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The Odyssey Is a Map. Here's Where It Leads. — Transcript

by Curtis Holland | Reviewing the Record · 4,280 words · 639 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:00Homer's Odyssey is one of the greatest
0:02stories ever told. But what if I told
0:04you the locations in it are real? I'm
0:07Curtis Holland, and I'm an independent
0:09historian who studies ancient history,
0:11ancient texts, and ancient symbolism
0:13through a scientific and first
0:14principles lens. And today, we're going
0:17to continue our conversation on the
0:19Odyssey, specifically the locations of
0:21Odysius travel and how they fit into our
0:23historical timeline.
0:30So, what did Homer actually know? I
0:32promised you in our last video that I
0:34would discuss the specific locations
0:36that he has Odysius travel on his way
0:38back from Anatolia to Greece. Now, if
0:41you were to take a look at a map,
0:43Anatolia, which is modern-day Turkey, is
0:46not a 10-year sail from Greece. Yet,
0:48Homer has Odysius traveling all across
0:50the Mediterranean, facing many trials
0:53and tribulations.
0:55Some of those are brought about by the
0:56gods. Some of those are brought about by
0:58Odysius and his men's own hubris. But
1:01that begs the question, what's the point
1:03of a long drawn out journey for a sale
1:06that you could functionally accomplish
1:07in days in antiquity? This brings us
1:10back to Strao, the author we spoke about
1:12in our last video, specifically his
1:15first book on geography. In it, he makes
1:18the claim that Homer is the first
1:19geographer and that each location on
1:21this journey encodes to a real place and
1:24he goes through them line by line,
1:26discussing exactly how he was able to
1:29determine where each location was in the
1:32real world. And this process becomes his
1:34default in assessing ancient myths and
1:36texts in order to find the locations as
1:38he builds his own geography. And as I
1:41mentioned before, Strao became one of,
1:43if not the most cited ancient
1:44geographers when it comes to modern
1:46archaeologists and historians. This
1:49means that implicitly the foundational
1:51geography of the ancient world, the
1:52world we claim to understand now, was
1:55built on top of a method employed by the
1:57ancient poet Homer. So what is the
1:59method? Well, let's do what Strao did.
2:02Let's take a look at the book and
2:04examine some of the locations of
2:06Odysius's journey. Now, I'm not going to
2:08include every location in the Odyssey,
2:09as that would make this a 1-hour video,
2:11but I am going to try to follow the
2:13basic order of events and spoilers for a
2:163,000-year-old text. If you haven't read
2:18it by now, I don't know what to tell
2:20you. Let's start with Troy. We've
2:22already touched on this. Troy, the city
2:24that everyone said was invented right
2:26until someone took it seriously and put
2:28a shovel in the ground. Real place, real
2:30war. The text was right. And that's the
2:33starting line. Now, let's see where the
2:35voyage goes. One of the first stops in
2:37the journey is the lotus eaters. In the
2:39poem, Odysius's men eat the lotus fruit
2:42and forget everything. They forget home,
2:44forget the mission. They just want to
2:46stay and eat. That sounds like pure
2:48fantasy. Except the lotus eaters weren't
2:50invented by Homer. The Greeks called
2:52them the Latphagai. They were a real
2:54people in a real place. Heroditus,
2:57another ancient Greek historian,
2:59describes them in his histories. They
3:00were living on the Libyan coast, eating
3:03a real fruit for which they got their
3:05name. The fruit itself has been
3:07identified as the wild juju bee, a
3:09thorny shrub with a berry sweet like a
3:12date that they ate year round and even
3:14made wine from. It was a real staple
3:16crop for the people living there. But
3:18here's the thing, nobody forgets home
3:21eating juju bees. However, the Egyptian
3:24blue lotus growing in the same corner of
3:26the world was known to cause minor
3:28psychedelic effects and was widely
3:30consumed in antiquity before itself
3:32vanishing from the Nile. And Herodotus
3:34isn't just passing along legend here.
