Talk:Troy: Difference between revisions

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 14 January 2019 and 8 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): ColeS777 (article contribs).

why is the "crimean war Debacle" and anything not directly related to Troy itself even in this article?

It seems completely extraneous and worthy of it's own wikipedia article — Preceding unsigned comment added by JKF011 (talk • contribs) 21:33, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

I agree with this user and the other discussing the problems of discussing the Calvert family in this article. While this family was certainly important for understanding the excavation of Troy, they should not consume such a large portion of the text. The "Possidhon affair” section is entirely superfluous and unrelated to Troy itself, only tangentially through the Calverts. — Preceding unsigned comment added by WorldlyBecket (talk • contribs) 19:56, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

is this a Calvert Family article?

After 10 minutes of reading I know more about the Calvert family than Troy and I consider the majority of the information on the Calvert family completely irrelevant to the topic. Which should be Troy. Not the Calvert folk. MHCTruter (talk) 19:42, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Now look at the article as of 30 December 2019 which had less about Calverts. Do you want to revert to that? Or do you have no proposal? Peter Gulutzan (talk) 01:21, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

I was also bothered by this content which i consider out of scope, so I have summarized it here and moved the bulk of the content to Frank Calvert romnempire (talk) 04:07, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

This talk section duplicates Talk:Troy#Some_serious_problems, which gives +2 to this scope criticism romnempire (talk) 04:10, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm afraid the fault is mine. Originally there was not much on the Calverts. Calvert affairs of course are critical for understanding who Frank Calvert was, what was his relation to the site, and how Schliemann got it. I did a lot on Calverts but I suddenly realized it was way too much for the Troy article and properly belonged under the Calverts. I wanted to think it over so I stopped and got onto something else. Now, I fully intended to get back on Troy and change the material, but I got off on other things. I was hoping someone else would take a hand on it. So, I am quite glad you involved yourselves. I did thank you publically. At some point I WILL get back on the articles. There was more to say. Meanwhile I back you totally on this. I only request you do not delete any referenced material. This changing the location of material has happened quite a bit over the years. One tries to do a good job but says too much about topics that should have other articles, but don't yet. I used to split articles. Well ciao, carry on, good job.Botteville (talk) 17:32, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Information from Rüstem Aslan of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University

Seeing as Hisarlik is in a state of continual excavation I would advise that the page contains sections derived from recent publications of the current head of archeology Rüstem Aslan of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University. As a “current and future studies” section perhaps. 2A02:A445:79E2:1:35E3:2E63:E4BF:9525 (talk) 16:57, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

I don't know who you really are but this suggestion sounds like a sales pitch. We could put more of Mr. Aslan's results and theories in if we knew what they were. I haven't seen much on the Internet, mainly the mere notice that he was taking over and that now foreign excavators were being excluded. I think you might be taking us for more glorified than we really are. We have to go by past publications, can't go off on our own. This is not a scholarly article or a scholarly source. I hope you are not Mr. Aslan, as then we would be obliged to ignore what you say totally, as one is not allowed to plug one's own stuff.Botteville (talk) 01:07, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Theories on timescales; 10 years in Homer vs 100 years in archeology

Troy VI shows archeological evidence of destruction at 1275BC. Troy VIi (formerly called Troy VIIa) shows archeological evidence of destruction and fire at 1190BC. Are there any literary sources that aim to link the somewhat out of place and extremely long duration of the siege as described in Homer (10 years), with a conflation through the centuries afterwards, of the actual timescale of repeated destruction at Troy (100 years) ? 2A02:A445:79E2:1:F8E9:4B4A:2FF9:EDFB (talk) 02:26, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

You're taking these dates too seriously. Unless there are tree rings involved archaeological dates are only rough estimations; no one knows what the calendar dates really are. People like Blegen and other scholars just toted up the dates by a variety of sources and methods and expressed a preference if they were going to. Look up absolute dating and relative dating. But let's look at your language: "the somewhat out of place and extremely long duration of the siege." Who are you to conclude that? The scholars don't. Don't know enough.Botteville (talk) 01:19, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

History of Troy tag

What do you mean, what history? Troy has no history, that is the whole point. I don't see any basis for calling this section unencyclopedic in content and style, and I don't see any explanation here. I do not think you looked up the blue links. The style is mine and I use the same style throughout. Did you get the right tag? If you're not happy with the detail, that is because there ain't any. We can't go to the town hall and look up the records of the founding fathers of Troy. Sorry.Botteville (talk) 01:29, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Latest edits

P Aculeius, my edits aren't POV, they're an extremely laborious attempt to bring this article in line with current scholarship. I appreciate you joining that effort and catching my errors (surely there's more). I also appreciate that part of your latest edit suggested a different way of addressing my concerns, as I did previously with one of your edits. Could we perhaps continue our work in that spirit?

Some comments:

• In retrospect, I agree with your removal of "fraudster", so thank you for that. I do recall Schliemann catching a fraud charge during his time in California, but you're right that it doesn't belong there without a reliable source. For similar reasons, I think we need to remove the reference to Schliemann using dynamite which you readded.

• "which Greek chronographers placed in the late 13th or early 12th century" I prefer this this text to the previous, for reasons you can infer from my edit summary. I won't revert for now, but I'd like to be confident that it's accurate as a general characterization of what Greek chronographers thought, as opposed to just Eratothsanes and Herodotus. Do you know of a source that makes this claim directly?

• For similar reasons, I'd like to keep the "better source" tag on the Iliad citation.

• Regarding the caption, I agree that the "claimed to have" wording might sound too negative about Schliemann. But the article shouldn't state outright that the treasure was found there since scholars aren't sure. Similarly, it shouldn't claim that finding Troy was Schliemann's childhood dream.

