Mythical or Real? Part 1

This will be acontinuing series for a while. I want to explore nine mythical places thatarchaeologists think may have actually existed.

History is rife withmythical lands, from the homes of legendary kings to the earthly abodes of godsand monsters. Past civilizations have dreamed of extraordinary places hiding inplain sight.

But while many peoplebelieve it unlikely that either Atlantis or Shangri-La was real, other mythsmay have more truth to them than anyone realized. A growing body of archaeologicalresearch suggests certain places—the Minotaur’s maze from Greek mythology;Vinland, the first North American Viking settlement mentioned in Norse sagas;Solomon’s Temple described in the Bible; and others—could have been more thanfables.

From western Turkey toJerusalem, and from coastal England to the Colombian Andes, evidence indicatesthat these nine mythical places may have really existed.

Let’s look at the firstone today.

1. Troy, Turkey – 1200 BCE

The city of Troy was atthe heart of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. It is one of themost legendary sites of classical Greek mythology. Fantastic details are woveninto the tales such as; the interference of the gods in the Trojan War, thehalf-divine heritage of the Spartan hero Achilles, and the gift of a woodenhorse filled with Greek soldiers. But these days, archaeologists believe someaspects of the stories were true.

Nearly 150 years ofexcavations at the site of Troy in modern Turkey have revealed that it wasoccupied for 4,000 years. Also, during the Late Bronze Age (when Homer’s TrojanWar allegedly took place), the Trojans began to prepare for an insurgence fromoutside.

Researchers are stilllooking for proof of the battle that raged outside the city’s walls for tenyears. If it’s there, it’s buried under 65 feet of sediment, which built upalongside the shifting Scamander (now the Karamenderes) River. It’s the mouthof that river that makes Troy so important in the first place. Troy was settledover and over again because if you controlled the harbor, you controlled theMediterranean and Aegean Seas.

Troy isn’t the onlymythological site discovered in the region. Apollon Smintheion is an imposingtemple built for the god Apollo on top of a settlement from the sixth centuryBCE. Antandros was an ancient shipbuilding settlement. These and the sacredforests of Mount Ida are all historical sites that correspond to placesmentioned in the Ilied and Aeneid. Together, they now make upTurkey’s Aeneas Route, a tourist corridor following the epic journey taken byAeneas, the father of Rome, after he escaped Troy’s sacking by the Greeks.