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In Search of the Trojan War
1985 · TV series · documentary · 1 season
Michael Wood examines how far the historical and archeological evidence matches with the tale of the Trojan War.
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I personally feel like _The Day The Universe Changed_ (his second documentary) is better. I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology) ends up pretty scattershot, spreading out like Brownian Motion. _tDtUC_ is much more focused. Largely based on Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ for individual stories, it traces how the understanding of time in Europe changed from the middle ages to the 1980's- the idea of time as a marker of descent from a previous golden age (1), or at best a repeating cycle, evolves into our modern conception of time as endlessly improving into a better future. And the supporting book was amazing too.
I also want to speak up for the BBC history documentary team that worked with Michael Wood: _In Search of the Trojan War_, _In Search of the Dark Ages_, _The Story of England_, _The Story of India_ they were also a staple of American PBS and informed my understanding of the world.
1: My go to example for this is imagine you walk into the Pantheon in 1000 AD: no one on your entire continent has known how to build a dome like that in 500 years, and won't again for another 500 years. The fundamental way you understand the world has to be completely different from the "newer is better" baseline that we have understood the world by for the past 150 years.
Yes, a real disaster for us now. He didn't just "dig" through, but bulldoze to where he thought Homer's Troy should be. Doing this destroyed a lot of the evidence of the actual Troy he was looking for. Some of this has been recovered and pieced together by later and better archeologists but still a great loss.
The best video documentary I've seen on this is Michael Wood's BBC series "In Search of the Trojan War" from 1985. Six parts covering the history of the dig and the background of the war and aftermath. Much of it is on YouTube I think.