
Troy: Myth, City, Icon
FRANK L. HOLT
Naoíse Mac Sweeney
2018, Bloomsbury Academic, 978-1-47252-937-4, £19.99 pb.
No one, not even Homer, has ever tried to tell the whole story of Troy, but this slim volume comes incredibly close. The author guides us briskly through 5,000 years of fact, fiction and folklore. We walk the ruins of the city at the southeastern end of the Dardanelles in today’s Turkey in each of its physical iterations; we witness layer by layer the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann and others; we wade into the controversies surrounding those discoveries and weigh the theories spun from them; we wind up in the Troy of today with a broad understanding of how and why ancient lives and literatures affect us still. Travelers to the site of Troy need this book in their backpacks. For everyone else staying at home, reading this volume is the next best thing to being there.
You may also be interested in...
Work Reveals Common Ground Across Massive Desert
The Sahara wasn’t always a desert. Around 9000 BCE it was a bucolic expanse where animals and lush vegetation thrived.Child's Play: Reconstructing Everyday Life of Youth in Ancient Egypt
Egyptologist Amandine Marshall observes how the depictions of children created by Ancient Egyptians seldom illustrated their actual lives.Omani Author Zahran Alqasmi's Story About Life, Land and Honey
In his third novel, about a beekeeper living in Oman’s mountainous interior, local author Zahran Alqasmi grapples with a changing landscape around him.