There have long been questions about the location of Ithaca, the home of Homer’s great hero, Odysseus. Scholars may have found it.

Homer's legendary hero Odysseus wandered for 10 years in search of his island kingdom, Ithaca. Now, a British amateur archaeologist claims to have ended the ancient quest to locate the land described in "The Odyssey."

Although the western Greek island of Ithaki is generally accepted as the Homeric site, scholars have long been troubled by a mismatch between its location and geography and those of the Ithaca described by Ancient Greece's greatest poet.

Robert Bittlestone, a management consultant, said Thursday that the peninsula of Paliki on the Ionian island of Cephallonia, near Ithaki, was the most likely location for Odysseus' homeland. He said geological and historic evidence suggested Paliki used to form a separate island before earthquakes and landslides filled in a narrow sea channel dividing it from Cephallonia.

"Other theories have assumed that the landscape today is the same as in the Bronze Age, and that Homer perhaps didn't know the landscape very well," Bittlestone told a central London news conference. "But what if the mismatch was because the geography has in fact changed?"

Two eminent British academics said they backed Bittlestone's theory. They have co-written his book, "Odysseus Unbound -- The Search for Homer's Ithaca."

James Diggle, a professor of Greek and Latin at Cambridge University, said the hypothesis worked because it explained why in one passage Homer describes Ithaca as "low-lying" and "towards dusk," i.e. lying to the west of a group of islands including Cephallonia and Zakynthos.

The Paliki peninsula is largely flat and connects to Cephallonia's west coast, whereas Ithaki is mountainous and lies to the east. Bittlestone's theory suggests that Ithaki corresponds to the island Homer calls Doulichion.

"I have never for once doubted that the theory is right because it explains all the details," Diggle told The Associated Press.

Cool stuff!

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There have long been questions about the location of Ithaca, the home of HomerÂ’s great hero, Odysseus. Scholars may have found it.

Homer's legendary hero Odysseus wandered for 10 years in search of his island kingdom, Ithaca. Now, a British amateur archaeologist claims to have ended the ancient quest to locate the land described in "The Odyssey."

Although the western Greek island of Ithaki is generally accepted as the Homeric site, scholars have long been troubled by a mismatch between its location and geography and those of the Ithaca described by Ancient Greece's greatest poet.

Robert Bittlestone, a management consultant, said Thursday that the peninsula of Paliki on the Ionian island of Cephallonia, near Ithaki, was the most likely location for Odysseus' homeland. He said geological and historic evidence suggested Paliki used to form a separate island before earthquakes and landslides filled in a narrow sea channel dividing it from Cephallonia.

"Other theories have assumed that the landscape today is the same as in the Bronze Age, and that Homer perhaps didn't know the landscape very well," Bittlestone told a central London news conference. "But what if the mismatch was because the geography has in fact changed?"

Two eminent British academics said they backed Bittlestone's theory. They have co-written his book, "Odysseus Unbound -- The Search for Homer's Ithaca."

James Diggle, a professor of Greek and Latin at Cambridge University, said the hypothesis worked because it explained why in one passage Homer describes Ithaca as "low-lying" and "towards dusk," i.e. lying to the west of a group of islands including Cephallonia and Zakynthos.

The Paliki peninsula is largely flat and connects to Cephallonia's west coast, whereas Ithaki is mountainous and lies to the east. Bittlestone's theory suggests that Ithaki corresponds to the island Homer calls Doulichion.

"I have never for once doubted that the theory is right because it explains all the details," Diggle told The Associated Press.

Cool stuff!

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Look at this find from Creete -- life-size statues of Hera and Athena found in their original setting!

The works, representing the goddesses Athena and Hera, date to between the second and fourth centuries - during the period of Roman rule in Greece - and originally decorated the Roman theater in the town of Gortyn, archaeologist Anna Micheli from the Italian School of Archaeology told The Associated Press.

