Where was Troy?

Wilkens’ Case for England

Achilles storms ashore with his small band of warriors. He looks, yes, remarkably like Brad Pitt. A vast fleet of virtual Greek vessels is coming up behind him. The sands of an immense stretch of beach spread endlessly. A large walled city lies beyond in a desert-like plain. We know we are somewhere, at least in imagination, in the vicinity of the eastern Mediterranean, near the site of Schliemann’s great discovery, the great city of Troy.

But was Troy anywhere near this region? There are enormous difficulties, difficulties which still cause scholars to question the very existence of Troy, the reality of Homer’s war, the historical accuracy if not reality of the Illiad. Schliemann’s tiny ruins of a city on the coast of Turkey cannot possibly fill the bill for the city described in Homer. At best it could have held 2000 people. Yet Priam’s palace alone is described as having sixty rooms, not to mention the size of the city required to harbor the Trojan fighting force of 50,000 described by Homer. There is no bay near “Troy” with close to the space needed for a fleet of 1200 ships. Its tiny plain, from shore to city, would have spanned less than 2 km in distance, utterly insufficient for the huge encampment required for an Achaean army of 65,000, or for the great battles between the two armies that took place in front of the city, or for the eleven coastal towns situated upon it which were sacked by Pitt/Achilles. There is no evidence of the fourteen rivers mentioned by Homer. There are none of his numerous springs. There are no snows; there are no fogs. But there is no other city in the Mediterranean region that fits at all. If Schliemann’s Troy is Troy, Homer is vast hyperbole at best. If you are National Geographic, it is of course, the latter.

In a typical case of inexcusable academic neglect, Iman Wilkens’ great thesis (Where Troy Once Stood) has been ignored. Troy stood in England, he argued, near modern Cambridge. The great battle, which lasted 10 years and involved over its course perhaps 1 million combatants, took place circa 1200 BC. It was a great economic war, fought over the control of tin, the essential ingredient together with copper for making bronze, the critical metal of the age. Helen, as Priam well understood, was only the pretext. It was a war seared in memory. The hills of Gog and Magog, yet near Cambridge, are yet evoked in Revelations to conjure the image of the ultimate battle. But the record, carried orally in Homer’s great poem, initially in a Celtic language, ultimately ends up in Greece and is transcribed in Greek in the poem’s original dactylic hexameter, a meter in fact poorly suited to Greek. It is known that ultimately Celts settled in Western Greece. To Thucydides’ own skeptical amazement, for he could not see how the minuscule, subsistence-based, early Greek culture could have produced the armies and prodigious logistical effort described in the epic, the Greeks are eventually identified with Troy’s besiegers, the Achaeans.

How did this identity theft happen? I give this surmise before moving to Wilkens’ argument. It is 1200 BC. Homer describes great portents in the heavens. As Velikovsky would note, great battles are depicted between Venus and Mars, battles which may have been far more than myth. At precisely this time, the great copper mining operation along the southern shore of Lake Superior is suddenly abandoned. Over half a billion tons of copper had been steadily removed by a maritime people of considerable sophistication who based their remote operations in southern Wisconsin, a people with an obvious stake in the bronze trade. Something drives them to leave. Simultaneously, great cultures everywhere are about to collapse. There is evidence of sudden climate change. The Hittite culture, at the height of its powers, mysteriously collapses. The Mycenaean culture, at its height, is suddenly destroyed. Great cities are charred ruins. The distinctly non-Asiatic, warlike, horned-helmeted, apparently homeless and desperate “Sea Peoples,” described as “living on their boats,” appear in force in the Mediterranean. They are on their way to their ultimate defeat and annihilation while invading Egypt – one of the few, but only partially surviving cultures – by Ramesses III circa 1175 B.C. Some great catastrophe occurred, some event which dispersed peoples everywhere and caused great migrations, leaving Troy and its great war a vague but real memory.

