Communications are a Bit Rocky (with Caleb Howells too)

Was Homer’s Troy Ruled by the Assyrians?
Caleb Howells | 8 Sept. 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I1lS2-E56A

1:03 Barring your proposal of placing Troy in the Iron age and closer to Homer ... my view is, first Hattusa was destroyed (with possible Trojan involvement) and then Troy itself was temporarily destroyed and permanently joined to the Ionic Greek world.

May I remind that the famous Trojan war was not the first conflict between Mycenaean Greece and Troy, it seems that Priamos means "hostage" in Greek (correct me if I'm wrong) and got that nickname when Hercules took him hostage in an earlier war, when he was a boy.

As to the earlier war, I have no doubts that Hittites were involved.

2:37 I've noted that too.

With the exception of the word, presumably Myc. Greek *hethos and then by dissimilation of aspiration in Classical Greek ethos.

The possibly oldest and crudest meaning being "duty" or "taxation" ...

Hittites were forgot because they were plundering some guys with too much taxes. Damnatio memoriae, except for the Bible and one Greek word preserving the memory one tried to erase.

4:17 I would place Ninus in carbon dated 6000 / 3000-ish BC.

6000-ish ... Historia scholastica considers him a contemporary of Sarug.

3000-ish ... he is credited with having initiated idolatry over grief of his father Belus. Idols, specifically of Ishtar, come to the foreground in Mesopotamia around 3000-ish BC.

In both cases obviously carbon dated.

5:05 Assyria can have after taking over the Hittite heartland have taken on all Hittite loyalties as claims, and retroactively branding them as Assyrian ones.

30 kings, from Ninus. I'll go with the real historical years of Sarug, born 2295 BC. Nineve was destroyed in 612 BC. 1683 years.

Now 22/30 * 1683 = 1234, and so many years after 2295 = 1061 BC. One century off traditional date of 1180 BC.

5:25 Can Plato be dependent on Ctesias?

[All ensuing comments are lost]

6:13 Sure. But I obviously dispute that the actual Ninus lived in the 1300's BC.

Ninus and his father Belus are tied to a story in which Ninus invented idolatry over the statue of his dead father Belus.

And if I give the medium time for 22 kings out of 30, it's 1061 BC, a pretty good match for Troy destroyed in 1179 BC, 120 years earlier.

What's the time for each king on my view? 1683 years = 1683 / 30 = 56.1 years per king. Now, that's not realistic for the times of the Trojan war, and one could imagine that kings have been forgotten or interregna overlooked, perhaps deliberately so. It is more realistic for times back near Sarug.

Tukulti-Ninurta I (1243 f.Kr.-1208 f.Kr.). 1243 to 612 = 631 years = 631 / 30 = 21 years per king. Realistic as far as it goes, but why would Ctesias have come across people who forgot about his father Salmanassar, who must on any view have been pretty famous?

8:03 Some have said Cadmus is a myth and Herodotus was wrong in crediting him with the Phoenician letters.

Some have said the Greek alphabet is older than we thought.

Archeology doesn't quite prove that Thebes ever was a Phoenician enclave, Bronze Age or later. Herodotus can have been wrong in crediting Cadmus with the Greek Alphabet.

8:59 I would say that the Ethiopians in the Trojan war actually point to Hittite times.

How so?

My theory is, Hittite memories of Kadesh were mixed with Trojan memories of the War.

However, in Kadesh, Hittites were fighting Egypt and may have had Ethiopian allies. So little battle-field archaeology exists, this Ethiopian presence can't be ruled out.

Later, when one deliberately forgot about Hittites and their name got nobler connotations than taxation, these memories were reattached to the Trojan war.

I need to go back to the video* with Mary Bachvarova (channel Lantern Jack interviewing her) to get back to whether there was a Hittite version of the Iliad.

[tried to add:

Also, apparently Assyrians never conquered Ethiopia, so the info in Ctesias is spurious, i e garbled info.]

* A Hittite Version of the War of Troy?
Lantern Jack | 28 Nov. 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ao2sps9bR4

Homer's Hittite Background

On Homer's Trojan War · Homer's Heritage · Homer's "Illiad" as it was misspelled - a Quoran asked on accuracy · Homer's Hittite Background

From Hittite to Homer
by Mary R. Bachvarova (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Hittite-Homer-Mary-R-Bachvarova/dp/1108994105/

A Hittite Version of the Trojan War?!
Lantern Jack, 28 Nov. 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ao2sps9bR4

1:13 ObjectionS, your honour.

1) Hattusha might have ended prior to the Trojan war.
2) Hattusha sometimes had a tense relation to Troy, and Greeks didn't exactly lay territorial and sovereign claims to Troy.
3) Walter Leaf argued BOTH Troy AND Achaean Greece were "satrapies" under Hattusha. That would make the Trojan war a civil war within the Hittite Empire ... but this was argued before we could say Hattusha ended c. 20 years before the Trojan War.