"They are in very good condition," she said, adding that the statue of Athena, goddess of wisdom, was complete, while Hera - long-suffering wife of Zeus, the philandering king of gods - was headless.

"But we hope to find the head in the surrounding area," Micheli said.

Standing six feet high with their bases, the works were discovered Tuesday by a team of Italian and Greek archaeologists excavating the ruined theater of Gortyn, about 27 miles south of Iraklion in central Crete.

Micheli said the goddesses were toppled from their plinths by a powerful earthquake around A.D. 367 that destroyed the theater and much of the town.

The statues fell off the stage, and were found just in front of their original position, she said.

"This is one of the rare cases when such works are discovered in the building where they initially stood," she added.

Hopes are high that other parts of the theater's sculptural decoration will emerge during future excavations.

"Digging has stopped due to the finds, but we suspect there may be more statues in the area," she said.

The town where the statues were found, Gortyn, has been occupied since around 3000 BC, and was a major center of the Minoan civilization that predated the Mycenaean Greece of Homer. It later served as the Roman capital of Crete, and was one of the cities in which St. Titus would have preached the Gospel.

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A group of old soldiers gathered the other day to keep alive the memory one of their own -- 2nd Lt. Robert Ronald Leisy, who gave his life in Vietnam at age 24 so that others might live.

The day Leisy died, a reconnaissance squad of eight or nine men scouting a valley strayed into a North Vietnamese regiment of several hundred men and were being cut to pieces.

"We aren't going to leave those guys down there," Leisy said.

In the face of withering fire, Leisy raced to position his men and was moving with Baillargeon, calling in artillery, to the front of the line.

" 'Bernie, this is like the valley of the Little Big Horn.' That's the last thing he said to me," Baillargeon remembers.

And then Leisy saw a North Vietnamese sniper in a tree aim and fire a B-40 rocket at them.

In a fraction of a second, he smothered Baillargeon with his body. Gene Clark, 57 and a retired Macomb, Ill., police officer, was the medic who braved bullets to save lives that day. He saw that one of Leisy's hands was gone, his leg and abdomen shredded.

"He said, 'I'm not going to make it, am I?' " Clark recalls.

Yet Leisy continued to direct the fight, waving off Clark to help others.
Leisy was strapped into a litter, but the fighting was so intense no helicopter could approach, and he died within three hours.

LeisyÂ’s heroism was recognized by a grateful nation when he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1971.

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The seminal account of the "Middle Passage" of African blacks to America for enslavement was written by Olaudah Equiano. His claim was to have been an African who survived the journey, and his story was purported to be a first-hand account in 1789.

But new evidence raises a question about the facts of Equiano's life -- and whether the story he told was true. And lest you think this is simply an obscure academic debate, please realize that Equiano's account is the basis for much historical thinking on the Middle Passage. I include Equiano's account when I teach about slavery, and it is either explicitly or implicitly a part of most textbooks used today.

Things began around 15 years ago, when Carretta, a professor of English at Maryland who had long been enamored of Equiano, ever since he started teaching his autobiography to undergrads, hopped a plane to England and started hunting. At Westminster Abbey, he stumbled on the documents that recast Equiano's beginnings in a completely unexpected light.

"No one had ever looked at his naval records," Carretta says, still sounding a little surprised. "He tells us the month and year and place he was baptized.

"I was indeed shocked. I said, 'This does not make sense, this shouldn't be. What do I do with it?' "

Carretta decided to test the waters: He edited a new edition of "The Interesting Narrative" for Penguin in 1995 -- and listed his discovery in a footnote. No one noticed.

So in 1999, feeling a little more adventurous, he printed his findings in a history journal, Slavery and Abolition. People noticed.

Some academics in African American studies saw Carretta's findings as an attempt to discredit Equiano, to depict him as the pawn of white abolitionists.

At an academic conference in 2003, scholars debated whether Equiano's claims of his origins were "most likely rhetorical exercises," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which first reported on Carretta's biography.