3:36He's talking about a real people group,
3:38one the Greeks actually knew and met and
3:40had established trade relationships
3:41with. Fly the Elder, another ancient
3:44historian, puts them in the exact same
3:45region centuries later. And Strao gives
3:48you that location exactly, an island
3:51called Menanix, which is now called
3:53Derba off the coast of North Africa in
3:55the Gulf of Gabes. And so notice what we
3:58have. You have a real people in a real
4:01place eating a real fruit on a real
4:04coastline that you can go to today. And
4:07that's how mythology works. Tell a real
4:10story and embellish it a little bit to
4:12make it interesting. Now, hold on to the
4:14Gulf of Gabes. We're going to be coming
4:16back to it next. The island home of the
4:19Cyclops, the oneeyed maneating giant
4:22Polyphimis, who traps Odysius in his
4:25cave. And of course, this is the story
4:27everyone remembers. And it's also the
4:29part that sounds the most made up. So,
4:31what do we do with this? Well, let's
4:33start with the text. Because Homer
4:35doesn't hand you a fairy tale island. He
4:37hands you sailing directions. A harbor
4:40that you can run a ship straight into
4:42without tying it off. A freshwater
4:44spring at the head of it. A soft,
4:47well-watered meadow, a wooded island
4:50full of wild goats lying just offshore.
4:53And that doesn't read like literary
4:55invention. It reads like a real
4:57coastline that someone actually saw. So
5:00where is it?
5:01>> Well, Strao puts it in southeast Sicily,
5:04the country around Mount Etna and
5:06Leantini. Real geography. And in the
5:09same breath, he locates another people
5:10group right next door, the Lreonians.
5:14The cannibals who smashed Odysius's
5:16fleet with boulders. And Strao isn't
5:19reaching here. He's drawing on real
5:21ancient scholarship from the time.
5:23Thusidities, a hard-nured Greek
5:25historian known for intentionally
5:27stripping myth out of his own history,
5:29was writing 400 years before Strao even
5:31got a hold of this story. In it, he
5:33makes the claim that the Cyclops and the
5:35Legonians are real people groups, not
5:37monsters, and they're the oldest
5:39occupying the island. Now, he does say
5:42that he cannot vouch for who they were
5:44culturally or specifically, but the
5:47placement's already ancient even in his
5:49time. So, here's Strao's claims. two
5:52hostile populations in a real Sicilian
5:55territory. The kind of coast a Greek
5:57sailor had every reason to avoid. A sort
6:00of Bronze Age North Sentinel island. And
6:03that tracks as the late Bronze Age was
6:05known to have many people groups
6:07actively hostile to foreigners. Homer
6:10just takes the extra step and turns them
6:11into giants, embellishes the encounter,
6:13and keeps the real history underneath.
6:16Now, that's all fine and dandy, I hear
6:18you say, but here's the question. What
6:20about the one eye? Well, here we find
6:23Homer's not immune to literary
6:24borrowing. He turns to the north to a
6:27people group called the Aramispians.
6:30This was a Cythian legend of a people
6:32group known to have one eye recorded in
6:34a poem by Aristius called the Aramaspia.
6:37The Greeks had really creative names for
6:39their poetry. And Strao's read is that
6:42Homer borrowed the oneeyed motif, a
6:46oneeyed people that the Greeks already
6:47knew and mapped it into a real hostile
6:50people in Sicily. And it works because
6:52that legend is already wellnown. The
6:55audience hears one eye and immediately
6:57understands the type of people they're
6:59dealing with. Homer isn't building a
7:01monster from scratch. He's using
7:03shortorthhand his listeners already had.
7:06Odysius and his crew then go on to meet
7:08the king Aololis, the wind god, who
7:10governs the Aolon Islands. In the poem,
7:13he hands Odysius a leather bag with a
7:15silver drawstring that contains all of
7:17the winds that he would need to find his
7:19way back home, which obviously sounds
7:22like pure myth, a man who controls the
7:24weather. But again, here we see a real
7:26place beneath the myth. Aololis governed
7:28the Leari Islands, the Aolon archipelago
7:32just north of Sicily. The islands still
7:34carry that name today, but it's the next
7:37part that matters. And Shrao tells you
7:39exactly how a man can become a wind god.