Botterweg14 (talk) 00:06, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

In the spirit of collaboration, let's see if we can agree on a way to address your concerns. I'll state at the beginning that I was only skimming the article based on another discussion occurring on Wikipedia, so I didn't go through it with a fine-toothed comb. These were just issues that stuck out to me.

• IMO it's fine to mention concerns about Schliemann's methodology and conclusions in the appropriate parts of the article, but they don't belong in the lead. I'm not expert enough to say whether his use of dynamite was significant enough to warrant inclusion—but I do know that 19th century archaeologists frequently employed very destructive techniques, and it's important to discuss them in that context. Like your questions about his reputation for honesty, his judgment about which layer most likely corresponded with the Troy of the Iliad, what his boyhood aspirations were, and whether the artifacts he attributed to his excavation actually came from Troy, these all might belong somewhere in Wikipedia. But we have to consider the weight of the discussions and their placement.

A discussion of Schliemann's background clearly belongs in the article about him, but what he did or didn't do in California seems to have almost no relevance to the article about Troy. Schliemann's archaeological judgments regarding Troy are fair game to discuss in this article; the fact that he was "a divorced man in his 40's" seems irrelevant, and likely to suggest to readers that his conclusions are less likely to have been correct due to flaws in his character or morals—not actually a legitimate basis for disputing those judgments in this article, although they may be tangentially relevant in the article about Schliemann.

• I seem to recall a long discussion—probably on the talk page, or one of its archives, of "Trojan War"—about the dating. And most of the dates favoured by the Greek chronographers seemed to fall within a reasonably short range. I may be wrong about the exact range, but I do know that Eratosthenes' dates fell within it, and became the most widely accepted, perhaps because Eratosthenes had a reputation for meticulous and logical reasoning. In this case, I was simply rewording the set of dates previously added; but that is flexible, and could be modified further, although I probably would exclude the outliers among the proposed dates and veer closer to Eratosthenes, without necessarily giving his dates as definitive.

• I'm not sure what better source there can be for the Iliad's description of Troy than the Iliad itself. In fact, that's the very best source possible. It may be that you can find other scholarly works that summarize the description—but they're really not necessary for a general description of the work's contents that nobody is likely to dispute. You're familiar with the Iliad and presumably some of the literature discussing it; do you regard the description as controversial? If the description accurately describes what the Iliad says, then a citation to one or more relevant passages should be fine. If it's likely to be disputed, then feel free to put a "better source" tag back on it—but other editors may disagree, and remove it (I will defer).

• The caption isn't the right place to debate whether the treasure actually came from Schliemann's excavation of Troy. You might consider rewording the caption so that it doesn't appear to comment on whether Schliemann accurately represented where the treasure came from. It'd be perfectly fair to discuss the treasure and what Schliemann said about it, and what other archaeologists have said about it, in the body of the article—as long as the discussion itself doesn't appear to be taking sides, or only presenting one point of view. This is the same issue with whether Troy VIIa should instead be called "Troy VIi", or at least viewed as a continuation of Troy VI (two slightly different issues)—it's an academic dispute, and the way it was phrased went beyond that and seemed to be saying that the ones who favoured "Troy VIi" were right, but unjustly forced to use the wrong terminology—really not a neutral way to present the debate.

• I'll quickly mention two other things that I edited concerning Schliemann and his conclusions. First, we can't really prove what he did or didn't imagine himself doing in his childhood. You may or may not find his account plausible, but if there's a dispute worth having, it goes in the article about Schliemann, not about Troy; the argument about whether he really dreamed of finding Troy when he was a child isn't that relevant to Troy. As for Schliemann's identification of Troy II as Homeric Troy, I believe elsewhere we have (can't recall in which article) that Schliemann later concurred in Troy VIIa being the most likely. And that's what we expect from scholarship in progress: one's first impressions will often be based on incomplete information and analysis. We don't expect people to get it right the first time when they're blazing the trail, so to speak. So while it's fair to say that he initially thought that Troy II ought to be Homeric Troy, it's not really fair to use that as a criticism of Schliemann as an archaeologist: any other archaeologist of the same period might have reached the same conclusion, only to be proven wrong as more information came to light and enabled a more precise dating of the various layers.

I hope this adequately explains the edits and the reasons I made them. Hoping you will agree with them, and use my feedback as a basis for continuing to improve the article, P Aculeius (talk) 01:03, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Okay, thanks, so it sounds like we don't actually disagree very much about the article. Unless someone writes a well-sourced "Schliemann" section that puts his shortcomings into context, I definitely agree that the article doesn't need to dwell on them. Where particular errors on his part are relevant in other sections of the article (e.g. dating of Troy II) I'm open to more charitable phrasing, though what's currently there doesn't seem hugely uncharitable to me.

Regarding sourcing, I think this is a topic where we need to hold ourselves to a high standard. Given the enormous amount of scholarship on the topic, it's extremely easy to accidentally misrepresent a superceded idea as the current consensus, a resolved question as an open one, or a sexy talking point as an actual scholarly claim. These issues were rampant in earlier versions of the article, and I sometimes caught myself making similar mistakes during my rewrite. I'm not hugely concerned about the article's description of Homer's description of Troy, but I'd sleep better if there was a secondary source that used a phrase like "regional power". But I am a bit concerned about the ancient tradition's dating of the war. I only recall the dates suggested by Eratosthenes and Herodotus, and those might simply be more salient since they line up with Troy VI/VII. So in this case, I think a citation really is essential to make sure the text is accurately describing the tradition. I don't have these worries about the Troy VI/Troy VII continuity thing, since the Bryce reference flatly states that this is the current view, and the other reference seem to agree. But I've rephrased per your comment, to keep the nomenclature issue separate from the substantive one. Botterweg14 (talk) 03:38, 5 October 2021 (UTC)