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The Trojan Horse: Real Or Myth?

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Anonymous

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I can't speak for others...

Trojan war... almost certainly happened, and almost certainly didn't involved the Greek God's and probably not the horse. Nature of myth. The Persian Expedition as outlined by Xenophon also probably happened, but that was more likely to have happened in the way described, since, from modern experience the world mostly works that way. Notice use of probable and mostly there? ...

As to myths... well, they can be instructive. Never date a married lady called 'Helen' and never take the big horse inside the walls :D
 
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I don't know a great deal about the Trojan war. I read the Aeneid as a Latin student, and I've read a few articles proporting to have located Troy in Turkey.

I don't have any reason to question the latter, but if it was important to me to know the historical evidence for the Trojan war, I'd make an effort to find out more.

I will say that the fact the Aeneid is universally acknowledged to be a mythologised account of a historical event known of by oral traditions of passing thing down, and not the hub of some movement that makes extraordinary claims about divinity and revelation gives it a huge advantage to my mind in terms of which is likely to have a greater basis in fact.

No-one is trying to use the notion of the historicity of the Trojan war to shore up any kind of powerful movement. No-one has a reason to lie about it.
 
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A Horse or a Boat? Hip new theory.

Italian Archaeologist Claims That the Trojan Horse Was Really the Trojan Boat
11/15/2017

Thousands of years after Homer first made reference to the Trojan horse in a short passage of The Odyssey, an Italian archaeologist now claims that the mythical wooden creation was actually a boat, according to reports appearing this month in Italian media. Francesco Tiboni, a naval archaeologist at the University of Marseille, published an article in Archaeologia Viva claiming that the story of the Trojan Horse was nothing more than a mistranslation of one key word in Homer.

The horse, best known from a late version in the Aeneid of Virgil, is first recorded in Homer’s Odyssey, where it is alluded to in two places:What endurance too, and what courage he displayed within the wooden horse, wherein all the bravest of the Argives were lying in wait to bring death and destruction upon the Trojans. (4.271f.)

“…Now, however, change your song and tell us of the wooden horse which Epeus made with the assistance of Athena, and which Odysseus got by stratagem into the fort of Troy after freighting it with the men who afterwards sacked the city. If you will sing this tale aright I will tell all the world how magnificently heaven has endowed you.” ...

According to Tiboni, the horse was not hippos, the Greek word for “horse,” but hippos, a Phoenician term for a type of warship with a curving prow. This is based ultimately on a retrofitted legend recorded by Pliny the Elder, who in Natural History 7.57 wrote that “Hippus, the Tyrian, was the first who invented merchant-ships.” Hippus was, likely, the back-formed eponym of a type of boat called in Greek (but not necessarily Phoenician) the hippos, the first true plank-built cargo ship, and one long associated with Phoenicia. In academic literature, a curved Phoenician trading vessel is usually called a “hippos ship,” but it is not, to my knowledge, a Phoenician term. It’s a Greek one, because the ship’s curving prow resembled the curves of a horse’s head. ...

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/i...t-the-trojan-horse-was-really-the-trojan-boat
 
Have they found the Trojan Horse?

Turkish archaeologists claim they have found what they believe are pieces of the Trojan Horse.

According to a report by newsit.gr, Turkish archaeologists excavating the site of the historical city of Troy on the hills of Hisarlik have unearthed a large wooden structure. Historians and archaeologists think what they have discovered are remains of the legendary Trojan Horse.

The excavations brought to light dozens of fir planks and beams up to 15 meters (49 feet) long. The remnants were assembled in a strange form, that led the experts to suspect they belong to the Trojan Horse. The wooden structure was inside the walls of the ancient city of Troy.

The Trojan Horse is considered by most to have been a mythical structure. The horse is commonly associated with Homer’s epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey.

https://greekreporter.com/2021/08/1...m-they-have-found-the-trojan-horse-in-turkey/
 

Did archaeologists find the Trojan Horse?


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Depiction of the story of the Trojan horse in the art of Gandhara. British Museum.
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)


Turkish archaeologists excavating the site of the city of Troy on the hills of Hisarlik have discovered a large wooden structure that they believe are the remains of the Trojan Horse. These excavations include dozens of fir planks and beams up to 15 meters (49 feet) long, assembled in a strange form.

The wooden structure was found inside the walls of the ancient city of Troy.

Boston University professors Christine Morris and Chris Wilson believe that "the carbon dating tests and other analyses have all suggested that the wooden pieces and other artifacts date from the 12th or 11th centuries BC."

