Where Troy Once Stood

Where Troy Once Stood is a 1990 book by Iman Jacob Wilkens that argues that the city of Troy was located in England and that the Trojan War was fought between groups of Celts. The standard view is that Troy is located near the Dardanelles in Turkey. Wilkens claims that Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, though products of ancient Greek culture, are originally orally transmitted epic poems from Western Europe. Wilkens disagrees with conventional ideas about the historicity of the Iliad and the location and participants of the Trojan War. His work has had little impact among professional scholars. Anthony Snodgrass, Emeritus Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University, has named Wilkens as an example of an "infinitely less-serious" writer. The title of his book comes from the Roman poet Ovid: "Now there are fields where Troy once stood..." (Latin: Iam seges est, ubi Troia fuit..., Ovid, Heroides 1.1.53) Wilkens argues that Troy was located in England on the Gog Magog Hills in Cambridgeshire, and that the city of Ely refers to Ilium, another name for Troy. He believes that Celts living there were attacked around 1200 BC by fellow Celts from the European continent to battle over access to the tin mines in Cornwall as tin was a very important component for the production of bronze. In fact, Homer names the attackers of Troy as Achaeans, Argives and Danaans, not Greeks. Wilkens further hypothesises that the Sea Peoples found in the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean were Celts, who after the war settled in Greece and the Aegean Islands as the Achaeans and Pelasgians. They named new cities after the places they had come from and brought the oral poems that formed the basis of the Iliad and the Odyssey with them from western Europe. Wilkens writes that, after being orally transmitted for about four centuries, the poems were translated and written down in Greek around 750 BC. The Greeks, who had forgotten about the origins of the poems, located the stories in the Mediterranean, where many Homeric place names could be found, but the poems' descriptions of towns, islands, sailing directions and distances were not altered to fit the reality of the Greek setting.