With last week’s release of The Odyssey, powerhouse director Christopher Nolan’s critically acclaimed film adaptation of the Homeric epic, Greek history and mythology is on everyone’s minds. An interesting local connection can be made between the famed ancient city of Troy, where the king of Ithica, Odysseus, fought in the Trojan War, and the University of Cincinnati—all thanks to late classics professor and archaeologist Carl W. Blegen.
In The Odyssey, the Greeks—led by Odysseus—hid inside a 40-foot wooden horse, discovered and claimed by the Trojans, in order to gain entrance to their city of Troy.
From 1932 to 1938, Blegen directed the University of Cincinnati excavations of the mound of Hisarlik, a hill and surrounding area in the Çanakkale province of Turkey widely believed to be where Troy once stood. Blegen, who started working at UC in 1927, participated in several other excavations in Greece before this one.
“Blegen’s archaeological focus was on the period of ‘prehistory,’ which means ‘before written history,’” says Dorothy and Marion Rawson Professor of Classical Archaeology Kathleen Lynch. “We have to deduce history from archaeology, the ebbing and waning of sites and from the artifacts humans made and used. Blegen was very careful, but he also sought to understand the human past. Why did people live the way they did?”
Image courtesy Wikicommons
Blegen, archaeologist Marion Rawson, and their team chronicled their discoveries at the site through hundreds of photographs that now sit in UC’s digital archive of Troy. Featured in the archive are 19 albums of archaeological discoveries, including antiquities and structures, as well as Blegen’s thorough field notes and financial ledgers from the project. Over 9,300 scanned photographs and more than 100 excavation notebooks fill up the digital archive.
“Because the records are from the 1930s, and because they were not meant to be kept, many are acutely fragile,” says UC junior research associate and classics archivist Jeff Kramer. “This reason, and because we wanted to share such a rich documentary history of an important excavation at a world-renowned site, is why we scanned more than 9,300 photographs and more than 100 excavation notebooks.”
Hisarlik was first heavily excavated by German businessman and archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s, where he discovered nine different archaeological layers of Troy, which was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt during 4,000 years of settlement. These layers, referred to with Roman numerals (i.e. Troy I), each correspond to a city built on the ruins of the previous.
On subsequent excavations in 1882 and 1890, Schliemann was joined by German archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld, who later returned to collaborate with Blegen on the UC excavation. Blegen’s most significant finding was that Troy’s nine levels could be further divided into 46 sublevels. Lynch says that Schliemann wanted to excavate the site to find evidence that Homer’s epics were based on true stories, but Blegen’s excavations were more scientific.
“Blegen brought with him advanced archaeological techniques he had honed on his many excavations in Greece during the 1920s and 1930s,” says Lynch. “He purposefully left much of the site unexcavated so that future archaeologists could explore the site with newer techniques and tools.”
Image from "Cincinnati Enquirer," December 4, 1955
Lynch participated in a second UC excavation from 1988 to 2002, directed by then-classics professor C. Brian Rose. The Cincinnati team was responsible for studying and publishing the “post-Bronze Age” finds at Troy.
In Homer’s Iliad, Troy is the site of the 10-year siege by a coalition of Greek states, called the Trojan War, which remains one of the most important events in Greek mythology. This war was the claim to fame for several mythological heroes and figures, such as Achilles, Agamemnon, Helen of Troy, and Odysseus.
Nolan’s The Odyssey adapts Homer’s other epic poem of the same name, which follows Odysseus’s journey home after winning the Trojan War. The film features an ensemble cast led by Matt Damon as Odysseus, and was the first feature film ever to be shot entirely on IMAX 70 mm film cameras. The Iliad was loosely adapted into the 2004 film Troy, starring Brad Pitt as Achilles.
While researchers of the 18th century had largely rejected the story of the Trojan War as fable and myth, the discoveries made by Blegen, Schliemann, and Dörpfeld at Hisarlik reopened the question of if a real battle took place.
However, this isn’t the only connection Blegen or UC has to an ancient Greek city. After his time at Troy, Blegen began an excavation that uncovered the Palace of Nestor in Pylos, Greece, in 1939. The palace was an important center in Mycenaean Greece (1750 to 1050 BC, during the Bronze Age), and is named after Nestor, the king of Pylos and side character in both of Homer’s poems. Blegen’s work at the palace resumed after World War II in 1952 until 1966, even after he retired from teaching in 1957.
Image from "Cincinnati Enquirer," December 4, 1955
The archaeological site is the best-preserved palace from the Mycenaean period, and many of Blegen’s findings are housed in the Archaeological Museum of Chora in Messenia, Greece. In the Odyssey poem, Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, travels to Pylos to ask King Nestor if his father survived the Trojan War. This scene was omitted from the new film adaptation, but nevertheless, parts of the movie were filmed in Pylos.
Pylos has recent ties to UC as well. In 2015, an international team of researchers led by UC senior research associate Sharon Stocker and Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology Jack Davis uncovered a previously undisturbed tomb of a Bronze Age warrior in Pylos. Davis and Stocker, who are husband and wife, were continuing Blegen’s work in the area when their team discovered an intact adult male skeleton and 1,400 objects including weapons, jewels, armor, and silver and gold artifacts. The 3,500-year-old grave, still intact, was named the Griffin Warrior Tomb after an ivory plaque with a griffin found between the skeleton’s legs.
This find was significant because of the displays of wealth in the tomb, which dated back to 1500 to 1450 BC. This was a time when mainland Greece was being shaped by close contact with the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete, often regarded as Europe’s first advanced civilization. But it also continued Blegen’s legacy of uncovering foundational Greek history and making significant archaeological contributions for UC.
Image courtesy Wikicommons
“Stocker and Davis’s discovery is one of the most important in Greece since Blegen’s discovery of the palace,” says Kramer.
Blegen died in August 1971 at age 84 in Athens. He is the namesake of the Carl W. Blegen Library, home of UC’s Department of Classics and the Archives and Rare Books Library.
To Lynch, studying ancient Greece and stories like Iliad and Odyssey is important to see what humanity was like thousands of years ago. The ancient Greeks were some of the first to write stories incorporating human experience and emotion, and we continue to tell stories the same way today. Archaeology is what helps us connect to these past stories.
“We, as humans, try to explain our world through stories,” says Lynch. “We structure memories not just through description, but through an emotional narrative. Odyssey is much more than a man trying to find his way home; it is about how we have to leave home to understand home and family. Archaeology allows us to amplify through evidence of real, lived experience. It’s about how people lived in ancient times, and what mattered to them is not so different from what matters to us. That’s why a story written 3,000 years ago can still have relevance today.”
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