This Hardcover Book item from Oxford University Press, USA was reviewed on 13-Sep-2008.
Search ISBN:0199263086 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery Reference Book. Classifications : Greece Ancient History Subjects Books General Europe History Subjects Books Literary Theory History & Criticism United States World Literature Literature & Fiction Subjects Books General Classics Lite . Click the following link to view the cover of Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery. Related topics: Greece. Ancient. History. Subjects. Books. General. Europe. History. Subjects. Books. requestid: b0fd658c-3e6b-4ed0-8e72-aa6a889e2803
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1) Hardcover Book Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery by Oxford University Press, USA. My husband is a great fan of Homer and of Troy. This book is a wonderful combination of both. Factual yet written interestingly and with ferver.
If I can ever get my husband to put it down, for a moment, I might get to read it, too.¤ 2) Hardcover Book Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery by Oxford University Press, USA.
The fascinating feature of the archeology essentially resides in the continuous mobility of its nature; where every single day you may find out an evidence that destroys a whole life of sacred investigation. Because the basic corpus of its study is fed for many variables and several disciplines, where the random sequence of the intermingled factors can generate a fruitful and new hypothesis of work. History, geography, psychology, sense of ownership, military defense, religious beliefs, social conventions and mental paradigms constitute a huge parade of unlimited possibilities. And you as fevered and ceaseless analyst has to disentangle, take off and ensphere the countless clues, traces and findings along the uncertain road of riddles and enigmas.
For many persons around the world (as I do) Troy has been a matter of undeniable passion, that has transcended by far, the febrile imagination of Homer. Schliemann and more recently, Michael Wood, as well as a ser of thinkers have dealt with this captivating and enigmatic fact.
This book brings new lights around this first-rate issue. New investigations that will induce you to rethink and even reconsider all the basic premises. Once you begin to read it, you will be engaged by its extraordinary informative value around, where the finding of new signs place us before an absolutely different perspective.
Absolutely recomendable.
¤ 3) Hardcover Book Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery by Oxford University Press, USA. The whole of my reaction to this book is divided into three parts.
First, this book is a convenient source of information on the preliminary results of the excavations carried out at Hisarlik in Turkey under the leadership of Manfred Korfmann since 1988, as well as news about a 2003 re-interpretation of a letter from the Hittite archives known since 1928.
The truly new information in the book is that the football stadium-sized citadel at Hisarlik, which has been regarded as Troy since Schliemann´s day and was almost certainly regarded as that in classical times, turns out to be exactly that: a citadel. It was the keep of a much larger walled city, serving much the same function to Troy (or whatever) that the old acropolis did for Athens before it was burnt in the Persian invasion. The full extent of Troy (or ...), its residential areas protected by a wall much less formidable than those of the citadel, as well as by anti-chariot ditches, is much greater than formerly believed and the town may have housed a population as great as 10,000. In the context of its time and place, this Troy (or ...) was a major population center. As such, rather than being merely the fortress of a relatively small-scale nest of pirates, it serves much more comfortably as the focal point of a vast sea-borne invasion.
The re-interpreted document appears in this English translation but not in Latacz´s German original edition, since it was published in 2003, after the German text was in print. The document in question is now said to be a letter from the king of Ahhijawa (or Achijawa) to the Great King of the Hittites that asserts his claims to some islands in the northern Aegean, most likely Lemnos, Imbros and/or Samothrace. Now these kings of Ahhijawa were almighty nuisances to the Hittites, who ranked with the Assyrians and Egyptians among the Great Powers of the time. Ahhijawa was powerful enough to command a certain diplomatic respect and distant enough to avoid being crushed by the land-based forces of the Hittite military machine. Ahhijawa was almost certainly a naval power.
The name most commonly used by Homer for his Greeks is Latinized as "Achaean," from the Greek "Achaioi." Linguistics pretty conclusively demonstrate that the pre-Homeric form of this name was Achaiwoi. Ever since the name Ahhijawa turned up in the Hittite archives, some scholars have heatedly asserted that it is obviously the name applied by civilized Hittite scribes to the land of the barbarian Achaeans, while other scholars have just as fiercely denied it.
One of the Ahhijawan kings corresponded with Hattusili(s) II, the Hittite Great King whose reign centered around 1250 BC. The Ahhijawan´s name was Tawagalawa(s). And that name has been identified as a Hittite version of the Greek name Eteokles, in its earlier form of Etewokles (while other scholars have ... etc.) Eteokles, of course, is remembered in Greek myth and legend as a prominent member of the Theban royal family and a descendant of the founder of Thebes, Kadmos.
This letter from Ahhijawa regarding the ownership of the islands appears not only to be from our old friend Tawagalawa, but in it he bases his claim on the domain of a distant ancestor who happened to be named Kadmos [page 244]. Most annoyingly, Latacz´s translators fail to provide the Hittite version of the name identified with Kadmos, so we are obliged to take the identification on faith. Nevertheless, if the Kadmos-Eteokles genealogy is actually there in the Hittite archives, it is an impressive boost to the historicity of Greek legends.