Location, Location, Location

Wilkens’ arguments are numerous. I cannot and will not do justice to them all. I wish to describe a small, illustrative piece of his discussions. Let us begin with location. Between the modern city of Cambridge and the Wash – a large bay in the North Sea - there lays the East Anglian plain. The Wash itself has the capacity to hold 1200 hundred ships, and it provides shelters against storms from the west. It would have been exposed to storms from the north, as Homer indeed recounts. Even given its 25 km shoreline, the Achaeans would have needed to draw the ships up on shore in rows, exactly as Homer recounts. The present shoreline has now moved 25-30 km northwards towards the sea. The land has been reclaimed with the help of dykes, but large portions lay as much as three feet beneath sea level. On the plain, between the ancient shoreline area and Cambridge, just to the city’s northeast, are the remains of two enormous earth ramparts, built in parallel 10 km apart, one twelve kilometers long, the other fifteen. There are anti-chariot ditches (mentioned by Homer) in front of these dykes, facing inland, towards the city, as befits the fact that they were built by an invasion force as protection to their encampment. In the Illiad, while Achilles sulks, the Achaeans are indeed driven back to these defensive fortifications. It would have required a massive labor force to move the earth to build these – they are 20 m high and 30 m wide. The standard estimate of 65,000 to 100,000 men in the Achaean force is derived from the average number of men, as related by Homer, each ship could carry.

The Illiad, a true seafarer’s work, is filled with references to the ocean and the tides. The sea is described as grey, black, turbulent, misty, immense. The difference between the high and low tide, insignificant in the Mediterranean, is significant in Homer. Ditches were dug, he recounts, to bring the boats on shore, then float the boats out again at high tide. This is not the Mediterranean, but it is a description befitting the Atlantic – its demeanor and its tides.

There are fourteen rivers mentioned by Homer in the region around Troy. City names, Wilkens notes, are changed routinely by conquerors, rivers are not; their names endure. Homer’s rivers yet exist around the Cambridge region. Wilkens’ insight into the correspondence of ancient Homeric name to modern name is stunning. The pairs (Homeric/modern) are: Aesupus/Ise, Rhesus/Rhee, Rhodius/Roding, Granicus/Granca, Scamander/Cam, Simois/Great Ouse, Satniois/Little Ouse, Larisa/Lark, Cayster/Yare (Caistor castle is at its mouth), Thymbre/Thet, Heptaporus/Tove, Callicolone/Colne, Cilla/Chillesford, Temese/Thames. Half of these rivers have kept their names virtually unchanged in 3000 years. A total of four rivers were found in the “Troy” region of Turkey. They were simply dubbed with Homeric names, regardless of the Illiad’s descriptions.

If we have the plain with its rivers, the bay with its shore, the defensive dykes, can we locate “steep Troy?” Multiple hills border Cambridge, but a line taken perpendicular to the centers of the two dykes and directed south intersects the highest hill in the Cambridge area, a few kilometers from the city. Known now as the Wandlebury Ring, it is part of a plateau called the Gog Magog hills. Roughly 71-117 meters in height, it dominates the plain. Other hills can also be located. The small hill in front of Troy on which the Trojan army gathered (before the ramparts were built), exists some kilometers to the north where Bottisham village now stands. The Homeric name was Batieia. No rivers cross the plain of battle, as evident from Homer, and just as evident, the battlefield was bordered by the Scamander to the west, as it is by the Cam today.

The numerous other important clues that Homer left are all there. As he described, there are oysters, eels, vineyards, springs, thick fogs, snows, poplars and willows. The eels in the river Cam are so numerous, Wilkens notes, the inhabitants of the town of Ely think the name is derived from them. In reality, it is derived from Ilos, the ancestor of Priam, whose burrow, according to Homer, was exactly this area.

The Great Name Transfer

But Homer speaks of the Hellespont, Crete, Egypt, Thrace, Ithaca, Argos and Mycenae, Pylos and Sparta, and more. How could Troy possibly be in England? Let us go straight to the unifying key: The Trojan war was in essence a war of France and its allies against England and its allies – nearly all Celts. The Achaeans, the formidable enemies of the Trojans, consisted of an alliance led by what is now modern day France (Argos), and which included Scandanavia (Crete), Denmark (Aulis), the Netherlands (Phrygia), parts of Germany (Pylos) and Spain (Ithaca). Homer left numerous clues to the identities of these nations, and Wilkens demonstrates how easy it is mine them.

