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Finding Ithaca: Identifying Odysseus' Homeland

Yithian

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Study 'locates' Homer's Ithaca

An amateur British archaeologist says he has located Ithaca, the homeland of Homer's legendary hero Odysseus.

Robert Bittlestone and two experts say research shows the rocky island in The Odyssey was in the western part of Greek tourist destination Cephalonia.

Satellite imagery was used to match the landscape with descriptions in Homer's poem about the return of the man behind the wooden horse of Troy.

Many experts had stated the island of Ithaki was the location.

They had explained geographical inconsistencies in The Odyssey by suggesting that Homer lived much later than the events portrayed and in a different area.

But other Ionian islands including Cephalonia have also been named in previous studies.

Earthquake theory

Surrey-based management consultant Mr Bittlestone first came up with his theory in 1998.

During field trips to western Greece he also analysed literary, geological and archaeological data, and utilised 3D global visualisation techniques developed by Nasa.

His book Odysseus Unbound - The Search for Homer's Ithaca is co-written by Cambridge University professor James Diggle, and geographic expert John Underhill from Edinburgh University.

It says earthquakes have helped fill a narrow channel which had separated Cephalonia from Ithaca - said to have been located in the peninsular now known as Paliki.

"Our purpose has been to demonstrate that there is something both very new and very old to be found at this new location and that we should now treat the existence of ancient Ithaca very seriously," Mr Bittlestone said.

Future research

Mr Bittlestone's has described his theory as one of the most important classical discoveries since the unearthing of Troy in Turkey in the 1870s.


The book says Ithaca was the area now known as Paliki

The book details 26 locations in the Odyssey that can be identified today in northern Paliki and its vicinity.

The research was conducted in cooperation with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and with the Athens-based Institute of Geology and Mineral Exploration.

"The book opens exciting prospects for future research regarding the location of Homeric Ithaca," said Petros Tatoulis, Greece's Deputy Minister of Culture.

"The Ministry eagerly follows Mr Bittlestone's hypothesis and looks forward to staying informed about any future developments."

Cephalonia is the same island where Louis de Bernieres' best-selling novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin was set.

The novel, which was made into a film starring Penelope Cruz and Nicholas Cage in 2001, is set against the real-life massacre of thousands of Italian soldiers by German troops during World War II.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4293786.stm
 
Bittlestone, Diggle & Underhill . . . Now where is that appropriate names thread? :D
 
Odyssey over as sleuth 'finds Homer's island'

greets

another version of the odyssey story (with added man in tight jeans)

Odyssey over as sleuth 'finds Homer's island'

ROGER COX

FOR centuries, scholars have puzzled over the location of Ithaca, the island home of the Greek hero Odysseus described in Homer's epic poems The Odyssey and The Iliad. But now the search may be over.

In what is billed as one of the most significant classical discoveries for more than a hundred years, a team of experts led by Robert Bittlestone, a management consultant and businessman, claimed yesterday that they had found the "mystery" island.

Instrumental in the project was an Edinburgh-based academic, John Underhill, who specialises in stratigraphy - the study of geological strata or layers.

In London yesterday, Mr Bittlestone announced that the Ithaca described by Homer was not the present-day Greek island of Ithaca, as had previously been believed.

Instead, he and his colleagues have concluded that Odysseus's Ithaca was located on the western peninsula of the neighbouring island of Kefalonia - an area now known as Paliki.

In Homer's time, they argue, this peninsula would have been separated from the rest of Kefalonia by a narrow sea channel, but over the last 3,000 years that channel has gradually been filled in by a combination of rockfalls and tectonic uplift, joining the two land masses together.

However, a note of caution was sounded by Michael Wood, a leading historian and television presenter, who argues that the location of Ithaca is already well-established. According to Mr Wood, the general description of Ithaca in Book 9 of The Odyssey "matches today's Ithaca perfectly well". He also bases his opinion on archaeological evidence.

"It is what has been found on Ithaca by modern archaeologists that really clinches the identification, in my view", he said. "There have been important Mycenaean finds, especially in the north of the island, which show that the place was indeed a kingdom in the Late Bronze Age, the period on which Homer's narrative ultimately rests. No matter how much the new book denies this, the evidence is clear."

The findings of the Bittlestone study are to be published next week in a book called Odysseus Unbound - The Search for Homer's Ithaca, co-authored by Mr Bittlestone, James Diggle, a professor of Greek and Latin at Cambridge University, and Prof Underhill, of Edinburgh University.

Prof Underhill, who has been carrying out research on the Ionian Islands since 1982, was invited to take part in the project in 2003 after Mr Bittlestone came across his name on the internet. By studying rocks and sediment in the valley that lies between Paliki and the rest of Kefalonia, he set out to test the hypothesis that the peninsula used to be an island.