7:41Aololis taught men how to navigate those
7:45waters. The currents there are brutal,
7:47and they run with the tides. Getting
7:49through alive depends on timing them
7:51right, and Aololis knew how to read
7:54them. And for that, the locals dubbed
7:56him the keeper of the winds. Now, if
7:58you're an ancient traveler on the deck
8:00of a ship and didn't know any better, a
8:02man who can reliably predict the
8:04currents in the winds looks like a man
8:06who can control them. You see, the bag
8:09of winds isn't magic. It's simply the
8:11knowledge of how to navigate difficult
8:13waters in a boat. And this is exactly
8:16the type of information that Strao
8:17proposes gets compressed into looking
8:19like the knowledge of a god. And that's
8:22not a one-off. That's the entire idea of
8:25mythic compression. And then here, Strao
8:27quotes Paleibius, another ancient Greek
8:30historian. He explains that Danish,
8:33foundational as one of the first Greek
8:34kings, was deified for being the one to
8:36find reservoirs of water underneath the
8:38city of Argos. And then another king,
8:40Atreaus, became deified because he was
8:42the one who taught the Greeks that the
8:44sun moved in an opposite direction to
8:46the stars around the heavens. Both of
8:48these two were appointed kings in
8:50antiquity per the legend. And both of
8:52them were remembered as deified figures
8:54in Greek mythology. And here Shabbo
8:56makes an even more powerful claim. In
8:58every god we worship, we're really
9:00honoring the person who discovered
9:02something useful. Somebody knows
9:04something real. How to read the sea,
9:06where the water is, how the sky moves.
9:08And across enough generations, the
9:10knowledge gets remembered as a person.
9:12And that person gets remembered as a
9:14god. The myth being the container of
9:17forgotten knowledge. However, not every
9:20divine character encodes cleanly into
9:22real people. Some demonstrate the
9:24dangers of real locations. Cersei, the
9:27witch who turns Odicius men into pigs,
9:30and the sirens, whose song captures the
9:33hearts of weary travelers, bewitching
9:35them into crashing on the rocks. So,
9:37what do these allegorories mean? And
9:40it's quite simple. The Mediterranean is
9:43dangerous. There are many coastlines
9:45that are so beautiful, yet so deadly
9:48that sailors would wreck themselves
9:50trying to reach them. These characters
9:52represent what it feels like to be
9:53pulled toward a beautiful coastline
9:55after a long time at sea. But
9:57unfortunately, without the knowledge of
9:58how to traverse these areas, it is often
10:01incredibly dangerous. The Greeks placed
10:03Cersei's island on the Italian coast at
10:06a cape that still carries her name,
10:08Monte Cersio. The Sirens had a home,
10:10too. A stretch of the Italian coast that
10:12the natives called Sarinuse, and an
10:14island called Losia, which was named
10:17after the Sirens. Anyone who's ever been
10:19to the Almalfi coast in Italy knows how
10:21beautiful that coastline is. Yet, some
10:23of these coastlines are the most
10:24perilous in the entire Mediterranean.
10:26These aren't free floating fairy tales.
10:28They're fixed to real places on real
10:31maps, the same as every other location
10:33on the journey. The danger was real. The
10:35poetry is just how you remember it. And
10:37while some may say that the names of
10:39these locations came from the myth, many
10:41of these names were already ancient by
10:43the time of the ancient Greek
10:44historians. And it's unclear whether or
10:46not those names can be attributed
10:47specifically to Homer or if they predate
10:50his epics. And so now we come to another
10:52strange location on the journey, the
10:55land of the dead. Odysius sails to the
10:57edge of the world to a place of
10:59permanent fog and darkness where the sun
11:01never shines. And there he speaks with
11:04the souls of the dead. The people who
11:06live at that dark edge are called the
11:08Samrians. And that's Samrian with a C,
11:11not Sumerian. Now, the location of the
11:14underworld is obviously a myth, but the
11:16Samrians were anything but. They were a
11:19real people from far north up around the
11:22Black Sea, often called the Pontis or
11:24the Uxene. And Strao makes a point of
11:27this. Homer didn't just know the name of
11:29the Samrians. He knew them. Around
11:32Homer's lifetime, or perhaps just before
11:34it, the Samrians came down out of the
11:36north and ravaged their way across the
11:38land, all the way into Ionia into the
11:40Greek world itself. The Greek chronicers
11:43preserve this. This is a real people,
11:45hostile and foreign to the Greeks. Their
11:48existence also shows up in the records
11:49of the Neoasyrian Empire as the Game
11:52starting in the late 8th century BC.
