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General
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Who were the Trojans?
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How did people react to the discovery of Troy?
On the first point: Troy didn’t disappear at the end of the Bronze Age. It was a major city from the late 700s BCE to around 500 CE. Around 500 it was hit by a major earthquake, and it gradually faded away over the subsequent centuries. There may still have been people living there when…
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In the Bronze Age, was it preferable to capture and ransom charioteers?
Here’s Anthony Spalinger talking about the campaigns of Amunhotep II (War in ancient Egypt, 2005, pp. 140-141): During his Syrian expedition some maryannu warriors were captured as well as horses and chariots. Protective armor, quivers, and bows were also recovered from the defeated enemy. … The war booty is more useful to analyze as it…
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What do we really know about the Bronze Age Collapse?
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Are any Homeric characters attested in evidence contemporary to the supposed timeframe the events to?
The simple answer is: no, none at all. A few names that pop up in Greek myths dating to the classical period do also appear in Bronze Age texts, like the individuals named a-ki-re-u (*Achilleus) in KN Vc 106 and PY Fn 79.2, but they’ve got absolutely nothing to do with the legendary character —…
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Does Iman Wilkens have a point about Homer and the Trojan War?
No one takes Wilkens seriously. On the most general level this is because his idea is based on a mix of cherry-picked resemblances, arbitary hypotheticals, and outright misinformation. Some of the misinformation comes from over-reliance on translations: all translations fudge details to get across a point sometimes, and if you go putting lots of weight…
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Why is there no names of any Mycenaean kings outside Greek mythology?
The surviving documents from Bronze Age Greece are products of the Mycenaean palace culture, ranging in date from ca. 1400 to 1200 BCE (plus one or two decades on either side). All the documents that have survived, survived by chance thanks to being filed in a temporary storage area (not long-term archives) and being fired…
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How did we learn that the Bronze Age collapse was a real thing and not just a myth?
The idea of a ‘Bronze Age’ or a ‘Bronze Age collapse’ was never any kind of folk idea. As a period, as a categorisation, the ‘Bronze Age’ is entirely a modern construct; the ‘collapse’ is entirely a finding of modern archaeology. The idea of a Bronze Age was first formulated in the 1820s-1830s by the…
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What Bronze Age history can we extract from Homer?
The main historical data that we do get from Homer is linguistic. We learn a lot about phonological developments and the relationship between dialects, and a fair amount about changes in vocabulary over time. We learn that there was a poetic intersection between the Aeolic and Ionic dialects, though there’s active disagreement over the historical…