13:21 There is one Greek word that could originally mean "Hittite" ethos - the original meaning being "tax" or "duty" in "tax/customs" sense ... Heth would become Eth by dissimilation of aspiration.

And obviously, if Hittites were tax collectors either in Greece or even just Troy, one can very readily understand why the memory was erased, only the Bible recalls them.

Similarily, assume Babel was a real event, a real fiasco for the first empire builder, and there is very probably a deliberate erasing of the memory, and - again - only the Bible recalls it.

34:30 Milawata letter - I look it up and find it's from c. 1240 BC.

Since Troy was destroyed in 1179 BC, this letter would be talking about an earlier conflict, which might have led up to the Trojan War.

Tawagalawa letter - c. 1250 - would have been about "avoiding the Trojan war" - which would have been more feasible while Hattusha remained a power.

34:39 "If you want to believe in a Trojan war, have it it!"
34:47 "Troy six was destroyed in 1300 maybe, but that probably was an earthquake."
34:57 "Troy seven A was destroyed seemingly in some kind of war in 1180, that would be too late for the Hittites"

Exactly - too late for the Hittites and the carbon 14 date matches the historic date according to Eratosthenes.

1200 destroying Hattusha would be the reason this war is not recorded in Hattusha.

Apart from Greeks picking the part of looters for themselves, why not believe them if they inculpate themselves, we also have the fact that Achaean unified Greece breaks down some of these times, and - well, the ship catalogue seems too boring for simple story telling and also a great explanation of how local loyalties then came to take the upper hand over a disappearing central authority.

49:52 Resuming the discussion,
1) the professor Mary Bachvarova concentrates on epics of a certain type (some of which unhistorical, like destruction of Akade) being present in a melting point of oral traditions, like the ones recorded for some reason by Hittites
2) she states that the walls of fallen Troy were nearly immediately objects of veneration
3) that Greeks came to venerate them too
4) that festivals of oral performances came to form epic traditions
5) and the one in Miletus helped the transition from Aeolia to Ionia.

Miletus as well as Troy certainly adored Apollo.

She refuses to identify the events of the actual war leading to the fall of Troy VIIa with the events in the Greek tradition of Trojan war, but she also refuses to disidentify them.

She notes that different versions of epics exist in relation to different audiences - and that a mixed audience, pro-Greek and pro-Trojan, is necessary to understand the focus of the Iliad.

All this is perfectly compatible with Homer assembling to a whole, focussed on Achilles and Hector, epic traditions starting with the actual war of Troy.

It can be noted, it is not easy to prove destruction of Akkad non-historic.

The location of Akkad is unknown.

Two explanations could be:
a) it was destroyed, as claimed by the epic
b) it was renamed Babilu, after Sargon had conquered an earlier Babilu in what's now Turkey (Çinar).

A compromise could be, it was destroyed, and its rebuilding was named Babilu.

52:36 So, an epic formula about "steep Wilusa" recorded in Hittite as an incipit matches an epic formula in Homer "steep Ilion" ... (Ilios ap' eine) ...

This would mean, after the war, the method of epic performance being already in place, and formulas about Ilion too, the memory could quickly crystallise into epics.

We don't have an uncontrolled oral transmission, which would end up like a telephone game, but one controlled by the confiding of it to specialists.

Susan Sherratt was in 2010 publishing THE TROJAN WAR: HISTORY OR BRICOLAGE?
in Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies
Vol. 53, No. 2 (2010), pp. 1-18 (18 pages)
Published By: Oxford University Press
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43655704

I think the question is posed both right and wrong.

The right part is, not involving "symbol" or "fable" as an alternative.

The wrong part is, putting history and bricolage as mutually exclusive.

In this case, it is very probable that history was highly contaminated by bricolage from epics about other historic (or sometimes non-historic) events.

I have myself argued some Anatolian (originally Hittite) nobility being absorbed into the nobility that was audience for Homer's and pre-Homeric epics, and that scenes originally in battle of Kadesh found their way into a war purporting to be just the Trojan one.

As the memory of the Hittites was actively suppressed, this is even probable. A noble commemorating an ancestor fighting at Kadesh in that case couldn't name the locality Kadesh. He had to relocate the story into a non-Hittite (at least purportedly) context.

Another formula is by Mary Bacharovna traced to between 1150 and 1050 - in other words soon after the actual destruction of Troy VIIa.
Iliou proparoithen
Iliou has to be four syllables, I-li-o-o, with first I long, and last o naturally short, but involved in a long syllable by position, before pr- in proparoithen.

53:59 "at the point where contraction between like vowels and adjacent syllables is starting to happen in Greek"

In other words, after -oio had become -o-o, but before it had become -ou.

What if the formula is even earlier, while -oio generally remained -oio, but in this case it is -o-o because of dissimilation since we have -i - just before the genitive ending?

The Mycenaean Greek ending was -oio, but for the words in Classic -iou, do we know Mycenaean Greek had *-ioio or could in theory Mycenaean Greek have had -io'o instead, to avoid repeating the yod sound?