To Homer’s contemporaries, these were not clues; they were the then-current names. There are, in the Illiad, lists of the twenty-nine Achaean regiments and the cities from which they came, as well as descriptions of the region and mentions of its rivers in other parts of the Illiad. Argos, for example, covered Northern France. Towns and rivers mentioned yet exist such as Orniea (Orne), Messels (Messei), Auros (Aure), Tarphe (Thar). None of these names exist in Greece. Mycenae, the capital of Argos and seat of Agamemnon’s rule, itself cannot be found. It is likely to have been a contraction of a name meaning Mysteries-on-Seine, a place of Gnostic initiation. Most probably, its name was changed to commemorate Agamemnon’s victory. It is now Troyes. Agamemnon’s kingdom included Egypt (Seine-Maritime) after his victory over Thebes (Dieppe), sandy Pylos (the Rhineland Palatinate area of Germany), and Phrygia (northern France and western Belgium). It also included many islands (he was “lord of many isles and all of Argos”). Though difficult to find today, 3000 years ago, the sea level was higher. Indeed there would have been many islands in northern and even western France. The seven towns Agamemnon offered to Achilles in the Rhineland yet exist: Cardamyle/Karden, Enope/Ennepetal, Hire/Irrel, Pherae/Vervier, Antheia/Anthèe, Aipeia/Eupen, Pedasus/Pedenberg. Achilles was unimpressed, and turned the offer down: they are all on the left bank of the Rhine, exposed to invading tribes from the east.

Homer’s Crete is a land “in the midst of the wine dark sea.” It is “begirt with water” and is five days sail north of Egypt with a good wind. But the Mediterranean is not the wine-dark sea, and the five days sail (approx. 1200 km) is twice as far as the distance between Crete and modern Egypt. But historians, not for lack of trying, have given up in dismay at ever making Homer’s numbers and directions work in the supposed region he intends. But Homer’s Crete has yet another anomaly, for he says, “I left behind the snowy mountains of Crete,” complaining of wearing “cloaks and bright coverlets.” In a word it was cold. This was Scandanavia. The rivers again tell the tale. Homer’s Iardanus is now the Hardanger (Iardan becoming Hardan), the largest fjord in Norway. Nearby, his (also nearby) Celadon is now the Sildefjord (Celadon likely becoming Silde). For Crete, the Illiad’s list of regiments mentions the river Nisa, now the Nissan of Sweden, and the Arne, now the Arna of Jutland, and the Schoenus, now likely the Skjern of Jutland. No such rivers are found in today’s Crete. Of this land, Homer noted, “their tongues are mixed,” and so it is today.

This is but a fragment of a sample of Wilkens’ analysis along these lines. Taken across all the lands Homer discusses, it is overwhelming. The evidence is there for all but apparently academia to see. As the great migrations of the Achaean peoples took place, and settlements were begun in the southern climes, the Homeric names were eventually transferred. Egypt, for example, was dubbed so only by Alexander the Great after his conquest in 332 BC. At the time of Homer, it was Misr, Al-Khem or Kemi, or Meroë, the latter meaning, it is believed, “those blackened by the sun,” an epithet especially apt for Ethiopia – also a Homeric name. The Thebes of the area of Agamemnon’s France known as Egypt became the Thebes of modern Egypt. Homeric Thebes is now Dieppe. The Greeks, like all conquerors, gave familiar names and places to their colonies.

Epilogue

Wilkens, I noted, felt that the war was fought for the control of tin, a commodity produced and controlled by England/Troy. It is interesting to consider the other piece of the bronze equation. Frank Joseph (Atlantis in Wisconsin) has described the massive copper mining operations that were carried on along the southern shore of lake Superior. It was the hidden source that fueled the Bronze Age. In 1840, he notes, ten wagonloads of stone hammers and tools were carted away from these open pit mines from a single location near Rockland, Michigan. The Indians called these people the “Marine Men.” In the age over 3000 years ago, with the ice age just ending, one could navigate easily from the ocean and the St. Lawrence to the great lakes. In many respects, this operation carries the aura of being a “trade secret” – a secret location of one of the all-important metals of the age. Which side, the Trojans or the Achaeans, was running the operation? It was certainly not beyond the ability of either. The navigation certainly was not, as Wilkens shows in unfolding the hidden code of the Odyssey. Or was it another group entirely? Were the Sea Peoples necessarily either the Achaeans or the Trojans? What caused the great migrations?

Today, the Wandlebury ring near Cambridge is a public park. Some digging was done earlier, in 1904. The results were considered hard to date – “exceptional.” There were clearly fortifications in the area. Some sections have been cemented over. Farmers, pipe-layers and construction workers in the region continue to unearth evidence of dead warriors, weapons and slain people, though there is no record of a great battle ever having been fought there. And the hills of Gog Magog stand silently before a large plain, upon which stand two immense war dykes, and look northwards towards the wine-dark sea. What lies beneath is as yet buried as Wilkens’ brilliant masterpiece.