Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

by Guy Deutscher

Needless to say, all this was twelve years before Heinrich Schliemann actually found Troy on a mound overlooking the Dardanelles; before he excavated the palace of Mycenae, homeland of the Greek overlord Agamemnon; before it became clear that both Troy and Mycenae were rich and powerful cities at the same period in the late second millennium BC; before later excavations showed that Troy was destroyed in a great conflagration soon after 1200 BC; before sling stones and other weapons were found on the site, proving that the destruction was caused by an enemy siege; before a clay document was unearthed that turned out to be a treaty between a Hittite king and the land of Wilusa; before the same Wilusa was securely identified as none other than Homer’s Ilios; before a ruler of Wilusa whom the treaty calls Alaksandu could thus be related to Homer’s Alexandros, prince of Troy; before—in short—Gladstone’s feeling that the Iliad was more than just a quilt of groundless myths turned out to have been rather less foolish than his contemporaries imagined.