Author: Stephan Blum, Research associate, Institute for Prehistory and Early History and Medieval Archaeology, University of Tübingen

Warning: this article contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Ten years at Troy. Ten more lost at sea. When Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca – in Homer’s poem and again, played by Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan’s new film – he doesn’t walk through the door and say who he is. He lies. He invents […]

Archaeologists have found something unexpected inside a 1,600-year-old Roman-era Egyptian mummy: a fragment of Homer’s Iliad. It wasn’t placed beside the body, but inside the mummy’s abdomen. But the real surprise isn’t just where the fragment was found. It’s how it got there. To understand, we must go back – to the Iliad itself, and […]

Imagine a city that thrived for thousands of years, its streets alive with workshops, markets and the laughter of children, yet that is remembered for a single night of fire. That city is Troy. Long before Homer’s epics immortalised its fall, Troy was a place of everyday life. Potters shaped jars and bowls destined to […]

Sometimes the seeds of collapse are sown in the very soil of prosperity. Beneath the ancient city of Troy’s shining walls, the earth quietly cracked under the weight of its ambition. When we think of environmental destruction today, images of oil rigs, coal plants or plastic islands come to mind. But long before industry, ancient […]

Somewhere between hero and hustler, family man and philanderer, king and con artist, Odysseus is one of ancient literature’s most complex figures. In the Iliad, he is the mastermind behind the Trojan horse. In Homer’s Odyssey, he is the protagonist of a ten-year journey home – one that sees him encounter gods, monsters, temptations and […]

Wine drinking in ancient Troy was not restricted to the upper classes, as has long been supposed – something our new research has established for the first time. Colleagues at the University of Tübingen and I have discovered that wine was also enjoyed by the common folk, independent of upper-class celebrations and religious rituals. In […]