The real Troy?

Ever since Schliemann’s excavation of the hill of Hisarlik in Turkey, this site has generally been thought to be the ‘Troy’ of the Iliad; it’s even got the Wooden Horse to prove it:

Some people, though, are bothered by the apparent discrepancies between Homer’s descriptions of Troy and the actual topography of Hisarlik. Confronted with the possibility that Homer’s geography may have been less than perfect, these scholars have taken up the challenge to locate the real site of Troy and restore our faith in Homer’s infallible accuracy. Hence, for instance, the suggestion that Homer’s Troy was actually located at Bergama/Pergamon.

Others have looked further afield – after all, why does Troy have to be in Turkey? As one scholar points out, serious scrutiny of this question has been prevented by “the almost religious belief that Homeric Troy was situated in Turkey, because of its proximity to the Hellespont, Lesbos, Tenedos and Samothrace, and of course also because the story was passed on in ancient Greek”.

Amongst the few brave enough to challenge this ‘almost religious belief’ there is unfortunately little agreement as to the true location of Troy. Suggestions include Bosnia and Herzegovina and Finland (a conclusion which naturally follows from the author’s previous identification of the Peloponnese in Denmark). More radically, Troy has been interpreted as representing the whole universe, with the accounts of battles depicting the movements of constellations; and, naturally, there remains the possibility that Troy is Atlantis.

The hypothesis of greatest interest to the readers of this blog, however,  must be that put forward by I.J. Wilkens (author of the quotation above) that Troy was in fact located in the Gog Magog Hills a few miles outside Cambridge, with the citadel, Pergamon, being located in the Wandlebury Ring hill fort:

The strongest evidence for this is provided by the extensive linguistic research which has enabled Wilkens to identify the rivers of the Trojan plain in Cambridgeshire. His conclusions that, for instance, that the SCAMander is the modern Cam, while the SimOEIS is the Great OUSE, are really so obvious that it is surprising no Homeric scholar had made this identification before.

Equally surprising is that this hypothesis has as yet received little attention from our Faculty, particularly given that Wilkens apparently gave a lecture on this subject to the Herodoteans as long ago as 1992. It is to be hoped that in future this will be the subject of further research here in Cambridge; after all, if Wilkens is proved correct, the Faculty’s status could only be enhanced by its being the only Classics department able to offer day-trips to Troy.

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