Posted on 10/11/2006 9:53:43 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Most people think the modern-day Ionian island of Ithaki is the location. But geologists are this week sinking a test borehole on nearby Kefalonia in an attempt to test whether its western peninsula of Paliki is the real site. The scientists hope to find evidence that the peninsula once stood proud, separated from Kefalonia by a narrow, navigable marine channel. It is only within the last 2,500-3,000 years - and long after Homer's time - that the channel has been filled in, the team contends. "We can't prove the story of the Odyssey is true, but we can test whether Homer got his geography right," said Edinburgh University geologist Professor John Underhill, who is supervising the drilling operation.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
A panorama of the Thinia isthmus. The suggestion is that this valley was once washed by the sea, and that over the past 2,500 years the channel has been filled with fallen rock and earth from the hills. Large earthquakes would have thrown huge volumes of material down into the valley.
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Archeologists make historic discovery (Tomb of Odysseus)
The Madera Tribune | 8/27/05 | Thomas Elias
Posted on 09/23/2005 10:37:53 PM EDT by wagglebee
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1490367/posts
;')
Geologists investigate Trojan battlefield
BBC NEWS | 02/07/03 | N/A
Posted on 02/08/2003 12:52:05 AM EST by TigerLikesRooster
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/838508/posts
I get a charge out of the academics/non-academics that take Homer's accounts as fact but will in the same breath deny the historicity of Biblical accounts.
The difference? Homer's accounts don't make claims on their life and the afterlife.
I know what you mean. Unthinking, uncritical doubt of Homer was common in the 19th c academic community. Schliemann defeated it for a while, but at least in the English-speaking world, Evans' excavation of Knossos and subsequent fantasies about the Minoans (helped along by colonial period nationalism) led back toward doubt and discredit of the late Schliemann's work. There is still quite a few who will proclaim that whatever the germ of the story may have been, Homer's Trojan War per se never happened.
Homer's Odysseus however does visit the underworld, which illustrates the view of the afterlife common to his (her?) time and place.
The Trojan War definitely happened, but it wasn't quite as huge and magnificent as Homer made it out to be. He deliberately exhaggerated the height and thickness of Troy's walls, as well as the size of the city itself, to glorify the Greeks by showing what a massively awesome enemy they had defeated.
Hey, that is a pretty good picture. I've seen a documentary on this subject. I believe Homer was correct and earthquakes (etc) brought the islands together.
Actually, the walls were just as Homer recorded, but alas, Schliemann cut a trench into the mound of the citadel destroying a good bit of the evidence for this. Dorpfeld's later excavation (and he was present with Schliemann during the earlier one) found the remaining parts of the wall. The excavations going on now have found that the Roman and Greek city surrounding the citadel was built on Mycenaean-era foundations and in some spots using the original outer walls.
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