The second thing about this book is attitude. It´s full of it. Despite Latacz´s academic credentials and the prestige of the publisher, the tone of the book is resolutely not scholarly but popularizing ... well, as popular as the subject matter will allow. Inordinate pride is taken in favorable comments appearing in German popular journals whose very existence is a matter of indifference to members of the English-speaking world. Prior excavators at Hisarlik all did well enough, considering their and limited technical resources, but now for the first time truly competent people are on the scene and they are finally making worthwhile discoveries. Earlier investigators of Homer and history have been trapped in the ghetto of the classicists (with a couple of exceptions almost grudgingly acknowledged), but the current crop are properly oriented toward middle eastern excavation and history. The vast majority of the text is devoted to rehashing material firmly established since the 1950s. Indeed, a good part of the text would have been old hat in the 1880s. But readers not familiar with the development of this little corner of scholarship would hardly be able to differentiate between the wholesale rehashing of old learning and the light seasoning of new material.
The third part of my reaction to the book relates to the translation. The translation has a strong and pervasive German accent. This is particularly odd because the translators, Windle and Ireland, are both associated with the School of Language Studies at the Australian National University. What were those cobbers thinking? I´m not at all chuffed about the result.
Using a much simplified version of a method used by philological scholars of the 19th Century, the ones who get such short shrift in this book, I am willing to hazard a guess that Windle and Ireland didn´t work jointly on the whole text, but rather worked independently on individual chapters or, less likely, on individual sections. The test is pronunciation. One translator followed the conventions of the English language and referred to an ancient people and their language as "Luvian" (pronounced just the way it looks.) The other translator, the one who more often referred to those ancient people, followed German convention and called them "Luwian" (pronounced "Luvian.") The w-man is the one who prepared the index.
All very minor, idiosyncratic stuff, you might think until you come on passages devoted to historic sound changes in the Greek language and only belatedly realize that they are literal translations from the German (and of German sounds) without acknowledgment of or adjustment for English-based readers. One passage actually says something on the order of the sound represented by the archaic Greek letter digamma was originally pronounced like W, evolved into something like the English W and then disappeared in most Greek dialects before Homer´s time. I think what the w-translator really meant was that digamma was originally pronounced V, became W and then disappeared. Things start getting hairy when dealing with the name Homer often uses for his besieged city: Ilios, as in the proposed equation of Ilios = pre-Homeric Wilios = Hittite Wilusa(?).
Attitude and annoying translation quirks aside, this book is still a handy summary of current scholarship and dispute. It helps, though, if you have a fairly good idea of what they´re talking about before you plough through the actual words of the translators.¤ 4) Hardcover Book Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery by Oxford University Press, USA. Latacz´s intent is to update scholarship for those with an interest in Troy (particularly researchers in interdisciplinary areas related to such study) and to do so by means of tightly structured argument. In this he succeeds. One might find his conclusions tentative and contingent on further corroboration, but, nevertheless, he indicates the direction of future inquiry. Yes, he uses periodic sentences, but he´s entitled to his style, like Homer. Yes, the effect of his prose and framework make for dry reading, but they inform, even if they don´t entertain. Worth reading, particularly for someone who will read one book about antiquity in a decade or who has little time to keep up with someone else´s speciality. Still, scholarly inquiry pales when compared to the brilliance of the text it seeks to illuminate. Poetry exists to be enjoyed; scholarship to be understood. Their domains, cognitive and affective, are distinct and evaluated by different rules. "The Odyssey" is great art; "Troy and Homer" is but a good summary of rapidly changing scholarship. Some questions aren´t examined, the economic cause of the Trojan War, for example. And the book itself is historic source material about Classical studies--proof that, a century after alienating its creative element, philological study, as practiced by the Grammarians, still asserts hegemony. Finally, reading between the lines, one sees the vanity of scholars competing for recognition, legitimacy, and honors on a subject that, however interesting, is marginal. All knowledge is not equally worthwhile, and irony is best served dry.¤ 5) Hardcover Book Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery by Oxford University Press, USA. but this is barely readable.
The translators have struggled earnestly, but what can you really do with a sentence like this, from the preface? "The idea of writing a book about the new research at Troy, which had developed in so many directions, arose from a combination of external impulses and a personal feeling that, given the fundamental turnabout in the research situation in Bronze Age history, which is to a large extent due to the new Troy research, a provisional appraisal of the facts and theories now to hand was needed and would probably be of value for further work in the various disciplines involved."
It´s impossible to read the Iliad without feeling its historicity, that it was based on accounts of an important conflict and strong characters. But Homer is foremost a poet, a geographer of the soul, not of the soil. Professor Latacz can at most show that the physical, linguistic and written evidence available do not contradict Homer in his essential narrative. His attempt to elevate Homer to historical evidence is in the best heroic tradition, courage in the face of certain failure.¤ 6) Hardcover Book Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery by Oxford University Press, USA. In this book Joachim Latacz turns the spotlight of modern research on the much-debated question of whether the wealthy city of Troy described by Homer in the Iliad was a poetic fiction or a memory of historical reality.
Earlier excavations at the hill of Hisarlik, in Turkey, on the Dardanelles, brought no answer, but in 1988 a new archaeological enterprise, under the direction of Manfred Korfmann, led to a radical shift in understanding. Latacz, one of Korfmann´s closest collaborators, traces the course of these excavations, and the renewed investigation of the imperial Hittite archives they have inspired. As he demonstrates, it is now clear that the background against which the plot of the Iliad is acted out is the historical reality of the thirteenth century BC. The Troy story as a whole must have arisen in this period, and we can detect traces of it in Homer´s great poem.¤ Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 11-Oct-2008, 01992630869780199263080, 590-860-270-590-900-280-290-341-8 
Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery, Book, Image © Oxford University Press, USA
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