Talk:Troy

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).

Metuboy changes

Metuboy has made a string of changes. He is a new user with a talk page - not much on it - and no UP. He starts out well putting in some pics that spruce up the sections. For that reason I think he is not a vandal. But then he removes a bunch of data from the box. I'm not intrinsically opposed to such changes but he gives no reason for his changes. They just happen to be a lot of the additions that I made. Metuboy, are you aware of this discussion page? Can you give us an idea of why you are doing what you are doing? For now I am putting back the deletions. This is not oppositional, only asking for a rationale. Thank you.Botteville (talk) 23:46, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

I finished looking at Metuboy changes. Except for taking away most of the box and its data M. concentrates on picture layout. He brings in new pictures from commons. It looks good, except now the pictures don't have much to do with the text. I made but few changes. I suppose it is nothing I can't live with. Relevance is sacrificed for aesthetics. Maybe you can't always have both. Not enough pics for every aspect. Maybe someone else should comment. For the box, there is a lot of relevant data in it. I am opposed to cutting it, but as I say I would like to get M.'s reasons. An article should be both pleasing and informative. We need to keep the information.Botteville (talk) 03:21, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

Hmmm, the infobox is much too long. Entries should be far more terse. That UNESCO nonsense at the bottom should be cut for a start, and the essays on the height and area. There are rather too many pics in the top half, and two few in the bottom. Any excess of useful images can go in a one-line mini-gallery. Has he finished? Johnbod (talk) 03:33, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your speedy input. I don't know if he is finished or not. I see nothing more. In view of the fact that there are different ideas now I think we are justified in making changes. I expanded the box but I do not have any firm ideas on what should be in it. The box was intended to give scientific data such as physical dimensions. When you get a site like Troy, and not just a single famous artifact, the box can be pretty long. If we are going to cut it, there is the question of what should be cut. There might be some disagreement on that. I wouldn't worry about the cut data as we certainly will put that in elsewhere or in the Hisarlik article. It shouldn't be too far away, as people want to know, "hiw big is Troy?" Perhaps a question more relevant to your comment is what to do with the UNESCO site data. All UNESCO site boxes have this data. It was there before I started work. Do you know, is there a policy that UNESCO site boxes must have this data? I invite additional commenting from the community. For the pictures, well, I tend to agree with you. The pictures are pretty but some degree of relevance seems warranted. I note that your idea corresponds to mine about the concentration; i.e., a gallery. I started one of those for the walls but was limited by the disorganization of the pics in commons. I'm still working on commons organization so I have not been able to finish it. Well, the question as it is now developing is how to get an attractive AND informative lead-in. If you want to go ahead and try your hand with the ideas you mentioned I will not object. I welcome other comments. Meanwhile I will be working either in commons or some section of the article itself. Perhaps we will hear from Metuboy. This is live to him right now but later he will be forgetting all about it.Botteville (talk) 10:40, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

The UNESCO template is a disgrace and an outrage I gave up complaining about a decade ago, since the fanboys who added it everywhere couldn't see why anyone might want a few words describing or periodizing a site/building, but really needed to know what continent it was on, & the "inscription" date. All that is on the Unesco website of course. But no one will mind it being removed. Johnbod (talk) 15:48, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

After all this tension your reply gave me quite a belly laugh. I don't think that just because someone designed a template 10 years ago we are necessarily bound by it. Wikipedia is nothing if not innovative in presentation. That's the one area not tied to the experts in the field (whom I am really beginning to appreciate). I remember when a famous German administrator took a totally oppositional stand to side boxes (over 10 years ago). We see how that came out. Anyway thanks for communicating your true thoughts. For the pictures I do not know what to think. I will just leave that alone for a while, see what comes up. In fact I was done with the intro so ditto for the whole thing. I Still have not heard from Metuboy. Maybe he does not know we are here.Botteville (talk) 21:06, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes, if I had the energy I'd go round improving all X00 or X,000 WHS pages - I thought my efforts did get a couple of more useful fields added at Template:Infobox_UNESCO_World_Heritage_Site but I can't see them now. It really is a disgrace. Metuboy hasn't edited for 20 hours or so, but seems to have moved on. Anyway, there is consensus here to adjust his image changes. Johnbod (talk) 03:35, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

In fact, I see it's almost a decade ago I began my wholly unsuccessful attempts to sort the template out - see Template_talk:Infobox_UNESCO_World_Heritage_Site/Archive_1#Gives_altogether_the_wrong_information. Johnbod (talk) 03:42, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Yep, typical. To me the gist of the argument is what standard way to handle introductory data in all articles. To me it is more, how shall we design THIS article. Thousands of articles all done the same way are a bit boring. Earlier in my career here I used to experiment around a little to get a good-looking new design. Same problem. Students can't seem to think outside the box. They are looking for THE correct way to do it, an outcome of mass production. If you do things the way the teacher says to do it then you get an A. So Troy lay unexcavated further for 40 years even though there were serious questions. I'm not going to cast stones as I am not a guiltless party. The users standardized everything I did. I am not saying a standard article is necessarily bad. I confess my approach to this intro was pretty much reactive not proactive. How could I fix what was already there, etc. But, if you or anyone care to take a freer hand I've no obection. I will be concentrating on the missing stuff. I hope this reply is not too long.Botteville (talk) 18:32, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Maps

