immortalised in legend as the leader of the Greek forces in the
Trojan War.
Forrer reasoned that the Hittites must have come into contact
with, or at least known about, the Bronze Age Greeks who had
inspired Homer’s epics theIliadand theOdyssey, composed four
or more centuries after the Bronze Age. This prompted his search
for Greeks in the Hittite texts. And he found them! Or so he
claimed in an announcement he made in 1924. The basis of his
claim was that Homer referred to his Greek warriors at Troy as
Achaians (he also called them Danaans and Argives). And Hittite
texts referred to a land somewhere in the west as Ahhiyawa, and on
occasions to a king of Ahhiyawa. From all this Forrer concluded
that Achaia was the, or at leasta, name of Bronze Age Greece, and
that Ahhiyawa was the Hittite way of writing this name. So, he
declared, Homer’s Greeks had been found in the Hittite texts. What
was even more exciting was his statement that he had also found
references in these texts to the Trojan War and to some of its chief
participants.
Forrer’s claims aroused great popular interest, and even some
scholarly support. For thefirst time there was now evidence,
from independent contemporary written sources unearthed in the
Hittite capital, that Homer’s great epic of the Trojan Warwas
based on historical fact. It all seemed too good to be true. And
scholarly scepticism quickly set in. A large part of Forrer’scase
was based on his identification of Homeric names with names
found in the Hittite texts– like Attarissiya, equated with the
name of Agamemnon’sfatherAtreus,andAlaksandu, equated
with the name of the Trojan prince (Paris) Alexander. These
equations provoked much hostile criticism from other scholars
who regarded Forrer’s equations as scientifically unsound,
dismissing the similarity in names as being purely coincidental
- what we might call‘kling-klang etymology’.Attheforefrontof
the critics was a German scholar called Ferdinand Sommer, who
in 1932 published a full edition with commentaries of all the
‘Ahhiyawa texts’(there are fewer than 30 of them). In the process,
he utterly ruled out any possibility they had anything to do with
Mycenaean Greece.
THE SETTING FOR AN EMPIRE 53