Homer and the Micenian World

[Matthew Amt]

Really? Is this a new theory, or something that's been around awhile?

Actually the disputes go back nearly a century. But the traditional "high" chronology has become very entrenched and the revisionists get very little press.

All the sources I could find online and in my books still place the Trojan War (if it really happened at all) in the mid-to-late 13th century BC. Most of those archaeologists who think the Hissarlik site is Troy think that Troy VII, which is dated to the same rough period as the literary sources place, is Homer's Troy; a minority think it's Troy VI, which is earlier. I have yet to see anyone identify a much later level (if there are later levels) as the Homeric Troy.

Right, all the basic and popular publications will stick to the traditional dates. And the date revisions won't change which Troy is the right one, really, it will only change the absolute dates of that level. The *relative* sequences are not greatly affected (except when some things now though to be sequential or greatly separated are found to be contemporary).

It seems any theory proposing such a massive shift in the ancient chronology would have attracted quite a bit of attention and yielded a lot of debate online and in scholarly journals like Archaeology, yet I can't find any reference to it. Help me out here!

The "old guard" is very dogmatic and vicious. An appalling amount of vitriol gets thrown, with very little good science. Peer-reviewed journals won't even consider publishing articles advocating the low chronology--there are to many reputations and egos at stake, for starters.

I did find one online paper that expounds this exact theory-- i.e. that the Egyptian chronology upon which the Greeks based their dating was widely off by three or more centuries, that everything pior this must be down-dated, and that the so-called Greek "dark age" was only a few decades at most, not three or more centuries. Trouble is, it was written by Immanuel Velikovsky, author of "Worlds In Collision," who is widely regarded by most historians as a total crackpot.

Right, that's the general theory, but also right that Velikovsky hasn't been much help to the "low chronology" side! This subject was one of his favorites, though he advocated a 500-year cut in the dates. He is generally believed to be an extremist who didn't really understand the issues clearly, and it should be kept in mind that he was NOT the first one to point out the chronology problems! They predate him by generations. There is a whole website with articles by him and his supporters which is worth a careful read, since he quotes one expert and archeologist after another who are puzzled by chronology problems all over the Mediterranean and elsewhere. It's a real eye-opener.

http://www.varchive.org/dag/index.htm

(And full of typos, by the way...) Apparently, one of his supporters, Edwin Schorr, was actually denied a degree and ended up leaving school, career in ruins, simply because he wanted to do his dissertation on the chronology problem. Reminds me of Gallileo...

As Dan says, "Centuries of Darkness" is the best work, and its writers pretty much stick with a 250-year reduction. Amazing book.

Khairete,

Matthew