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Where Troy Once Stood: The Mystery of Homer's Iliad & Odyssey Revealed, by Iman Wilkens
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From the front flap of this 365 page book: "Like generations of scholars, Iman Wilkens has been intrigued by the origins of Homer's great epic poems about the Trojan War and the adventures of Odysseus - and now believes he has finally tracked down their source. Arguing, convincingly, that the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' do not fit the topography, geology, climate, and oceanic tidal patterns of the eastern Mediterranean, Wilkens relocates the Homeric scene in western Europe and the northern Atlantic, revealing the precise of Troy itself and the plain on which the Trojan War was fought. By examining the texts in detail, Wilkens has identified over 400 place-names in western Europe and concludes that the original oral version was composed by Homer several hundred years before it was written down. He reveals that the Trojan War was fought on a far larger scale than previously thought, by Celts from regions as far apart as Scandinavia and Spain, and that the 'Odyssey' provided an oral map for illiterate Celtic seafarers. [This book] is an extraordinary and enlightening journey into prehistory that is as exciting as the voyages of Odysseus. Thanks to Wilkens' patient detective work, many of the most puzzling aspects of Homer's epic poems now fall into place, enabling the reader to understand fully the meaning and significance of Europe's oldest literary masterpieces."
- Sales Rank: #514502 in Books
- Published on: 1991-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.40" h x 6.40" w x 1.20" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 365 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Wilkens, identified only as a scholar living in Paris, claims that Homer's Iliad and Odyssey do not describe Greek civilization at all. According to his fanciful reading of these texts and of history, the Trojan War was fought between Bronze Age Celts; Troy was in East Anglia, England, not in Asia Minor; and Odysseus plied the Atlantic, with stops in Senegal (Land of the Lotus-Eaters) and Havana, Cuba. Homer, it is claimed here, was a poet from Holland who lived in Spain and France. Maps, photos, tables and comparisons of place names, tides, vegetation, etc., support a flimsy argument. Although at least some elements of his thesis have been advanced as early as 1790, Wilkens plays fast and loose with the evidence.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating Revisionist View of the Trojan War and the Odyssey
By Jersey Kid
I first came cross a reference to this book in Clive Cussler's `Trojan Odyssey.' At first, I presumed it to be a faux work created by Mr. Cussler, but after a brief search online, I was surprised to find the book does, in fact, exist.
It is Mr. Wilken's contention that neither the Trojan War nor the Odyssey is Greek in origin. Instead, they are events that - wrapped in a somewhat thick coating of legend and allegory - are Celtic tales related to northwest Europe. He states that Homer - in all likelihood an actual person - did not create these two stories out of whole cloth, but rather collected and documented oral histories that were many centuries older. These oral histories were borne to the eastern Mediterranean by a group called the "Sea people' by Mr. Wilkens who were a Celtic subgroup driven out of Europe in a multi-generation Diaspora after their defeat in a war over tin mines in England.
Sound outlandish? It shouldn't because this was the Bronze Age, and bronze is made by alloying copper and tin. And where was the greatest concentration of tin in Europe: England. Other than location, this is the point at which Mr. Wilkens begins his deviation from the Iliad. He believes that the so-called Trojan War was not over Paris running off with Helen, but a banding together of European mainland tribes to destroy the England-based tin cartel. This realpolitik approach does appear more credible than an account of gods helping lovers be together and then choosing sides in a decade long war.
What proof does Mr. Wilkens offer to support his views. It seems that for many hundreds of years there have been questions about the geography in the Izmir area not being similar to the story. The same goes for the weather - described as consistently cool and wet - and the sea - described as having extreme tidal surges. The author catalogues the discrepancies and then presents his theory that the war took place in the Cambridgeshire area of England.
With the Odyssey, Mr. Wilkens is similarly incisive on debunking the idea that 10 years of sailing could occur in the Mediterranean. Again, his view is that the site for the story is the Atlantic ocean as far west as the new world back through the English Channel to the now-Dutch coast. There is, however, a bit of a disclaimer. Mr. Wilken's posits that the story is heavily-allegorical; so much so that I came away with the impression that he was less certain of the volume of truth in the story as compared with the story of the war.
He also strives to support his theories with linguistic comparisons between the Homeric place- and tribal-names and European words. Not being a linguist, I cannot comment on the veracity of his scholarship. Truth be told, I cannot comment on the accuracy of his historic or geographic contentions either. It does seem, however, that the circumstantial evidence is bountiful. The Arthurian legends came to us in the similar manner of oral histories being written down centuries later. And, one only has to briefly come in contact with the Grail legends and their allegorical content to note that what Mr. Wilkens offers is worthy of consideration.
One minor negative note is that it seems to me that English is not the author's first tongue. At times the phrasing is a bit stilted which tends to disrupt the flow of the narrative. A minor point to be sure.