Carretta sees his findings as a twist in the narrative, one that intrigues but, he argues, in no way diminishes Equiano's authority.

"No one raises these questions about Ben Franklin," says Carretta, whose book is titled "Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man."

"No one believes Franklin's biography is absolutely unvarnished, true. Everyone selects, elaborates, enhances, embroiders. We expect that. To not, is to assume that someone is a transparent auto-Dictaphone, and can't shape anything, which is more demeaning.

"My Equiano is a literary genius. Other people's Equiano is more like a literary tape recorder: He says what he says."

Actually, I would argue that this could seriously undermine Equiano's authority. This is not a question of a self-serving varnish on one's autobiography, but instead is a question of complete fictionalization of one's life. Carretta is corrects in labeling him a literary genius -- but the problem is that his account is held up as a work of history. If what we have is a novel rather than a memoir, this important narrative of the Middle Passage loses much of its historical importance.

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A month back, I linked to a story about the possible discovery of King David's palace in Jerusalem.

Well, now there is another article, this one somewhat more scholarly and not tinged with the subtle and implicit anti-Semitism of the first.

The evidence is remarkable. It includes a section of massive wall running about 100 feet from west to east along the length of the excavation, and ending with a right-angle corner that turns south and implies a very large building. Within the dirt fill between the stones of the great wall were found pottery shards dating to the eleventh century b.c.e.; this is the earliest possible date for the walls’ construction. Two additional walls, also large, running perpendicular to the first, contain pottery dating to the tenth century b.c.e.–meaning that further additions were made after the time of David and Solomon or during their reign, suggesting that the building continued to be used and improved over a period of centuries. The structure is built directly on bedrock along the city’s northern edge, with no archaeological layers beneath it–a sign that this structure, built two millennia after the city’s founding, constituted a new, northward expansion of the city’s northern limit. And it is located at what was then the very summit of the mountain–a reasonable place indeed for the palace from which David “descended.”

This immediate evidence fits well with other archaeological finds from the site, as well. In 1963, the renowned archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon reported finding a Phoenician “proto-Aeolic capital,” or decorative stone column head dating to the same period, at the bottom of the cliff atop which the new excavation has taken place. Kenyon wrote that this capital, along with other cut stones she found there, were “typical of the best period of Israelite building, during which the use of Phoenician craftsman was responsible for an exotic flowering of Palestinian architecture. It would seem, therefore, that during the period of monarchic Jerusalem, a building of some considerable pretensions stood on top of the scarp.” In the early 1980s, Hebrew University’s Yigael Shiloh uncovered the enormous “stepped-stone” support structure which now appears to be part of the same complex of buildings. And in the new excavation, Mazar has discovered a remarkable clay bulla, or signet impression, bearing the name of Yehuchal Ben Shelemiah, a noble of Judea from the time of King Zedekiah who is mentioned by name in Jeremiah 37:3–evidence suggesting that four centuries after David, the site was still an important seat of Judean royalty. This matches the biblical account according to which the palace was in more or less continuous use from its construction until the destruction of Judea by the Babylonians in 586 b.c.e.

So, is it David’s palace? It is extremely difficult to say with certainty; indeed, no plaque has been found that says on it, “David’s Palace”; nor is it likely that such definitive evidence will ever be found. And yet, the evidence seems to fit surprisingly well with the claim, and there are no finds that suggest the contrary, such as the idolatrous statuettes or ritual crematoria found in contemporary Phoenician settlements. The location, size, style, and dating are all right, and it appears in a part of the ancient world where such constructions were extremely rare and represented the greatest sort of public works. Could it be something else? Of course. Has a better explanation been offered to match the data–data which includes not only archaeological finds, but the text itself? No.

If this discovery stands up, it will put to rest the revisionist school that claims that Jerusalem was an unimportant town and that the history of Israel contained in the Hebrew Scriptures is a pious fiction forged centuries after the fact.

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