Morris and Wilson believe with a "high level of confidence" that the structure is linked to the iconic horse. “This matches the dates cited for the Trojan War, by many ancient historians like Eratosthenes or Proclus. The assembly of the work also matches the description made by many sources. I don’t want to sound overconfident, but I’m pretty certain that we found the real thing!”

https://www.jpost.com/international/did-archaeologists-just-find-the-trojan-horse-676349

maximus otter
 
It's a hoax! From Jason Colavito's email newsletter:

This week, members of the media fell for an old hoax. Back in 2014, the satire site World New Daily Report published a piece pretending that the wooden remains of the Trojan Horse had been found. The story was fictitious, cobbled together from Wikipedia and a little imagination, but riddled with basic errors about Classics. (For example, Mycenaean Greeks did not write in the standard Greek alphabet.) Seven years later, The Greek Reporter picked up the story from a Greek-language website. From there, the Jerusalem Post and International Business Times, both of which have large sections devoted to lightly rewritten clickbait, repeated the story nearly verbatim without checking the facts. Even after the fake story was pulled from various sites, even less scrupulous sites like Illinois News were still repeating the story as of this writing. An archaeologist who shares a name with the fictitious researcher cited in the original 2014 article put out a statement explaining that the story is false* after becoming overwhelmed with requests from media organizations trying to confirm the story with her.

*And from the archaeologist:

Update: Dr. Christine Morris Confirms She Has Not Found the Trojan Horse​


https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2...-confirms-she-has-not-found-the-trojan-horse/
 
It's a hoax! From Jason Colavito's email newsletter:

This week, members of the media fell for an old hoax. Back in 2014, the satire site World New Daily Report published a piece pretending that the wooden remains of the Trojan Horse had been found. The story was fictitious, cobbled together from Wikipedia and a little imagination, but riddled with basic errors about Classics. (For example, Mycenaean Greeks did not write in the standard Greek alphabet.) Seven years later, The Greek Reporter picked up the story from a Greek-language website. From there, the Jerusalem Post and International Business Times, both of which have large sections devoted to lightly rewritten clickbait, repeated the story nearly verbatim without checking the facts. Even after the fake story was pulled from various sites, even less scrupulous sites like Illinois News were still repeating the story as of this writing. An archaeologist who shares a name with the fictitious researcher cited in the original 2014 article put out a statement explaining that the story is false* after becoming overwhelmed with requests from media organizations trying to confirm the story with her.

*And from the archaeologist:

Update: Dr. Christine Morris Confirms She Has Not Found the Trojan Horse​


https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2...-confirms-she-has-not-found-the-trojan-horse/
The irish idol that turned out to be disappointingly nothing like Cthulhu is back in the running as the most exciting archeological announcement of the month.
 
I have read (in translation) the Iliad (Homer's account of the Trojan war), the Odyssey (Homer's account of Odysseus' long journey home and eventually reclaiming of his wife and kingdom), and the much later Aeineid (Virgil's account of Aeneas' journey from Troy and how he became the ancestor of the Romans).

The Iliad ends before the fall of Troy, and there is no mention of the horse. It was written something like 400 years after the events, if the events happened at all.

The Odyssey makes only brief mention of the horse, describing the events in the past tense.

The Aeneid — written around 700 years after the Iliad and the Odyssey, so over 1,000 years after the event, by a Roman with an obvious agenda — says more about the wooden horse, but only in about 18 lines of verse out of a total of nearly 10,000 lines.

So we only have limited evidence to go on, and the interval between the events and the writing is comparable to:
The Iliad: a modern poet writing from his imagination about events from the 1720s, or
The Aeneid: a modern poet writing from his imagination about the battle of Hastings.

We cannot expect either factual accuracy, or a dispassionate view from either poet. Homer was glorifying the heroic age of Greece for his own countrymen, and Virgil was trying to borrow some of the glory of the heroic age of Greece to build a myth about Rome and give the city a justification for its destiny to rule the world.

That aside, I have never been in any doubt that the poets were referring to a horse, in the sense of a large wooden statue of an equine creature.

To modern minds, the concept of a huge wooden statue left as an offering sounds far fetched and bizarre. (No doubt to the Achaeans, the Angel of the North would seem strange.) However, the Iliad is full of direct intervention of the gods in the affairs or mankind. Ares himself literally appears on the battlefield. Individual heroes fight with superhuman might. Things are big, impressive, over the top.

To a modern reader, the nearest equivalent might be graphic novel in the style of Marvel, but to the Greeks of the time, the gods and heroes were real.

Trying to find a clever reductionist explanation for the horse (it must have been a big boat, or a siege engine, or just a metaphor) is completely missing the point. It is like trying to analyse a spider man comic by making comparisons to the achievements of Olympic climbers, and genetic engineering of wheat.

Myths are mythical: damn' good stories in which the truth is not flaunted in the form of factual accuracy, but is woven deep into the story. It can be teased out, not as facts, but as "eternal truths": men are jealous and foolish; war is pointless; men can die heroically; men can love; men can feel despair; and so on.

As a story written nearly 3,000 years ago, the Iliad is a fine description of what we now call clinical depression (in the case of Achilles), and there is an incredibly touching scene with Hector and his wife and young child before he goes out to fight. The battle scenes were clearly written by someone with actual experience of fighting with spears.

I recommend the story to anyone with the time and determination to read it — it can be hard going at times —but trying to get to the "historical truth" is missing the point completely.
 
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