11:55What's more, there's contemporary
11:56correspondence to Sargon II's court
11:59reporting that the Samrians had crushed
12:01the kingdom of Oratu around 714 BC. So
12:05then why does Homer place these people
12:07at the gates of Hades? And the answer is
12:10rather straightforward because the
12:12homeland of the Samrians is the North
12:14Caucus region at the edge of the Greek
12:16known map. Beyond them are the vast
12:18steps of Russia and Asia, uncharted
12:21lands and borderline uninhabitable to a
12:23Bronze Age population. It was a colder,
12:26wetter, and darker climate year round in
12:29comparison to the Greek Mediterranean.
12:31But perhaps most importantly, these
12:33people were alien to the Greeks. They
12:35were different. They had different
12:36traditions, different customs, and
12:38different gods. They were the perfect
12:40metaphor for the land of the dead, the
12:42land of people functionally living in
12:44another world. And that cognitive
12:46dissonance was perfect for the motif
12:48that Homer was going for. Which brings
12:50us to our next location, Sila and
12:53Kuribdus, the two monsters guarding a
12:55narrow straight. On one side, the
12:58six-headed creature reaching out to
13:00snatch men off the deck. And on the
13:02other side, a whirlpool that swallows
13:04ships whole. And by now, you should know
13:07where this is going. It's a real
13:09straight, the straight of Messina, the
13:12narrow gap between Sicily and the
13:13Italian mainland. And the danger there
13:16is real. This is where the two seas
13:19meet. The Tyan on one side and the
13:22Ionian on the other. Their tides don't
13:24line up. So the water tears through that
13:26narrow channel and it reverses twice a
13:29day. Now remember that number twice a
13:32day. That reversal is what spins up the
13:35whirlpools. And that's Caribbdus.
13:39The same currents Aololis taught the
13:41sailors to read. A genuine
13:43shipthreatening whirlpool in the exact
13:46spot that Homer puts one. And then
13:48there's Silo, the six-headed monster
13:51lunging off the rocks to snatch weary
13:53travelers. Paleibius, again preserved by
13:56Strao, makes the claim that this is a
13:58swordfish hunt native to that exact
14:00region. And he describes how it's done.
14:02A lookout posted on the cliff. Two man
14:04boats, one to row and one with a barbed
14:07spear. Something waiting at the rock
14:09lunging out to seize prey from the sea.
14:12And the thing from the sea is the
14:13swordfish. And the monster is the men
14:15hunting it. And swordfish hunting is one
14:17of the most dangerous kinds of fishing
14:19in the ancient world. They often
14:22compared it to hunting boar and Homer
14:25turned that fishing ground into a
14:26monster so that both monsters decode to
14:30real things at one real place. But
14:32here's an interesting control. Homer
14:35says Kuribdus turns three times a day.
14:38In reality, the straight of Msina only
14:40has a tide two times a day. And Strao
14:42flags it as he's been to the straight of
14:44Msina and counted it. So this is a good
14:47question. How do we know that this is
14:49the location that Homer meant? And the
14:52answer to that is incredibly simple and
14:53rather mundane because there's no place
14:55on Earth where the tide rises three
14:57times a day. It's not the tides that
14:59anchor that location. It's the rest of
15:01the textual clues that give you
15:03everything else. The straight is real.
15:06The whirlpool is real. The rock is real.
15:08The swordfish hunt is real. The only
15:10thing that's off is a single number. And
15:12that's the tell of mythic compression.
15:15You see the structure of that
15:17independently identifying everything
15:18else and mislabeling one number. That's
15:21not what literary invention looks like.
15:23That's what memory looks like. And
15:26that's Shabbo's whole argument. If Homer
15:28had invented Sila and Kuribdus, then
15:31there's zero reason why the rest of the
15:32data would match so cleanly with just
15:35the tides being off. Which brings us to
15:38our last location. The one Strao
15:40couldn't solve. Oijia, the island at the
15:43center of the sea where the sea goddess
15:45Calypso keeps Odysius prisoner for seven
15:48years until he's finally allowed to go
15:50home. Up until this point, all of these
15:52locations had been identified and
15:54accounted for by the ancient historians.
15:57But this one, Straa reads as pointing
16:00out somewhere past the edge of the known
16:02world. He believes it's out in the open
16:04ocean beyond where anyone lives.
