bunpeiris Literature

The Iliad. His mind fluttered; his fingers almost trembled. He was only eight years old & the epic narration of a war that had lasted no less than a decade held him,gripping tightly, at once with a pain and a pleasure in an unbearable state of being. Unbearable, for the reason, now it praises the gallantry of a hero; then it weeps at the death of the opponent of the hero. He sighs with relief when the hero makes a herculean effort to recover from the relentless assault and deals a mortal blow at his opponent in the nick of time; then he sighs again in sorrow when the darkness of death falls upon the opponent of his hero, for he too was somebody’s son, somebody’s father, somebody’s husband as his hero was. He went on reading. His young heart stirred. He felt his heart too heavy. The narration of relentless violence showed no mercy upon his little heart; to learn each killed had his mother & father waiting at home caused his eyes heavy with tears swelling in. But he wouldn’t give up. It
was midnight, his father was repairing a tape recorder; his mother was manually winding a radio transformer by means of a manual hand drill fixed horizontally onto a work bench; his four siblings were fast asleep. He was awake reading what must be read, before the dawn.He wouldn’t call off it for the following day, since the day after the following day, all of them would be in a day long journey on a locomotive train “Udarata Menike” [Sinhala: Highland Belle] powered by Canadian diesel electric engine leaving Colombo Fort to reach the highlandsanitarium, the military canton town of Diyatalawa, 47 km south of Sri Lanka Holidays Nuwara Eliya. It was December school vacation. Little did he know, herein his hands was a masterpiece. Little did he know that the was reading a lynch pin of the western canon. Little did he know it was the favorite book of Alexander the Great himself, his very first foreign hero. Little did he know what he had already been experiencing, was preciously what the original writer of the story had etched into immortality: the human soul in its duel
form; good and bad; the man’s violence upon man. Then on an equal footing was the conceptions of heroism and honour tied to the reality of tragedy. He was eight. He read the whole story cover to cover before the crack of the dawn and dreamt it night after night for a fortnight in the salubrious climate of Diyatalawa, one of the sanatariums encompassed in Ceylon Health Triangle of Sri Lanka. It was “Ranabima” [Sinhala: the battlefield], David Karunaratne’s Sinhalese translation of Homer’s “The Iliad”.Written bybunpeiris.

The city we call Troy, founded about 2920 BCE, was destroyed at least nine times and was home to various groups over its rocky history. The Greeks could be called the first “discoverers” of Troy because they founded the town of Ilion on the site after 300 years of abandonment, sometime around 700 BCE. They thought their Ilion was on the location of the legendary Trojan War.The city was abandoned about 1500 AD and forgotten. In 1868, German-American adventurer Heinrich Schliemann arrived at Troy’s location.He had heard the claim of Frank Calvert, an Englishman who was living there, that the hill called Hisarlik was likely to be hiding the ruins of Troy. After walking the site and reading the on a rooftop for two hours, Schliemann wrote, “I was fully convinced that it was here that ancient Troy had stood.” A wealthy man, Schliemann could pay for a big archaeological dig. However, the science of archaeology was very new, and Schliemann made mistakes. For example, he told the world about a set of beautiful artifacts that he labeled “The Treasure of Priam.”He even had his wife dress up wearing some of the lovely gold jewelry. Schliemann was sure that the treasure was from the Troy of the Trojan War.

After his death, Schliemann’s assistant Wilhelm Doerpfeld proved the treasure was part of Troy II, much earlier than the Trojan War could have been. Doerpfeld worked at Troy for many years, and it was he who identified the nine basic layers of the city, and labeled them with the system in Roman numerals that is still used today. Doerpfeld favored Troy VI as the fabled Troy. In 1932, he agreed to American archaeologist, Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati, to work on the site. Blegen and his crew kept full scientific records and used pottery to date parts of the site more accurately. It was Blegen who determined that Troy VII was the likeliest time for the Trojan War, based on evidence of burning and siege.So, is the discovered Troy the “real” Troy?

Scholars disagree on whether it’s the location of the war on which the legends were based. In fact, the legends may have been based on a series of wars, or on fragments of memory, or on imagined events.What we do know is that the Troy Schliemann, Doerpfeld, and Blegen rediscovered is real, and tells us a lot about how people lived over many centuries.

Troy is still being discovered today. Beginning in 1988, archaeologists from the University of Tübingen, Germany and the University of Cincinnati, under the direction of the late German archaeologist Manfred Korfmann, found many exciting things, including a Mycenean cemetery at Besik Bay, south of Troy, which suggested the landing place of the invading Greeks in the Trojan War. They found that the city extended out onto the plain, where fences and ditches kept enemies out, and found ample evidence of late layers built by the Greeks and Romans who themselves believed that the Trojan War had happened there, and was their own history.     http://cerhas.uc.edu/troy/q415b.html

Iliad is no longer an epic poem: it is history, that is since the discovery of Troy in Turkey

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