We have a suggestion from an apparently new editor to simplify the maps. The Europe maps come out and the Asia map goes in, a change that he made without including a reason. Fellow editor, it is part of the policy to put in reasons for your changes, but we don't have to play that game just to be playing games. I got no opinions, except that the map of all Asia is awfully large, and that Ataturk acted on a preference for his country to be European rather than Asian. What do you think, interested community?Botteville (talk) 12:34, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Reason reminder

The last few changes by fly-by editors, one unregistered, have not listed reasons for the changes. I agree with both changes but as I am working on this article still I would appreciate your following the convention and putting some sort of reason, please. It helps me and others evaluate the credibility of the change. In this last one I presume we don't need an explicit link when we have the blue link. Fine.Botteville (talk) 01:43, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

Çanakkale Boğazı

Unregistered user adds "Canakkale strait" without a reason. No history of any other changes. Since that is the Turkish name, it seems fair to me so I am not inclined to revert. To user: in the future please add reasons as is customary.Botteville (talk) 21:47, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Some serious problems

This article has some serious problems. It contains large sections that are almost completely irrelevant. For instance, there are the sections "Crimean War debacle" and "The 'Possidhon affair' and its aftermath," both of which are extremely lengthy and both of which seem to be completely off-topic. The sections are both talking about events going on the various Calverts' lives that have little to do with the excavations at Troy. In fact, the name Troy itself doesn't even occur once in either section. These sections need to be either removed entirely or drastically pared down. Some of the material could possibly be moved to the article Frank Calvert, but it definitely does not belong here. There is absolutely no reason to have a whole massive section in this article solely talking about a case of insurance fraud involving Frederick Calvert, especially since that section contains almost no citations whatsoever.

On top of this, there is the very serious problem that this article says almost nothing about the role of Troy in mythology and literature outside the Iliad. The Odyssey is only mentioned twice in the body of the article offhand. There's absolutely no mention of Sophocles or Euripides or any of the tragedies they wrote about the Trojan War. There is exactly one offhand mention of Aeschylus and there are only three offhand mentions of Vergil's Aeneid. There's no mention of the whole medieval legend of Troilus and Criseyde. There's a lot of really important stuff that's being totally left out here and a lot of really irrelevant stuff that's being treated in utterly excruciating detail. This article needs a drastic overhaul. Unfortunately, I don't really have time to rewrite Wikipedia articles anymore so I'm leaving this note for whoever finds it. —Katolophyromai (talk) 12:17, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

The subject of this article should be fairly strictly restricted to the history and archaeology; there are plenty of other articles on the Trojan War, Epic Cycle, and "the role of Troy in mythology and literature". At 157 raw kbytes the article is far too long already; the last thing we need is more big topics added. I agree there is too much on the Calverts - this should probably go to its own article, with a brief summary left here. Personally, I think all the "search for/ excavation history of" stuff should follow rather than precede a concise account of the history of the city as now understood through the latest archaeology. Or even also floated off. Johnbod (talk) 12:36, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

I made a reply below but I will make one here also. I agree with everyone, more or less, even though I wrote much of the article. There is a pretty serious problem no one has mentioned yet, and that is the size of this topic. This is only one small article to summarize libraries of books. The best scholarly minds have been working with might and main on the topic of Troy since the Iliad was first published. We're supposed to put all that in this article? Gee whiz. To address the critic above, there is no "history of Troy." We wish there were. There are basically two aspects, the legend, which is extensive, and the archaeology, which also is extensive. I don't think the legend goes here, as Johnbod surmised. The archaeology has two aspects also, the excavation process and the object excavated. It seems clear, the article was intended to cover the excavated object. Usually such articles also cover the excavation, but they don't have to. So, we can have "Troy", "Homeric Troy" and "Excavation of Troy." It begins to appear that we will need at least those three. However, it does not have to be that way! It can be any way we want it to be. I know we are all very busy. No one wants to get entangled in such a large territory. There is no right or wrong here, only what we want. in contrast to scientific articles. I notice the Calvert stuff has been rightly moved to the Calvert article. Obviously I am setting up to come back. I was the most hung up there, so that is where I probably start. I just wanted to clue you in on the magnitude of the magnitude and the problem of the problems. As for the detail, I suppose Wikipedia would be very short and very useless (like most of the web sites) without any detail. That is what we are here for, the detail, the thing the devil is supposed to be in. That's all I have to say.Botteville (talk) 00:48, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

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)