Prof Underhill found "considerable coverage" of so-called drift cover in the area - material deposited in the last 10,000 years - which supports the new theory.

The big question that still needs to be answered, however, is whether the drift cover extends all the way down to sea level.

Prof Underhill is keen to carry out more tests, including seismic acquisition - shooting soundwaves into the earth and recording the echoes that bounce back - and drilling boreholes to find out what kind of rocks are filling in the valley.

However, any such work will have to be approved by the Greek government.

In an appeal to be allowed to carry out more intensive research, Mr Bittlestone said: "The Greek authorities clearly need to evaluate the credibility of these proposals and to orchestrate what follows.

"I hope that what has been achieved so far will represent only a beginning. We shall ultimately learn the truth about Odysseus's homeland only if we have the courage and the confidence to look."

The initial signs are encouraging. In a statement issued earlier this week, the Institute of Geology and Mineral Exploration (IGME) in Athens described the findings published in Odysseus Unbound as "unexpected and thought provoking".

After graduating in economics from Christ's College Cambridge in 1972, Mr Bittlestone went on to found the consultancy and software company Metapraxis. He first turned his attention to the Ithaca question in 2003, when he noticed that Homer's description of the island fails to tally with the location of the present-day island of Ithaca.

In book nine of The Odyssey, Ithaca is described as "low-lying" and "furthest towards dusk [i.e. west]" of all the nearby islands. However, the island now known as Ithaca is mountainous, and lies to the east of its neighbours.

There have been various attempts to explain this inconsistency over the years, but most scholars simply concluded that Homer was ignorant of the geography of the area. Mr Bittlestone, however, wondered if this mismatch could have occurred not because of an error on the part of the poet, but due to geological changes in the landscape since the time of the Trojan War in around 1,200 BC.

In formulating the theory that Ithaca was located in western Kefalonia, a computer program was used to analyse literary, geological and archaeological data.

He also used satellite imagery and 3D global visualisation techniques, developed by NASA, to look for clues in the landscape. He then assembled a team of more than 40 geologists, classicists and archaeologists from all over the world.

Their discovery - arguably the most significant regarding the classical world since the unearthing of Troy in north-western Turkey in the 1870s - raises the possibility that important Bronze Age artefacts might be found in the area.

Archaeological finds disprove theory

OVER the last few decades archaeologists and textual historians have been able to prove that Homer's detailed descriptions of places are indeed based on autopsy, whether first or second-hand. I believe that it is beyond doubt that the same goes for Ithaca. Though there were big arguments in the 19th century as to whether Homer's Ithaca was today's island (next to Kefalonia) most, if not all, experts now believe Homer is describing today's Ithaca.

As William Gell first noted in his book on the island published in 1807, it is the numerous coincidences between Homer's description and the topography of the island that tend to prove the identification; and it is what has been found on Ithaca by modern archaeologists that really clinches the identification.

There have been Mycenaean finds, especially in the north of the island, which show that the place was indeed a kingdom in the Late Bronze Age, the period on which Homer's narrative ultimately rests. No matter how much the new book denies this, the evidence is clear.

Furthermore, a whole series of Homeric place names which describe natural features on his Ithaca can be identified with landmarks on the modern island, including torrents, fountains, caves, cliffs, offshore islets, bays and harbours.

It is, however, the archaeological find made by a British team in the 1930s that put any doubts to rest.

Sylvia Benton excavated a site by the sea in the north of the island, a cave shrine in which the roof had collapsed in the time of the Roman Empire. In the 1860s and 1870s locals had dug up a bronze tripod for holding a cauldron, and Mycenaean pottery turned up here in 1904. Benton found the cave had been used as a shrine from prehistory, the Bronze Age, down to the first century AD. She found a terracotta mask - a votive offering inscribed "My Prayer to Odysseus", showing that the cave had been centre of a cult to Odysseus at the time of Alexander the Great.

Even more fantastic was Benton's find of the remains of 12 more votive bronze tripods and cauldrons - magnificent artefacts with each tripod 3ft high (they can still be seen in the little museum nearby at Stavros village). When dated, they are found to be late ninth or early eighth century BC, which shows they are before Homer.

In Book 8 of the Odyssey, Homer tells how Odysseus receives gifts from King Alkinoos of Phaeacia before he sails back to Ithaca. The gifts were from "12 noble lords ... and I myself the 13th", says the king. What were the gifts? Later in Book 13 we read: "Come let each of us man by man give him a large tripod and cauldron..."

So 13 men gave Odysseus gifts, and the finds in the 1870s and 1930s add up to 13 cauldrons. When dated, they are proved to be from before Homer.

