>> His team assumed the Trojan War happened
Stop there and try to prove that, first.
Stop there and try to prove that, first.
"Our hypothetical date for the Trojan War (1300–1200 BC) was needed to enable estimates of the environmental conditions (temperature, day-night cycle, etc.) but should not be considered as a contribution to the continuing discussions about the date of the War. Moreover, the Trojan War cannot be taken as a historical event, at least in the form described in the Homeric epics [...]. There is no way to know whether it reflects a single event or a period of turmoil that was triggered during an alleged migration from Greece to the eastern Aegean, a narrative that has been also put into question [...]"
Source: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Persia won't come into existence for at least 600 years if "the era" is Mycenaean Greece.
If you're talking about the region of the Persian homeland, there are zero records of invasions by Greeks of the era. It's on the other side of Mesopotamia from them. Troy is located in Anatolia both according to classical tradition and modern belief.
The best currently known evidence for the Trojan War is stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tawagalawa_letter
e.g. the distance between ancient Persia and Egypt significantly (~50%) larger than between Egypt and the Greek mainland and sea travel was much faster in the first place.
Distinctively Iranian languages would have existed at the time - in fact, distinctively Indic and Iranian languages are both documented for the period - but there was no polity identified with Persians and there was certainly nothing identified with Persia.
Terminology of the region tends to use different ethnic identifiers for different Iranian groups. (Medes / Persians / Parthians etc. etc.) This means that referring to "Persia" is a lot more specific than just a geographical designator. It's kind of weird, since in other historical contexts you do see ethnically similar groups treated as if they were the same.
But if you do want to just consider the people broadly construed, you're stuck with the fact that the relevant state in the late Bronze Age was Elam, which isn't Iranian at all, and "Persia" still doesn't apply.
If you want to consider the geographical extent of the Achaemenid Empire, then it included Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the homeland of the Iranian plateau, Afghanistan, and everything in between, and there are indeed lots of records of contact between the Sea Peoples and "Persia" by that definition.
But it's completely absurd to call that "Persia" in a Bronze Age context. We'd have to stop referring to "Egypt" at all! At the time, there was no relevant concept that would relate to "Persia", the regions were not politically or culturally unified, none of them including the ones on the Iranian plateau would have thought of themselves as "Persian"...
Is it necessarily that much (to an extent it is of course) more absurd than to call the Bronze Age Mycenaeans/Achaeans Greek though? Yes they were a lot more concentrated geographically and the link between them and classical Greeks/Hellenes is strong but still seems like an anachronism.
> If you want to consider the geographical extent of the Achaemenid Empire
Not sure why would anyone want to considering the 700 year gap.
> But it's completely absurd to call that "Persia"
Certainly, that why I wasn't sure why did they mention Persia in the first place.
> none of them including the ones on the Iranian plateau would have thought of themselves as "Persian"
Considering that the word is derived from Farsi/Farsi wouldn't the people living in the territory that became heartland of the Achaemenid empire have called themselves that?
If you want to refer to an Iranic group in the Bronze Age as "Persian", that's not what I meant to label as completely absurd.
Referring to Anatolia as "Persia" because Persia conquered it many centuries later, and then failed to maintain control, is completely absurd.
> Not sure why would anyone want to considering the 700 year gap.
Yes, agreed, but that was the only reason I could think of for the original claim about contact between Bronze Age Greeks and "Persia".
> Considering that the word ["Persia"] is derived from Farsi/Farsi wouldn't the people living in the territory that became heartland of the Achaemenid empire have called themselves that?
To the best of my knowledge, the ancient form is Parsa and "Persia" derives from that, not from the much later form "Fars". https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%90%8E%B1%F0%90%8E%A0%F0%9...
I don't know when that term originates. It's possible that people living in the region would have used a related term for themselves in the Bronze Age. It would have had nearly no political significance. It's also possible, as far as I know, that the term is more recent than that.
I also don't know whether Achaemenid Persians would have referred to themselves by a term of that nature. There's a huge ongoing fight on Wikipedia over what terms are appropriate as Persian endonyms. What appears to be beyond dispute is that the people tended to refer to themselves by a term cognate with Aryan or Iranian. (Though when the Parsees leave for India, a thousand years later, they end up being called Parsees.) If you know more about this, I'd like to hear it.
Yeah, that was the entire point of my initial comment. To be fair I don't think I was able to contribute much besides that and of course I agree overall with what you're saying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy
also there are burned remain, anti-chariot defensive works, and bronze arrow heads radio carbon dated to the right era.
That should suffice to underline the uncertainty, from a purely scientific point of view, of what, exactly, was found by Schliemann. My opinion is that this man has caused no end of damage to any attempt to find the historical truth, if any, of the Homeric epic. I've had a few fights with fellow Greeks who were convinced that Schliemann really-really found Troy, the actual city from the Iliad, which was a true story then. A friend once told me that not only Troy was found, but that it was "seven cities", as Troy is described in the Iliad; most likely a reference to the multiple layers of ruins at the place excavated by Schliemann. Some of whom were indeed destroyed by fire, suggesting war, if memory swerves, but not all and in any case there have been so many wars in the thousand years since the first city was built there that we might as well assume it was aliens who first destroyed it.
... which some people inevitably will.
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[1] Some of the history of those excavations is on wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy#Excavation_history
The rest I know by dint of being born Greek and having read my fair share of ancient history (extracurricularly, obviously) as a child. I might misremember some things.