16:07Actually, that sounds a little bit like
16:10another mythical island.
16:13But here we run into a problem. And so
16:14Strao turned to Paleibius again, who did
16:17the most honest thing any scholar can
16:19do. He ran the numbers. Odysius builds a
16:22raft and sails for 17 days to get to the
16:25islands of the Fiatans. Based on the
16:27location of the Fiatians, the distance
16:30to the Atlantic Ocean could not be
16:32covered in that time horizon. In
16:34calculating the distance between the
16:36fiat and the Atlantic Ocean, the numbers
16:38rule it out. So Strao stops. He doesn't
16:41force it. He sets Oja down in his own
16:44words as something that should be
16:46neither examined too rigorously nor
16:48dismissed as groundless. Meaning it's
16:50pointing at something real, but we can't
16:53quite place it. But we have the
16:55advantage of 2,000 years of hindsight on
16:57our side. So let's see if we could do
16:59what Strao couldn't. Let's attempt to
17:01find this using first principles and see
17:03if we can boldly assert a new
17:05hypothesis. Let's start with the text
17:07because Homer gives you more than a
17:09story here. He gives you the heading.
17:11The first clue is that when Calypso lets
17:13Odysius go, she tells him exactly where
17:15to steer. Keep the great bear, the one
17:18constellation that never sets on your
17:20left. Be sure to watch the Pleades and
17:23watch Bootees. Those constellations
17:26never set because they're in the north.
17:28Which means in order to keep them on
17:29your left, the direction of travel must
17:32be east. And he is to follow that
17:34heading until the mountains of the
17:36fatians rise from the sea. And we
17:38actually know where the fatians are.
17:40It's the island called otherwise known
17:42as Corfu in modern-day western Greece.
17:45So all we need to do is take that
17:46sailing heading and run it backwards. A
17:49sailing raft in antiquity could travel
17:50anywhere from 1.5 to 2 knots which
17:53equates to about 1100 to,500 km over the
17:57course of 17 days. That doesn't get you
17:59to the Atlantic Ocean, but it does get
18:01you into the southern Mediterranean. And
18:04there are several good candidates that
18:06fall into that range. You have the
18:07islands of Corsica in Sardinia. You have
18:10Sicily. You have Malta and Goo, the
18:13sister island to Malta. And many of
18:15these locations had been debated
18:16throughout antiquity. Kamachis, one of
18:19the most learned men in the ancient
18:21world and the prime scholar who
18:23cataloged and organized the entire
18:25library of Alexandria, looked at this
18:27same problem 2,300 years ago and said
18:29Calypso's island was indeed Gooo. But
18:32here's the big problem, and again, it's
18:34context. Calypso's island was meant to
18:37be hidden. It was mythical. It was
18:39beyond the mortal veil. It was a place
18:42that was not well traveled. And every
18:44single one of these locations was well
18:46known in Homer's time. But that's
18:49actually where modern research and
18:50findings come into play because maybe
18:53there's a third option. And for that, we
18:55need to go to Tunisia. Remember when I
18:57said the Gulf of Gabes? Look at where
18:59this is. This falls right into the
19:02location that we just calculated. But
19:04not only that, Heroditus places many of
19:07his most ancient people groups right
19:09next to the lotus eaters in that same
19:11location. Diodoris also makes the claim
19:14that the locals there believe they had
19:16the oldest mythology that accounted for
19:18all of both the Greek and the Egyptian
19:20gods. And finally, Appalonius of Roads,
19:23a former head librarian at the library
19:25of Alexandria, places Jason and the
19:27Argonauts in that exact region. In the
19:29fourth book of the Argonautica,
19:31Appalonius places Jason and the
19:33Argonauts in Libya, specifically in a
19:35lake, Lake Tronis. Lake Trtonis has
19:38often been believed to be the Chhat
19:40Eljared in Tunisia, a ancient paleo lake
19:43that is now a salt flat. What's more,
19:46Talmé in his geographies gives precise
19:48coordinates that within his system map
19:50to the exact location in Tunisia where
19:53the Chhat El Jared sits today. And in
19:56the Argonautica, Jason and the Argonauts
19:58sail this same vector that Calypso gives
20:00Odysius in order to get back to Greece,
20:03which coincidentally was a real ancient
20:05seaway based on how the currents travel
20:07in that region. And now we must consider
20:09the next unit of analysis, the names,
20:11because Homer doesn't choose these names
20:13by accident. Ojisia, the word means
20:17primeval, the oldest from the dawn of
20:20the world. The word itself is tied to
20:22ojis, a king before the ducalian flood.
