Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery

Journal of the American Oriental Society, The, July-Sept, 2005 by Joshua T. Katz

Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery. By JOACHIM LATACZ. Tr. Kevin Windle and Rosh Ireland. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004. Pp. xix 342, illus. $45.

Jaan Puhvel's 1991 pamphlet Homer and Hittite--one of many relevant works that the author of Troy and Homer does not cite--ends with the words, "Homer is too important to be left to single-track hellenists" (1); similarly, of course, Troy is too important to be left to Anatolian archaeologists. Joachim Latacz, a specialist in Homer, has for many years been a particularly vigorous proponent of the view that the eighth-century B.C. Greek epic known as the Iliad is a reliable source of information about the city of Troy (modern Hisarlik) and its environs in the Troad in the Late Bronze Age. Understandably enthusiastic about archaeological and epigraphic finds from the past fifteen years and giddy over the resulting reassessments of the history of the eastern Mediterranean that bring the worlds of Greece and Asia Minor ever closer together (while also bringing a new academic Trojan War to the dinner table throughout German-speaking Europe), Latacz in 2001 published Troia und Homer: Der Weg zur Losung eines alten Ratsels, of which the present book is an updated translation. (2) Against what is probably the standard line in Anglophone scholarship today (see, e.g., Ian Morris's influential and, indeed, finely argued paper "The Use and Abuse of Homer," Classical Antiquity (5) [1986]: 81-138--also uncited), I am in substantial agreement with Latacz that certain significant details in Homer reflect society as it was long before the eighth century, in a shared Greco-Anatolian setting (think of the bond of guest-friendship between the Trojan Glaukos and the Greek Diomedes described in Book 6 of the Iliad), and I strongly urge both Classicist colleagues and the readers of JAOS to (re-)acquaint themselves with the indubitably very interesting interdisciplinary matters at stake. That said, it is not so easy to recommend Latacz's book, which is repetitive (the more something is said, the more it is taken as fact in his "logical" schemes), pompous (all the more so in English), and positively hagiographic in its advancement of the ideas of a very few scholars but inattentive to the work of many others.

The primary evidence that Latacz presents comes from two very different fields: archaeology and linguistics/philology. I am not knowledgeable enough about the former to be able to comment critically on the conclusions that Manfred Korfmann, the late professor of archaeology at Tubingen, reached in the course of his fifteen years (1992-2005) of excavating at Troy. By all accounts, though, his work is meticulous and deserves the highest praise, and he certainly did show that Troy around 1200 B.C. was not just Schliemann's citadel, but a substantial, fortified city, complete with a set of underground waterworks. This is a place Homer's Achaeans might well have spent ten years trying to sack.

The Hittite and Luvian textual sources and the linguistic arguments that Latacz adduces in order to show that Homer somehow really did know of Troy are, however, much less secure. Most readers of this review will be aware of the longstanding controversies over a few would-be Greco-Anatolian onomastic links, most famously and seductively between the toponyms I[lambda][iota][omicron][OIGAMMA] ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII][iota][lambda][iota][omicron][OIGAMMA]) 'Troy' (cf. Iliad, literally "(Poem) of (W)Ilios") and Wilus(iy)a and between the ethnicon A[chi][alpha][iota][omicron][iota] 'Achaeans (i.e., Mycenaean Greeks)" and the toponym Ahhiyawa/Ahhiya. I have no doubt that many of the most potentially significant connections--others include T[rho][omicron][iota][eta] (the other Homeric name of Troy) ~ Tarwisa and M[iota][lambda][eta][tau][omicron][OIGAMMA] ~ Millawanda--are real, but Latacz will not win lasting converts by simply repeating, without critical engagement, the claims of a handful of researchers he happens to respect. A very important, if sometimes in my view overly skeptical, account of the linguistic material is now available in (especially the first half of) Ivo Hajnal's Troia aus sprachwissenschaftlicher Sicht: Die Struktur einer Argumentation (Innsbruck: Institut fur Sprachen und Literaturen der Universitat Innsbruck, 2003), which should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the historicity of Homer's Troy.

An especially egregious example of bias presented as fact comes on pp. 243f.: Latacz describes, with no footnotes, no references aside from the mention of a "preliminary report" (p. 243) in a popular magazine, (3) and no further commentary, how the Anatolianist Frank Starke in August 2003 "was able to present the first cuneiform letter in Hittite to be sent not from east to west ` but from west to east" (p. 243), specifically, according to Starke, from the king of Ahhijawa to his Hittite counterpart, probably Hattusili III. Furthermore, the "king of Ahhijawa argues from history ...: he explains that a forebear of his had given his daughter in marriage to the then king of Assuwa [~ A[sigma]([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])[iota][alpha]?] ... and that consequently the islands [discussed in the letter] had come into the possession of Ahhijawa. As luck would have it this forebear is named in the letter: his name is Kadmos" (p. 244). As luck would have it--and yet this is simply false. While Starke has not yet formally written up his conclusions, his ideas have been the subject of much discussion among specialists--the letter in question, KUB 26.91 (CTH 183), a fragmentary cuneiform tablet from Bogazkoy that is generally said to be from a Hittite king (actually Muwatalli II?) and to an Ahhiyawan ruler, (4) was published over 75 years ago and so is in the public domain--and there just does not seem to be any way to read the Greek name of the mythical founder of Thebes, Kadmos, in the critical line: n]u-za Ka-ga-mu-na-as-za-kan A-BA A-BA A-B[I-YA xxxxx (Ro. 8). Starke emends to <TA> (to be sure, the two signs are similar), thereby restoring as the object of some verb an accusative Kad!mun ... A-BA A-BA A-BI-YA "my forefather Kadmos," and apparently further takes the subject of the sentence to be the enclitic pronoun -as "he (sc. the king of Assuwa)," which is grammatically impossible (as Andrew Garrett [see esp. "Hittite Enclitic Subjects and Transitive Verbs," Journal of Cuneiform Studies 42 (1990, publ. 1991): 227-42] has shown, building on an observation of Calvert Watkins). (5)