What this proves is that the story was older than Homer; that the cult of Odysseus on today's Ithaca was already in existence in the ninth century BC, and it proves too that Homer had this very cave in Ithaca in mind when he composed the Odyssey. He may even have been there.

MICHAEL WOOD

• Michael Wood is a leading history writer and television presenter probably best known for his programmes Conquistadors and In Search of Myths and Heroes.

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=2015172005

mal
 
Much of the same in the Daily Telegraph:-

Odyssey island 'revealed' by Briton's holiday hunch
By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent
(Filed: 30/09/2005)

A British businessman said yesterday that he had solved one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world.

Robert Bittlestone claims that he has found the true location of Homer's Ithaca, the island of Odysseus.

If true - and the claim has yet to be substantiated by archaeological evidence - it would be the greatest classical discovery since Heinrich Schliemann found the site of Troy in Turkey in the 1870s.

It might also establish that the wandering Odysseus was a real Greek - not just a poetic and mythical figment of Homer's imagination. It raises the tantalising possibility of finding Odysseus's palace and maybe his gold.

Mr Bittlestone, 53, a management consultant from Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey, developed the theory after a hunch came to him while on holiday in 1997.

He has since devoted his spare time to proving that a peninsula on the western side of the Ionian island of Cephalonia was once a separate island - and was Odysseus's Ithaca.

Matters are complicated by the presence a few miles to the east of Cephalonia of the island of Ithaki, long assumed to be the mythological Ithaca. But archaeological investigations there have never yielded any conclusive evidence.

Homer's two great epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, tell of the Trojan war in the 13th century BC and of Odysseus's 10 years of adventures on his journey home to Ithaca. Homer's best clue as to the whereabouts and topography of Ithaca are contained in the lines from the Odyssey:

'Around are many islands, close to each other, Doulichion and Same and wooded Zacynthos.

Ithaca itself lies low, furthest to sea Towards dusk [ie west]; the rest, apart, face dawn and sun [ie east].'

Homer, who, if he existed, composed his poems some 500 years after the Trojan wars, thus placed his Ithaca to the west of Same (modern-day Cephalonia) not to the east where modern Ithaki, which is mountainous and not low-lying, sits. Zacynthos, which still bears the same name, lies well to the south.

This conundrum has baffled Ithaca-hunters for years.

But Mr Bittlestone said yesterday that it came to him while on holiday in the area, that Cephalonia was once two islands, with the western Paliki peninsula, which is low-lying, separated from the bulk of Cephalonia by a stretch of water only a few hundred yards wide. He believes that Paliki is the fabled Ithaca while Ithaki is Homer's Doulichion.

Mr Bittlestone enlisted the support of two British academics, James Diggle, professor of Greek and Latin at Cambridge University, and John Underhill, professor of stratiography at the University of Edinburgh.

Both said in London yesterday that they had found plenty of evidence to support Mr Bittlestone's claims and none to contradict them.

In Odysseus Unbound, a heavyweight book to be published soon by Cambridge University Press, Prof Underhill says he has found substantial evidence that rock falls along with a rise in land levels probably caused by earthquakes, may have filled in the narrow straits between Cephalonia and Ithaca in the past 3,000 years.

Prof Diggle said that up to 70 topographical features on Paliki were very similar to how Homer had described them and the trio say that they have identified a hill that could be the site of Odysseus's palace.

Mr Bittlestone said: "What has flabbergasted me is that if you take a literal interpretation of The Odyssey you find that it fits Paliki like a glove."

In 1995, Greek archaeologists found flakes of flint and some shards of handmade pots from the right period on the hill.

The trio admitted yesterday that they cannot yet prove their case. They have founded a charity and are appealing for funds to carry out excavation work and to do more tests on the rockfalls.

Source:- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... haca30.xml
 
Drill hole begins Homeric quest
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News



A UK-led team is challenging cherished ideas on Greek mythology by proposing an alternative site for Ithaca.

The island was said to be the home of Odysseus, whose 10-year journey back from the Trojan War is chronicled in Homer's epic poem the Odyssey.

Most people think the modern-day Ionian island of Ithaki is the location.

But geologists are this week sinking a 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 in the last 2,500-3,000 years - and 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.

'Leading' candidate

At issue are a few lines of hotly debated text, in which Homer describes Odysseus' native land.


Click here to read the passage
He talks of low-lying terrain, furthest out to sea and facing dusk.


See a panorama of the Thinia valley on Paliki


More details

The team, which includes geologists, classicists and archaeologists, argues that modern-day Ithaki does not fit this description.

It is dominated by high ground and, being on the eastern side of the Ionian arc of islands, actually looks - if anywhere - towards "dawn and sun".

"This has always been a contentious issue since antiquity," said James Diggle, a professor of Greek and Latin and fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge.

