the scientifically relevant Homer and Troy research, to which Wilkens, as a private researcher without historical, archaeological or philological training, cannot be assigned, his work was at times recognized as one of the many curiosities of the modern reception of Homer, but as a matter of fact as irrelevant and for a critical one Discussion not worthwhile or not to be scientifically assessed seriously despite individual notable considerations. Outside the narrow specialist circles, his book was sometimes viewed more favorably or even as a convincing overcoming of Schliemann's position , and with Clive Cussler a novelist has recently also been inspired by motifs for his thriller Trojan Odyssey (2003; German The Troja Mission , 2006) to let.

At the University of Cambridge , Wilkens held a lecture on "The Trojan Kings of England" on May 26, 1992 at the invitation of a student association, in which he lectured on some of the core theses of his book.

expenditure

  • 1990 British first edition by Rider / Century Hutchinson, London, ISBN 0-7126-2463-5
  • 1991 British paperback edition by Rider / Random Century, London, ISBN 0-7126-5105-5
  • 1991 US edition by St Martin's Press , New York, ISBN 0-312-05994-9
  • 1992 British licensed edition through a book club at BCA, London, ISBN 0-7126-4094-0
  • 1992 edition in Dutch under the title Waar eens Troje lag: hetkret van Homerus' Ilias en Odyssey onthuld by Bigot & Van Rossum, Baarn ISBN 90-6134-381-X
  • 1999 revised. Dutch edition by Bosch & Keuning (Tirion), Baarn ISBN 90-246-0461-3
  • 2005/2009 revised English edition at Gopherpublishers.com, Amsterdam ISBN 9789051792089
  • 2012 Extended edition in Dutch under the title Waar eens Troje lag: hetkret van Homerus' Ilias en Odyssee onthuld at CHAIRONEIA, Leeuwarden ISBN 9789076792200

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Théophile Cailleux, Poésies d'Homère faites en Ibérie et décrivant non la Méditerranée mais l'Atlantique , Maisonneuve, Paris 1879
  2. ↑ Felice Vinci, Homericus Nuncius: il mondo di Omero nel Baltico , Solfanelli, 1993 (= Il calamo & la ferula, 14); ders., Omero nel Baltico: saggio sulla geografia omerica , Fratelli Palombi, Rome 1995
  3. ↑ Family tree of Iman Jacob Wilkens. Retrieved May 2, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Bruno Gentili / Carmine Catenacci, Fantasticherie omeriche di Raoul Schrott e la "nuova" Iliade di Alessandro Baricco , in: Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica, NS 87,3 (2007), pp. 147–161, p. 148
  5. ^ Anthony M. Snodgrass : A Paradigm Shift in Classical Archeology? , in: Cambridge Archaeological Journal 12 (2002), pp. 179–194, p. 190, again in ders., Archeology and the Emergence of Greece , Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2006, p. 70ff., p. 98
  6. ↑ Hans Derks, De koe van Troje: de mythe van de Griekse oudheid , Verloren, Hilversum 1995, p. 93
  7. ^ Lionel / Patricia Fanthorpe, Unsolved Mysteries of the Sea , Dundum Press u. a., Toronto 2004, pp. 199f.
  8. ^ In the Shakespeare literature, Annie D. Wraight, The Story that the Sonnets tell , Adam Hart, London 1994, p. Ii: "Schliemann's work has since been superseeded by the immense research of the classical scholar Iman Wilken"
  9. ↑ Clive Cussler, Trojan Odyssey , Putnam Press, New York 2003, cites Wilkens' "revealing book" as a source in the introductory Acknoledgments and incorporated it into his novel as a reading by his protagonists and key text for their interpretation of the event.
  10. ^ The Trojan Kings of England , 1992

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