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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, February 5, 2018 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Eric Cline

"The Trojan Horse: Legendary Fantasy, Earthquake, or Miracle of Engineering?"

ABSTRACT -- According to the legends of the Trojan War, after ten years of fighting, the Mycenaeans captured the fabled city of Troy using the stratagem of a wooden horse, in which they had hidden elite warriors. This plot twist has been the subject of much discussion over the years, since it seems unlikely that the Trojans would have pulled an actual larger-than-life wooden horse full of enemy warriors into their city (if indeed the Trojan War itself even happened). Suggestions have included the idea that the horse stood for some actual siege engine or engine of war, such as were used by the Neo-Assyrians during the early 1st millennium BCE; that it was a metaphor for an earthquake; and that it was simply a figment of a poet’s overactive imagination. Recently, a TV documentary investigated whether such a wooden horse could even have been made, given the engineering capabilities of the day, more than three thousand years ago.

In this illustrated lecture, Eric H. Cline will take a look at the Trojan War, and the possibility that it was an actual event, and then look specifically at the various suggestions that have been made concerning the Trojan horse.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Eric H. Cline s Professor of Classics and Anthropology, former Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and current Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University, in Washington DC. A Fulbright scholar, National Geographic Explorer, and NEH Public Scholar, he is an active field archaeologist, with more than 30 seasons of excavation and survey experience in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus, Greece, Crete, and the United States. He has authored or co-authored nearly 100 academic articles and a dozen books; his most recent is Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology (Princeton University Press, 2017).

Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov