When I first read about Troy in England on the Internet, I was intrigued. I had been a comparative literature minor in College, so I had read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. However, something seemed off about them. The great Greek tragedies lifted from the poems also seemed out of place, but I wasn't smart enough, or didn't have enough context, to figure out why. I even tried to learn to read the Greek originals to see if I could dispel my cloud, but that came to naught, literature really wasn't my bag and languages not a talent.
Reading about it on the Internet and getting my hands on books were two different things. I happened to mention it to one of the readers I correspond with, and his response was, he didn't take things like that seriously because they were impossible to demonstrate. I kept up my search, however, and this led to column 38-05, where the Kings of England are traced back to Brutus, said to be a survivor of the royal house of Troy. That didn't do the job and I continued my search. Eventually the search found me when I received an email offering Iman Jacob Wilkens' Where Troy Once Stood for sale. I had tried to get a copy of this book but as it was published in the Netherlands, I didn't have much success. I emailed them back and asked if they could ship it to the United States. It turned out that they had published a new edition, had a site with a Paypal button on it, and, although by the time the currency was converted to Euros and postage was paid, it cost me a fortune, I finally got a copy.
Believe me, it was worth every penny. (In fact, I just found out that copies of the first edition go in England for as high as £800 which is about 20 times what I ended up paying for it.)
Let me start out by saying, most serious scholars, starting with Plato, did not think that the scene of the events in either work was the Mediterranean. Plato, in fact, in spite of his limited knowledge of the North Atlantic, said the events could only have taken place there because of the constant descriptions of the tides and the harsh winds blowing out of the North, things that are not features of Mediterranean life. But, it's not only Plato that questioned locating the events in the Mediterranean, it has been serious scholars down through history that have questioned it. Here, I studied these works in college, and absolutely no one even raised the possibility. In fact, no one raised the actual argument, which is dismissed by the scholars supporting the Homer in the Mediterranean viewpoint on the basis that Homer is a liar.
If Homer is a liar, he is the most consistent and detailed liar in the history of the world. Taking it one step further, the translations that I was allowed to read in College had watered down Homer to a great extent, eliminating texts that would indicate the events could not have taken place in the Mediterranean, for instance, boat passages from Point A to Point B pass point C, an impossibility in the Mediterranean, and the detailed directional information that was left in the translations was simply meaningless, supporting the notion that Homer was a liar.
As it turns out, the two works contain a detailed description of a war that lasted nine years fought by two branches of the Celts, one occupying Britain, the other, a group of allies occupying countries on the Western coast of what today is Europe extending from what today is called Spain to what today is called Norway. The reason for the war, which was fought in the 12th Century BCE was quite simple. The Bronze Age was at its height. The principle ingredients of bronze are copper and tin. The continent had run out of tin. The only tin that was available was in Cornwall in Britain under the control of Troy (Troy, by the way, is the ancient Celtic name for the Minoan maze, with the bull and string story, supposedly centered on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean, although evidence for the story has never been found in the Mediterranean). The Trojans were the Celtic tribes on Britain (with several allies on the continent) while the Achaeans were the allies from the continent who, without access to tin, would see their prosperity disappear. For years, the Achaeans had attempted to substitute lead for tin, with devastating bodily affects (which are found in remains dated to the time).
As Wilkens points out, the Iliad covers only the final period of the war, but there are other contemporaneous verbal accounts that were recorded by the Greeks and cover the entire war. However, using the Iliad alone allows Wilkens to place events because Homer catalogs the ships of the Achaean allies, setting forth precise sizes and numbers, including troop numbers, belonging to each ally, and further describing in detail each ally's homeland, including rivers, foliage, weather, crops and herds raised, as well as how each ally prospered. In addition, Homer lists the Trojans, giving similarly detailed descriptions of the areas of Britain they occupied.
Homer also gives a detailed description of Troy, of the Achaean barracks, of the cities the Achaeans sacked outside Troy, all with precise location descriptions that went to rivers, hillocks and even barricades built to defend and protect Troy. Suffice it to say that none of these descriptions match up with the Mediterranean Troy. However, they match up precisely with a Troy located a short distance from modern day Cambridge in England, with the Achaeans landing from the North Sea (called Hellespont at the time) on the broad beach of what is now The Wash, northeast of modern day London. The broad plains in between was where the Trojan war was carried out and to pretty much prove it, thousands of bronze war implements have been dug up in the area in modern times and are well-preserved in museums, implements that are sorely lacking in the Mediterranean Troy, as are the site of a city capable of holding the Trojans Homer describes, beaches capable of holding the Achaean ships Homer enumerates with such detail, and a broad plain over which the minutely described battle scenes could play out.
The first problem Wilkens attacks, after giving a detailed description of the combatants, the ocean and tides, the climate, the vegetation, the horses, the cattle, the food, the Dikes (built to reclaim land from the ocean, the remains of which still exist), art and customs, religion and philosophy, tackles the transfer of place-names from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean area. As Wilkens makes clear, the Celts were the group described by Mediterranean populations through the ages, as the Sea People. Greece and the adjacent islands were populated by Celts, as Greek historians of the time admit. At the time, there were basically the Phoenicians, occupying what is now the area of Lebanon and east, the Egyptians, who weren't Egyptians at the time, but were named that after Alexander the Great conquered them, and the Carthaginians, who occupied Northern Africa. None of the places held the names Homer uses at the time. What is Greece and the outlying islands was either fairly deserted or hosted the so-called Palace Cultures, of which the Minoan is classified as one even though there are no maze remains to be found. These prosperous trading cultures felt they had no reason for defense, and were basically towns under a single roof with no battlements to keep out predators, which the Celts definitely were, with their warrior creed and plundering ways.
Thus, the areas today holding about a third of the Homeric names were actually areas either conquered or occupied by the Celts from the sea. Why, the author asks, do we not have a record of this? The answer is found in the nature of the Celtic religion. What would be considered the feudal lords in Western societies were called the Druids in Celtic society. The Classical Greeks acknowledged the influence of the Druids on their culture. Aristotle considered Gaul, the home of the Celts, to be Greece's teacher, with the Druids the inventor of philosophy, while Hecateus of Abdera claimed that Pythagoras learned all he knew about mathematics from the Druid Abaris. So who were the Druids in reality?
The Druids were the religious leaders of the Celts and arbitrated all of their knowledge. Because they considered knowledge sacred, they prohibited anything being written down. As a result, they invented the meter Homer originally wrote in to provide a mnemonic device that would allow long stories containing knowledge to be memorized and passed down among the initiate. That's why we have no written record of the Celts. They were prohibited from keeping one, and when, after the Roman era, they were wiped out on the continent, the only heritage that remained was the heritage that existed in Greece and the outlying islands. I should also mention, as Wilkens does quite poetically about the Greek pantheon of gods, that the fate of the Celtic gods, who were an abstract product of the imaginative Celtic mind, was to die on the shores of the Mediterranean where they were turned into marble forever.
Realizing that much as European names were transferred to the United States, continental names were transferred to the Mediterranean, Wilkens still faced what many other analysis of Homer had faced over the ages. It was quite easy to tie the names of Homeric rivers to specific areas of Europe, but how could Wilkens make a whole picture out of what to date had only been patchwork? It's becoming pretty clear that Wilkens has spent his life studying Homer, has read him in the original as well as all of the translations, and is therefore quite familiar with all of the references Homer alludes to. Many of the references to animals seem quite imaginative and a lot of the stories contain elements that seem out of place. Wilkens began to realize that all of these references occurred either before or after a voyage was described. Homer is very specific about the number of ships involved, describes the characteristics of both the land of departure and the land of arrival, and even is specific about travel times and about the direction the wind and the current flowed. The one thing that was missing in Homer's detailed description of the origin, length and destination of the many voyages he describes is the direction.
Wilkens put two and two together, the apparently unnecessary references to animals, or sometimes to humans, and realized that the references were all references to the zodiac. By charting the zodiac against the stars, he was able to come up with an earthly compass, with the particular Homeric references being to specific direction. There are even instances where the direction does not center on a single zodiac symbol, Homer uses two references to indicate an intermediate direction, in our language, instead of going northwest, go north by northwest.
With this piece of information in place, Wilkens then takes our hand and walks us through both the Iliad and the Odyssey, locating all of the homelands of all the players, tying each journey up with climate, topography and river names, and pointing out the remaining evidence that supports the journey. As a result, we easily find Troy in England, Egypt in upper Normandy and France, Crete in Scandinavia, Ithaca in Cadiz in south Spain, Pylos and Sparta in southern Spain, Argos and Mycenae in France and Troyes, the seven towns offered to lure Achilles back to battle as the Ardennes and Rhineland, and also elucidates the the locations of many of the side-stories in the Iliad.
An interesting side story Wilkens elucidates for us is the real story of the Trojan horse. Up until now, I had assumed the notion of a horse holding enough men to conquer a city the size of Troy, 50,000 normal inhabitants swollen to a hundred thousand during the war, a poetical invention to demonstrate (aptly in our own time) that a society grown too fat, dumb and happy is ripe for the plucking. As it turns out, the story of the soldiers in the hollow horse is only partly true. First a note about the Celtic warrior's code of honor. Celtic fighters were required to fight man-to-man. Anything less was considered dishonorable. Archers were considered cowards. In the final year of the war, the fat, dumb and happy Trojans were about to claim victory, not because of superiority in battle, but because the plague was raging through the Achaean camp. The Achaeans would not have enough soldiers to fight by year's end at the rate they were dying from the plague. Odysseus devised the Trojan horse plan as the only way to win. Filling the horse with soldiers who died of the plague and placing it before Troy as they departed put the unsuspecting Trojans in a sticky situation. If they left the horse in front of Troy, they risked incurring the displeasure of the Gods. If they burnt it without bringing it into the city, they risked similar disfavor. Odysseus was betting on the Trojans respect for their common religion to bring the horse into the overcrowded city where it could be properly sacrificed to the gods. Doing so, of course, introduced the plague into the festering city where it spread rapidly, bringing an end to Troy. Homer, who Wilkens identifies, was writing from the Achaean perspective. He therefore changed the story to one that respected the warrior code of conduct. However, when Odysseus later tells his tale in the Odyssey, a bard starts to sing the new version, and Odysseus begins to weep, Homer's way of cluing us into the real nature of the event.
The Achaeans, who had simply remained offshore, returned and sacked Troy, burning it to the ground. The remnants of the royal family were able to make their way to the Mediterranean, where they settled at what today is considered the real Troy. However, they stayed there for only three generations, Brutus, the rightful heir to the throne of Britain, returning to reclaim his throne, where the population readily accepted him, Thus begins the second hidden history recounted in the above column.
One of the most amazing results of following Homer's detailed sailing instructions tracing Odysseus' journey in the Odyssey step by step, we end up with a map of the Atlantic Ocean, prevailing winds and currents, exact distances, that could be passed from mind to mind without fear of disclosure to trading competitors such as the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, and the Carthaginians.
Of course, this alone bans a lifetime of scholarship from the scholarly halls of academia, that lofty plateau of thunderous dicta, one of which is the oh-so-proven edict that there was no European contact before Columbus (empirical science being, of course, adept at proving what every lawyer knows can't be proven, a negative).
Which leads me to the story of Odysseus. Everyone is familiar with Odysseus' trials and tribulations, but as Wilkens make very clear, those tribulations, Odysseus' journey, is an allegory for the initiation required to become a Druid. The initiation is rigorous for a simple reason: No one could be admitted into the ranks of the Druids, those that held knowledge and were therefore considered demigods, until it was assured that the knowledge received would be keep within the confines of the Druid community. It's a typical case of knowledge rules ignorance. Of course, one of the most valuable pieces of knowledge through the days of the Roman Empire was the wind and current information about the Atlantic Ocean because across the Atlantic lay the vast continents that provided riches to the Mediterranean world. The flat-earth charge that the Darwinists used to smear their opponents actually came from the practice of laying maps out on a flat plat. The purpose of putting the boundaries to the map was to populate the edges of the map with dragons and other beasts to scare the ignorant away from even thinking about sailing across the oceans.
Here I am having read Julius Caesar in its original Latin in high school and Greek literature in translation in college and I never knew anything about any of this. I always thought the reason teachers didn't teach reality, didn't place facts in their context, was because they had an axe to grind and that axe would disappear if the context was provided and something was actually taught.
Now, I'm not so sure. I'm not a big conspiracy buff. Anybody even remotely aware of history and current events, politics and diplomacy, knows that the world pictured for us in the newspapers isn't the world that exists. All we have to do is read foreign newspapers to see this to be a fact. But it isn't a big conspiracy. For anyone that's interested, there are tons of jobs in Washington and New York that provide a peek into the world that actually exists. People involved with those jobs simply do not speak out of turn, not only because it's insane for anyone to give out job secrets in any field, but also because we all tend to congregate with those that are familiar with what we know. One of my friends had a restaurant on Capitol Hill. Just sitting at the bar would give anyone an eyeful of this world.
No, I don't think in terms of conspiracy, but I'm beginning to see that we live in a misinformation bubble. I first ran into it with Shakespeare. In my English class on the subject, we were given a thick book whose only content put Shakespeare as the son of illiterate parents who never passed grade school and we were expected to believe he wrote plays that displayed a knowledge of English, French, Greek and Roman history, knowledge that could only be obtained from a knowledge of the classic languages, plays that were versed in legal and medical information, plays that expressed an understanding of military and naval maneuvers, plays that basically could only be written by someone with a Cambridge education at the least.
And everyone bought it hook, line and sinker. In fact, to bring up the possibility that Shakespeare was a pseudonym, something very common in literature, and more common in the charged politically religious climate at the time the plays were written, was to invite scorn, a failing grade and even the boot from the English Department. These columns go into detail about the misinformation we are fed in the area of empirical science, which has gradually expanded to take over most of our world views.
Shakespeare is an example from the 17th Century, but I just read an article, a social commentary, that floored me. The author made the off-hand statement that the Church had concocted the Dark Age after the invention of the printing press in order to wipe the slight clean. Given the vast amount of information locked away in the Vatican, information that can only perchance be duplicated in Islamic manuscripts (the Muslims brought paper from China and literally copied every piece of writing they could get their hands on, Greek, Roman, Coptic, Aramaic, Hebrew, you name it), it sounds reasonable. Given the fact that there was actually no Dark Age in Britain (column 38-05 again), just a covered up age, I intend to make this a project to explore.
I may not know the source of the misinformation bubble, but the Druids give me a clue. Knowledge is, indeed, power, and when the printing press was invented, it was widely outlawed for that very reason. In our reality, the printing press and the Internet break down all barriers to knowledge. However, creating misinformation, as has been the practice since the invention of the printing press, effectively accomplishes the Druid's goals.
The misinformation bubble is based on the way the mind works. We all look to others for agreement, and thus, the consensus rules. I think it was Margaret Thatcher who said, a government run by consensus has no leader. Translated to this column, it means a society run by consensus has no compass and, lost, it will eventually go the way of the Celts, unknown, unhonored, just un.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com