Well, I’m booked into see it this weekend, so I’ll give you my verdict on Monday, but Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has certainly been one of the most divisive movies of recent times. The left, who formerly disdained Nolan for his overt patriotism (Dunkirk) and scepticism of the Occupy Wall Street movement (The Dark Knight Rises), are gushing and crowing that The Odyssey is the blockbuster success of all time (much as they did with Black Panther, which, as Bret Easton Ellis had the temerity to point out, is actually rubbish, even by low MCU standards). The right were pre-emptively disgusted at Nolan’s apparently deliberate rage-baiting, by casting the most un-Greek actors imaginable in the Greek cultural centrepiece.
Defending the race-and-gender-swapping, the left sniff that, ‘It’s just a myth, it’s not real’. Well, Moana is even more of a myth – it was literally made up from nothing by a white Harvard grad less than a decade ago. Yet, when that was made into a film, the makers had to go grovelling to consultants, artisans, experts and a cultural trust, to avoid offending Polynesians.
But, are the Iliad and Odyssey ‘just myths’? Or are they a heavily mythologised retelling of actual, historical events, which is surprisingly more accurate than not? Sure, there are plenty of fantastic elements, such as the monsters of the Odyssey, but even Scylla and Charybdis are almost certainly fantastical interpretations of real maritime hazards, likely a narrow strait.
Aside from all the political noise, what is the truth? Are the characters, the events, the story, the locations, the battles and wars fictional or are they real? If someone were to ask you, is the Odyssey history or is it mythology? The correct answer would be yes. Mythological and historical are not mutually exclusive. Something can be mythological but still grounded in history.
The city of Troy is not a fairy-tale. It is the Bronze Age city of Wilusa in western Anatolia. Its ruins sit on the hill of Hisarlik in modern Turkey, excavated from the 1870s onward. Two strata match the Homeric account almost uncannily: Troy VI with its massive fortifications and imposing battlements, and Troy VIIa with a widespread ash layer and clear signs of violent destruction by fire. Archaeologists have even identified the hills Homer described.
The Hittites were an ancient European people who built a major Bronze Age Empire in Anatolia, modern-day Turkey, expanding up to a certain extent into the Middle East. They emerged at around 1600 BC. There are many things that are fascinating about the Hittite Empire, but two things come to mind and are relevant to this discussion: one, their extreme level of specialization when it comes to military organization, in particular chariot warfare, and their extremely detailed and well-organized archives.
Now, these archives, in fact, specifically two tablets, tablet CTH 191 and tablet CTH 74, shed light onto how much of a historical tale Homer’s Odyssey actually was. And due to the fact that these are external sources to the Mycenaean ones, we can use them to cross-reference in order to get closer to the truth. Moreover, the connection is the fact that the historical inhabitants of Troy, which would be the city of Wilusa, were vassals of the Hittites. And even though they were a culturally separated reality, they were technically Luwians and they lived on the periphery of the Hittite Empire. The Hittite Empire had a very strong influence both culturally, economically, and militarily with the city of historical Troy.
Oddly, the Hittites never wrote that ‘Our Age of Bronze is collapsing’. So what did they know?
But what about the walls allegedly built by Poseidon and Apollo themselves? Did the city of historical Troy have majestic battlements and impregnable walls? And does the archaeological record indicate both a breaching of that wall and a subsequent destruction of the city proper through fire? Well, the answer is yes to all three. Homer was on his A-game when it comes to historical accuracy.
Homer’s walls “built by Poseidon and Apollo” turn out to be real stone. The archaeological record also records a massive earthquake that levelled part of the city. Open Book 20 of the Iliad and the ‘fantasy’ suddenly looks like collective memory: Poseidon, known by the epithet ‘the Earth-shaker’, remember, makes the ground shudder so violently that even Hades panics in the underworld. The city of Troy is shaken exactly as the strata show.
External confirmation comes from the Hittite archives at Hattusha. Tablets CTH 191 and CTH 74 record a Western power called Ahhiyawa – widely accepted as the Mycenaean world – raiding Hittite vassals along the Anatolian coast. One early warlord, Attarissiya, arrives with an army and war chariots; linguists link the name to Atreus, legendary father of Agamemnon and Menelaus. Later texts name a troublemaker Piyamaradu (Priam) who seizes Wilusa, forcing the Hittite king to reconquer it and reinstall a vassal ruler under the Treaty of Alaksandu.
Wilusa itself switches sides over time – first joining an anti-Hittite league of western Anatolian states, then becoming a loyal Hittite vassal. That betrayal matches the Homeric picture of Troy as both neighbour and enemy to the Achaeans. The entire sequence of Mycenaean interference, Luwian revolts and Hittite counter-strikes spans roughly 150 years and supplies the geopolitical framework in which the Trojan War legend formed.
All of the events that I’ve just described coming from both the archaeological record and all of the corpus of documents that come from these excavations in Hattusha occurred over a span of 150 years and it is extremely likely that this was the origin or the foundation of the Trojan War described in the Iliad. I in fact wish to state that the events concerning the relationships between the Mycenaeans, the Hittites, and the Luwians contributed to developing the framework within which Homer or whoever for him created the Iliad.
So when the left insist ‘it’s just a myth, bro’, they are not defending art. They are defending the right to strip a culture of its historical memory while simultaneously demanding sacred treatment for other people’s stories. After all, these are the same leftists who insist that just-so stories of “a foggy, misty and dark place not seen by the sun” prove beyond doubt that the Māori discovered Antarctica. Or that third-hand claims about something an Aborigine allegedly said over 100 years ago ‘prove’ that Aborigines were ‘sophisticated astronomers’. But, when it comes to the foundational stories of the West, well, that’s ‘all just fairy-tales’.
The stones, the tablets and the ash layers say otherwise. Homer was not inventing from whole cloth. He was preserving, in the only language available to an oral poet, the memory of real cities, real wars and real catastrophes that shook the Late Bronze Age world.
