Mapping (or unmapping) Odysseus’ journey with an archaeologist

Reality or a realm of imagination

Despite decades of archaeological and scholarly research, there is no consensus on the route Odysseus took. While many episodes in The Odyssey are clearly mythical, scholars argue that some of them were inspired by the real geography and maritime world of the ancient Mediterranean.

Cline belongs to this school of thought.

“If you type into Google ‘map of Odysseus’s journey’, it’ll give you five or six or seven different maps, all telling you where these places are, but none of them is based in reality,” Cline says.

Odysseus and his soldiers fighting the Cicones, allies of the Trojans (Wikipedia)

“Occasionally, can we pinpoint places in the Odyssey. There’s one place where Odysseus tells what’s called the ‘Cretan lie’, where he lies about where he’s been and talks about having been in Egypt. There’s another bit — not in the movie but in the book — where Telemachus, his son, and Nestor, a Greek chieftain, talk about a silver bowl with gold inlay that was given to them by the king of Sidon. We know where Sidon is; it’s in modern-day Lebanon. So there are little bits and pieces like that.”

This uncertainty, Cline argues, arises because The Odyssey sits between two very different historical eras.

Homer is believed to have lived in the 8th century BCE (around 750–700 BCE), during the Iron Age, while the Trojan War he recounts would have taken place centuries earlier, between 1250 and 1150 BCE, in the Late Bronze Age. “The question is whether the people, places and objects, like chariots, that the Odyssey mentions belong to the Iron Age that Homer knew, the Bronze Age, or a combination of both?”

While Cline remains sceptical about pinning Odysseus’s wanderings to real places, he has far fewer doubts about the setting from which the story begins: Troy.

The occurrence of the Trojan War

What first drew Cline to archaeology was not Odysseus’s journey but the Trojan War itself — the conflict at the heart of Homer’s Iliad and the event that sets the stage for his The Odyssey.

When he was seven, Cline was given a copy of The Walls of Windy Troy, a biography of Heinrich Schliemann, the German businessman who used his fortune to excavate the ruins of ancient Troy. “That was when I decided to become an archaeologist, and I’ve worked on it my whole life,” he says.

Today, Cline is convinced that Troy existed and was located in northwestern Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey. He believes the city was ultimately destroyed by warfare and fire.

Penelope questions Odysseus to prove his identity (Wikipedia)

In his 2014 book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Cline argues that Troy’s fall was part of a much larger upheaval. Between circa 1200 and 1150 BCE, almost every major civilisation in the eastern Mediterranean collapsed in rapid succession, brought down by a combination of factors, including drought, climate change, internal rebellions and the breakdown of long-distance trade networks.

That transformation of the Mediterranean world, he argues, is precisely what makes it so difficult to map Odysseus’s journey onto real geography.

“It’s only in the 8th century, just before the time of Homer, that the trading networks get re-established. If you want to put Odysseus’s travels in that period, you can do it, but there are different players at that time. Egypt is no longer a major power. You’ve now got the Phoenicians and the Cypriots. The Mycenaeans are long gone. Nobody calls themselves a Mycenaean anymore. Now you’ve got the Archaic Greeks.”

Solving a myth

Cline argues that while archaeological discoveries have helped flesh out some facts, places, and objects about Odysseus’s journey, nothing can be said with certainty.

“You’re trying to solve a myth. You’re trying to solve a legend,” he says.

He compares the search to ongoing efforts to find evidence linked to biblical accounts, such as the Ark of the Covenant, Noah’s Ark and the story of Moses. “King Arthur is much the same.”

Even if archaeology cannot verify every episode of The Odyssey, it has helped reconstruct the world from which such stories may have emerged. Discoveries over the past century suggest that the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean was a highly interconnected world of trade, migration and cultural exchange. Mycenaean pottery, for instance, has been found at Troy, pointing to sustained contact between the Mycenaeans and the Trojans.

Cline argues that this network is one reason many of The Odyssey’s seafaring episodes make more sense in a Bronze Age setting than in Homer’s own Iron Age.

“I described the trade routes of the Bronze Age, where you’ve got Egypt trading with Greece, Assyria, Babylon and the Hittites up in Turkey. You’ve got Assyrians and Babylonians trading, the Hittites trading, and Mycenaeans sending their ships around. So we’ve got a lot of information from the Bronze Age. Odysseus would fit in pretty well with that time period, because if he’s living after the collapse around 1200 BC, this whole network of trading drops significantly.”

Despite decades spent studying the ancient world, Cline says Nolan’s film has only renewed his enthusiasm.

“I’m excited to watch it for the second time this week. As an archaeologist, ancient historian, classicist, whatever you want to call me, I am thrilled that so many people are paying attention to the ancient world.”