In conclusion, if you are interested in the Trojan War and the Odyssey and found Michael's Wood's `In Search of Troy' at all fascinating, reading this book is a worthwhile proposition.
Oh yes, one more thing: obtaining a copy is a bit of an odyssey in itself. Use an Internet search engine and you will find it. I'm not going to shill for the publisher, so you will have to go for it alone.
22 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
Wilkens Really Baked My Noodle
By Laura Knight-Jadczyk
We had just made an international move and were waiting in our new house for our delayed shipping container to arrive with our library. I was quite at loose ends without anything to read when this book arrived in the mail, sent by a friend who knew I was without books. I can tell you that, after reading the cover, if my library had been there, I would never have read it. "Stuff and nonsense!" I snorted! Who was this guy to suggest that Troy was not close to Greece, that all the scholars were wrong?
Well, it's really a good thing I didn't have anything else to read! So many questions answered!
Most people are not aware that not one of forty characteristics of the City of Troy and the Trojan War plain fit the Mediterranean setting. What is astonishing is that the author of the Odyssey does give ALL the information needed to exactly place where Troy Once Stood! For example:
* The Achaeans built 1186 ships for their attack on Troy, they could have travelled the short distance overland far quicker and cheaper if Troy really had been in the Turkish setting.
* Odysseus claimed to have got home by travelling as a passenger on a ship going from Crete to Sidon (present day Sa�da in Lebanon), but that is the opposite direction he needed to go in the Mediterranean setting.
* Agamemnon tells us it took him a full month to sail from his kingdom Argos to Ithaca, we know the trip takes less than 24 hours in the Mediterranean setting.
* The mythical location for Troy in Turkey is far too small to accommodate the invading army of about 100,000 men and the long pursuits in horse-drawn chariots.
* The extensively travelled Greek geographer Strabo who lived 2000 years ago (1200 years after the Trojan War) believed that some of the ports of call in the Odyssey should be found in the Atlantic because of the mention of tides that do not really exist in the Mediterranean.
Well, what really baked my noodle was the part about the rivers. Language and how it morphs over time is a particular interest of mine and Wilkens showed that he knew his stuff. The plains near Cambridge and the Gog Magog Hills is a place where more than 12 rivers mentioned in the Iliad can still be recognised by name even today.
Iman Wilkens is not the only one who has suspected that there was something fishy about locating Troy in Turkey. The modern day scholar Professor Sir Moses Finley, emeritus of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge (Fellow of British Academy) after years of study and writing countless renowned books on Greek history, also opined that the weight of evidence made it clear that Troy and the Trojan War did not occur in Greece and Turkey, but some where else. Sir Moses said...
"There has come to be an abundance of empirical evidence that the world Homer wrote about did exist.
"The opinions of later Greeks and 19th Century scholars are irrelevant. We are confronted with this paradox that the more we know, the worse off we are. Homer's Trojan War must be evicted from the history of the Greek Bronze Age..."
In an even older work "Troje lag in Engeland: Odysseus landde in Zeeland" (translated: Troy lay in the United Kingdom: Odysseus landed in the Netherlands) Ernst Gideon followed the work of the 18th and 19th century Belgium authors De Grave and Cailleux, who took pains to show that Troy was located in England and that the Odyssey took place in the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel.
Like Iman Wilkens, Ernst Gideon realized that the ocean Homer wrote about is wide, wild and dangerous, never smooth and sunny, the color was grey and never blue, and such an ocean could not have been the Mediterranean sea.
In short, the weight of the EVIDENCE makes it quite clear that Troy and the Trojan War did not occur in Greece and Turkey (as we know it today), but some where else.
It also raises many unanswered questions that Wilkens does not deal with. For example, we know that the land we now call "Egypt" was never called by that name until the time of the Greeks. It is very possible that a far more ancient Egypt, located elsewhere, was the legendary home of the great mysteries and "spiritual knowledge" referred to in myths and legend. And if that is the case, it turns philosophy on it's head.
In a very real sense, finding that the original Egypt was in France restores to Western Civilization its true heritage, displacing the unnatural Fascist, Asiatic monotheism brought to us courtesy of Judaism.
Iman Wilkens discusses the Celts and their culture as well. We are taught almost nothing about the Celts in school, though they seem to be considered as the ancestors of most Europeans, thus also Americans. The question we need to be asking is: Why is it that the religion and culture of the Mesopotamian region dominates our lives and our culture when it is, in effect, "foreign"?
The lack of written texts by the Celts has been the greatest problem for historians and students of the Celts. A lot of ideas are "supposed" or ancient sources with agendas have been relied on, and some of them even propose that there was a "taboo" by the Celts on putting things into writing.
