Helen of Troy by Bettany Hughes offers a panaromic romp across the the Eastern Mediterranean between the end of the Bronze Age and the cusp of the Age of Iron. Hughes, a historian by training, inserts her own insights as to what it must have been to be a woman of the Achaeans within the framework of archaeological consensus. I say archaeological rather than historical because Hughes' canvas offers few written clues as to its mental and emotional texture, the Bronze Age Greeks used literacy only as a tool of accounting, not of storytelling. This is the greatest weakness, and strength, of Helen of Troy. On the one hand the author is free to pursue her own flights of fancy, but occasionally they seem unmoored from the plausibilities and probabilities which constrain more literarily enriched time periods. Nevertheless, she draws upon the richer Hittite archives to offer an "outsider" perspective which nevertheless illuminates the nature of the folk of Ahhiyawa, especially when buttressed by the surprisingly accurate oral tradition exemplified by Homer and Hesiod, as well as inferences from the copious material remains left by the Mycenaeans. Finally, I must note that Helen of Troy is not just about the Bronze Age princess who might have lived. Rather, Bettany Hughes explores both the idea and archetype of Helen, the man-eating witch whose beauty drove men to madness and induced forgiveness.
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At my URL is, among other things, a review of two books on the bronze-iron transition. In a word, iron was more a marker of change than a cause.
As I remember, the Homeric poems were produced during the heroic Dark Age (ca. 800 BC) which followed the collapse of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations (ca. 1200 BC). They are set in what was to the Homeric Greeks a distant legendary past, but the action resembles that of the period of disunity of Homer's time and immediately before.
Have you seen the TV prog related to the book? Dunno if it was screened in the US. I didn't absorb much of the 'history' because I was too busy looking at Bettany Hughes. She looks especially good on horseback.
i looked on bit torrent....
Yes, I saw it on the local PBS station in San Francisco. My memory is it was longer than an hour. A few things were interesting, such as the recreation of what "Helen", high ranking women of the era, looked like. But the focus was not on approaches that interest me a great deal.
Speaking of what interests me. razib, if Bronze Age Greece/eastern Mediterranean interests you, I'd love to see you and your readers talk about it. I'm only generally knowledgeable but my next reading in the area will be technical and are already purchased.
The PBS website is likely to sell DVDs of the program.
i might talk about it more. i've had a long interest in the mycenaeans.
To generate curiosity, I'll mention what drew me to this time and place initially was learning of the 500-year-long dark age between Bronze-age and classical Greece.
I now know there's an archaeological record in Greece of a north to south destruction of the mainland citadels over a few years. Nothing equivalent replaced them.
There was a similar catastrophic collapse of all eastern Med. civilizations, and the sophisticated trading network between them, in a couple decades. One of the few [only?] pieces of evidence of events are Egyptian records of one or two huge battles off the Levant/Sinai in which they defeated the "sea peoples". They reference a huge fleet moving south along the coast with a large body of people in parallel on land, including [I think] families.
My National Geographics are not easily accessible, but within the last 5 years it did a multi-issue story on Bronze Age Greece. It had the magazine's typical detailed artist reconstruction of Mycenea and Troy and a great separate map. One side showed the migration routes and timing of refugees fleeing the various areas of Bronze Age Greece as they collapsed. And where they went. And that most places these refugees brought their culture too became the seeds of classical Greece outside the mainland. Some went beyond and fled as far as the Levant. The Bible cites them as one of the coastal peoples but I don't remember which.
And I've had a long interest in the Minoans.
One last item. When that great invention, the alphabet, reached Greece, specifically, I think, cities in Asia Minor, the oral myths passed through 500 years were written down by Homer. I believe now Homer is considered a group of storytellers, or at least the two texts have been ID'd as having strong evidence of indivdual authors, even if in the chain of oral tradition.
It's now know where the alphabet originated and from what -- a small tribe in the northern Sinai adapted heiroglyphics, using an Egyptian symbol who's initial sound represented a phoneme in their own language. A symbol of an apple equals the sound for "a". Over time the symbols got abstracted and the idea moved up into the Levant.
There's also a cool science story about an archaelogist[?], a woman, figuring out how written language got started in the fertile crescent [the first such in the world]. She has mounds of evidence because it was already dug up, in the thousands. The data was well known but nobody put it all together.
[Somwhere on my drive I can find an address from 3 or 4 years ago for a site I found which is a detailed walk-through photographic tour through the palace at Knossos on Crete.]
I'll stop here.
Speaking of the Minoans, I would definitely enjoy seeing Bettany Hughes in Minoan costume.