Why The Trojan Horse Probably Wasn’t a Wooden Horse
New clues to an ancient mystery still unsolved
We have been told an enormous lie for centuries and centuries, according to an Italian researcher. Have you ever heard of the Trojan Horse, the mythical trick which Odysseus had used to enter Troy? Well, it turns out that it wasn’t an actual wooden horse. Francesco Tiboni, an Italian archaeologist, revealed that the Trojan Horse was a Phoenician boat.
How then have we been misled? Tiboni argues that the error is very ancient. It appears that the word used for this specific Phoenician boat was the ancient greek ἵππος, a word that meant Horse. So many translators confused the two words, thinking that the Ancient Greeks had built a giant wooden horse instead of a Phoenician boat.
Homer knew the maritime issue perfectly, so much so that he left us a great deal of information on the construction technology of ancient ships. […] However, the very ease with which he used technical language led the post-Homeric poets to whom his works were handed down to be led astray by some of his passages. For Homer, talking about a ἵππος (hippos) was equivalent to indicating the Phoenician ship of this type. For his epigones, lacking knowledge of maritime things, it became a true horse. The underdevelopment — for it lay far in the future — of naval…