Iman Wilkens idea of why the Celts didn't write things down is one of the flaws of the book. He suggests that this was how the Druids kept their power.
But, if we look at what Caesar said was that the reason for the ban on writing, we find that it was really quite logical. The Druids were concerned that their pupils should not neglect the training of their memories, i.e. the Frontal Cortex, by relying on written texts.
It is worth noting that, in the nineteenth century, it was observed that the illiterate Yugoslav bards, who were able to recite interminable poems, actually lost their ability to memorize once they had learned to rely on reading and writing.
So, it seems that the Druids were actually concerned more about the accurate transmission of their knowledge than "holding power."
Although the Druids prohibited certain things from being written down, it's clear that they DID write. Celtic writings in Ogamic script have been found on many ancient stones. Caesar tells us that the Celts were using the Greek alphabet when the Romans arrived in Gaul in the first century BC.
The destruction of Celtic culture was so complete that we know very little about their religion. We do know that they celebrated their "rites" in forests and by lakes without erecting any covered temples or statues of divinities.
Plato had doubts about the Greek origins of Homer's work because not only do the physical descriptions in his poems not correspond to the Greek world, but also the Homeric philosophy is very different from the mainstream Greek philosophy we know about today.
Aristotle considered Gaul to be the "teacher" of Greece and the Druids to be the "inventors of philosophy." The Greeks also considered the Druids to be the world's greatest scholars, and whose mathematical knowledge was the source of Pythagoras` information.
What we can discern from Wilken's work is that there was an ancient and noble civilization associated with the Megaliths that no longer exists and even its high knowledge and nuanced philosophy has been forgotten - except for the Iliad and Odyssey.
Iman Wilkens restores to us a fragment of True European History and perhaps it is time for us to turn our attention to trying to learn more about it in the proper context. After all, Judao-Christianity has brought the world to the verge of total destruction in less than 2000 years. The Celtic cultures existed for many, many thousands of years, accomplishing great feats of engineering and producing a culture that was pre-eminent throughout the world until they were destroyed by the monotheistic infection - due mainly to the fact that they did not accept a single, monolithic authority.
Iman Wilkens book is filled with rich details and piles of supporting evidence that includes ancient historic writings, accurate geographic and topographic description matching, detailed maps, countless archaeological finds, historic place name matching, cultural and linguistic evidence.
This book is a MUST read for everyone, most particularly people of European and Mediterranean heritage.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Intriguing Theory Undermined by Poor Presentation
By Matthew Ries
The historicity of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey is the basis of Iman Wilken’s “Where Troy Once Stood”. The author’s theory that the Trojan War took place in England between Celts is both an intriguing revisionist theory as well as good material for authors looking for a good story.
The basic premise of the book is Wilken first rejecting the concise opinion that Troy as located in Anatolia, evening using ancient sources to help support his conclusion. Though Wilken’s believes the Trojan War did take place and examined Homer’s text to find Troy’s location, both by descriptions and etymology to find Troy in the Gog Magog Hills in Cambridgeshire, England. Wilken’s then places gives locations for all the combatants listed in the Iliad amongst the Celtic peoples of Western Europe from Scandinavia down to southern Spain. Based off his locations of the Iliad, Wilken’s catalogues Odysseus’ journey around the shores of Western European and throughout the Atlantic before arriving home in Spain. However, Wilken’s proposes that the Odyssey was not only a story of a warrior king, but a map for Celtic seafarers to sail for recourses in Africa and the Caribbean as well as tool for initiates into the ‘Mysteries’ of the Celtic Druids.
While this overall theory based on Homer’s epic poems is though-provoking, the overall book is undermined by how Wilken presents his material. Whatever one thinks of the theory this is a hard book to read because there is no flow from point-to-point throughout the text. Wilken’s enthusiasm for his theory is identifiable in the text mainly because he likes to insert conclusions and further theories randomly whenever something that is connected with them is presented in the text. After long periods of logical progression, Wilkens would started jumping from point-to-point before taking up his logical process again then incorporating the random points he talked about earlier into the narrative. Wilken’s never fully explains some of his conclusions or provides supporting evidence for some of his assertions, his view of who the Phoenicians were was the biggest in my mind. Finally Wilkens presents numerous maps and lists of his etymology evidence as part of his main text instead of as a large appendix, which makes the last quarter of the book a slog.
In the end the reader must judge Wilken’s theory for themselves and as stated in my introductory paragraph, it provides good story material like Clive Cussler’s “Trojan Odyssey”. However anyone who wants to read this book for either the revisionist theory or for story inspiration should keep in mind the book’s winding journey. Wilken’s published a revised edition of “Where Troy Once Stood” and maybe that edition (2009) presents the material better, however based on the chapter listings I’m doubtful. So if you’re interested in reading this book, you’ve been warned.
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