20:24And the old writers often used ojigian
20:27to mean anything in the ancient world
20:29that they couldn't name. And then
20:31there's the goddess Calypso from the
20:33Greek Calypto to mean to cover, to
20:35conceal, to hide. And the ancient
20:37lexicon is actually sharper than that.
20:39It glosses her name as the one who
20:40conceals what is known. She isn't just
20:43hiding a man on an island. She's hiding
20:45the island's location itself. And she is
20:49the daughter of Atlas, the Titan who
20:51stands at the western edge of the world
20:53and holds up the sky. And ironically
20:56enough, the Atlas mountain range covers
20:58all of northwestern Africa from Tunisia
21:01all the way to the straight of Gibralar,
21:03otherwise known as the pillars of
21:04Heracles. So, let's line it up. Calypso
21:07means to hide, to conceal, the daughter
21:09of Atlas, which is the mountains that
21:11hold up the western edge of the world,
21:13presiding over the location that is the
21:15primordial primeval place. So, what
21:18could be hidden? Not an island, but the
21:21Sahara itself, or at least what it used
21:25to be. And we've touched on this before,
21:27but during the African human period, the
21:29Sahara was green. Rivers, grassland, and
21:32water, not oasises. There are multiple
21:34peer-reviewed papers that talk about
21:36rivers and massive paleo lakes, some
21:39large enough to contain islands that
21:41sprawled over the entire Sahara Desert.
21:43Homer's epic points back to a memory, a
21:46memory of a Sahara that was once
21:48habitable and a prime location for
21:50humans to live. The Greek historians
21:52were hunting for an island in the middle
21:54of the sea. But that island was never in
21:56the sea. It was already hidden
21:58underneath the sand of the Sahara. But
22:00then following first principles, this
22:02actually leaves open another question.
22:04The Sahara was already desiccating by
22:06the time of Homer, meaning he wouldn't
22:08have been able to witness any lakes to
22:10attest to them. Which means that if
22:12Homer is recording real geography in
22:14this story, the knowledge of that
22:16geography is older than him. Which means
22:19that those who came before him recorded
22:21this information for him to preserve.
22:24And this [music] is the ultimate purpose
22:26of mythology. This is how stories get
22:28passed down generation to generation and
22:30millennia to millennia. Many of the
22:33stories we hear today are echoes of past
22:35stories that we've been telling for
22:37thousands of years. And as we've shown
22:39throughout the conversation, often times
22:41these stories are real, pointing at real
22:44things, real knowledge, and real
22:46locations. Sometimes we just need a bit
22:48of modern research data to find the
22:51answers. But here's where we need to be
22:53disciplined and take one massive step
22:55back. Can we say through this little
22:57analysis that we found the mythical
22:59island of Oijia?
23:02No, probably not. But here's the point.
23:05The text gives a real heading to a real
23:08coast, a real coast with a real
23:10geography, real history, and real
23:13ancient names that map to the specific
23:15motifs that Homer employs. The logic
23:18that decoded Odysius's journey at every
23:21other stop could still be applied here.
23:24And quite possibly the reason it still
23:26reads like a fairy tale is because the
23:28world it's describing is no longer here.
23:31What's changed in our time since Stravo
23:33is not that we're more intelligent
23:35today. It's that we have access to
23:38knowledge that we never had before. The
23:42African human period data is little over
23:4550 years old. We're still learning about
23:48what that means and what the
23:49implications for that knowledge are. And
23:51as we do, stories from the past that
23:53have been written off as pure mythic
23:56fantasy are starting to become more and
23:59more plausible. And aside from
24:01demonstrating that Homer's Odyssey
24:04documented real history and real
24:06geographical locations, that's the whole
24:09point of this video. Schlleman found
24:11Troy because he refused to call the text
24:13a liar. So, the question I'd carry out
24:16of here isn't what did the ancient
24:19writers make up. It's what are we still
24:22calling fiction that's just waiting to
24:25be found? I'm Curtis Holland and I'll
24:28see you on the next one.

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