"Many different candidates have been suggested and the general feeling has been that the island that has the same name now - Ithaki - must be Ithaca, but it simply doesn't square with all the geographical information we have about the original Ithaca.

"The suggestion we advocate, and are now testing with the geology, is a radically new one; involving as it does splitting the island of Kefalonia into two," he told BBC News.

Catastrophic collapse

The Paliki solution was first proposed in Robert Bittlestone's 2005 book, Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer's Ithaca. Paliki is certainly flatter than Ithaki, and the most westerly point in the Ionian arc.

But to prove its hypothesis, the team will have to show - at the very least - that the sea once flowed through a tight channel that is now the Thinia isthmus joining Paliki to the main part of Kefalonia.


Homer and his poems have been placed in the 8th Century BC
On the face of it, this a tall order - literally: the highest point on the isthmus is some 180m above sea level.

To suggest the Mycenaean landscape could have changed so radically in so short a time seems extraordinary, especially since modern seismic surveys in the area indicate the amount of uplift experienced by Kefalonia over the past 3,000-5,000 years is perhaps 6m at most.

The team's argument is that the channel has been covered by a colossal infall of rock from the surrounding hills, particularly those on the eastern side of the Thinia valley.

"The bedding planes all dip very steeply towards the valley, and they are natural planes along which landslip and rockfall can occur - and do, periodically," explained Professor Underhill.

"This happens in winter, never mind in the frequent earthquakes they experience there. There are very interesting Pathe news pictures taken after the devastating earthquake of 1953 which demonstrate that whole hillside degraded significantly; huge volumes of rock came off the slopes."

Trojan echoes

This week's investigations involve sinking a 100m-plus borehole at the southern end of the valley. If the Paliki solution stands up, it should find a loose aggregation of rock and debris through the core's entire length.

"If we hit hard rock, the theory will not fly," said Professor Underhill.


Archaeological investigations have put Troy in Turkey
But assuming the borehole is successful, then the team will apply for funding to carry out a more extensive programme of drilling. Ground-penetrating radar, gravity and seismic surveys have already been conducted; carbon-14 and other dating techniques would need to be brought in to prove the infall occurred in the right timescale.

The team is encouraged by the writings of the 1st-Century-BC Greek geographer Strabo, who mentions the existence of a channel many years after Homer is presumed to have lived in the Ionian region.

And, of course, this is by no means the first time that science has sought to match current features on the landscape with Homeric descriptions.

The city of Troy featured in the Iliad is now widely recognised to have been in north-western Turkey. A study of river sediments in the region would even seem to fit with aspects of the military campaign that Homer's story says eventually led to the destruction of the city.

If the existence of a Bronze Age channel on Kefalonia is proven, it is quite likely to set off anew heated arguments about specifics and meaning in the Odyssey.


And some will continue to contest Ithaca's location. Sarantis Symeonoglou is professor of art history and archaeology at Washington University in St Louis, US. He has spent years trying to tie locations on Ithaki to details in the poem.

"I have been digging [there] longer than anyone, since 1984. I already have solid evidence that the site of the city of Odysseus is where Homer says, on the saddle of Aetos, at modern (and ancient) Ithaca. The palace is in a terrible ruined condition, but identifiable! I found a corner of it," he told BBC News in an e-mail.

John Bennet, a professor of Aegean archaeology at Sheffield University, UK, commented that any new discovery of a channel should be viewed in a wider context.

"For the archaeological world, what is very interesting is the possibility that there has been major geographical, geomorphological change on the island of Kefalonia, which means the way people have lived on the island has changed significantly from the Bronze Age into the broadly Classical period.

"As a result of that there will be a new phase of general archaeological data that will benefit all of us."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am Odysseus, Laertes' son, world-famed
For stratagems: my name has reached the heavens.
Bright Ithaca is my home: it has a mountain,
Leaf-quivering Neriton, far visible.
Around are many islands, close to each other,
Doulichion and Same and wooded Zacynthos.
Ithaca itself lies low, furthest to sea
Towards dusk; the rest, apart, face dawn and sun.
Odyssey 9, 19-26 (trans. James Diggle)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6034367.stm
 
Last edited by a moderator:
This Smithsonian article:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/odysseys-end-the-search-for-ancient-ithaca-112739669/

... represents a 2008 updating of an April 2006 account. Among other added details, it provides this update on the drilling project:

Recent follow-up research, announced last year by Bittlestone, Diggle and Underhill, dramatically bolsters the case they are making. Among other findings, teams of international scientists have shown that a 400-foot borehole drilled on the isthmus met no solid limestone—only loose rockfall. A Greek Geological Institute survey pinpointed a submerged marine valley, consistent with a onetime sea channel between modern Paliki and Cephalonia. The new findings, says Underhill, represent “very encouraging confirmation of our geological diagnosis.”
 
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