The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (40 page)

The records also show that a Greek king was in dispute with the Hittites around 1260
BC
over a northern city called Wilusa. We know
that the early Greeks called Ilios (Troy) “Wilios”. And 1260 was, of course, the approximate date of the Greek expedition against the Trojans. At about this date the Hittite king Hattusilis mentions in a letter his troubles with the Greeks as well as the sack of the city of Carchemish – far to the east – by his new enemy, the Assyrians.

Some ten years later the Hittite emperor wrote to the king of the Greeks, whom he addressed as
brother
. It seems that this king’s brother had been causing trouble for the Hittites. What seems to have been happening was this: the brother of the Greek king, a man named Tawagala, had joined with a rebel from Arzawa – a region northeast of Miletus – in harassing the Hittite garrison. The emperor of the Hittites marched with an army to Miletus, found that his enemies had fled, and wrote an aggrieved letter to the Greek “king” that made it clear that the Greeks were then a major power in the Mediterranean. The king to whom the Hittite emperor was writing could well have been Agamemnon. His rebellious brother Tawagala has been identified as a Greek named Eteocles, and if we knew that Agamemnon had a brother of that name, it would clinch that argument. Unfortunately, we only know of his other brother, Menelaus.

In the television series, “In Search of the Trojan War”, the historian Michael Wood argues strongly that Wilusa was Troy (not just the city, but the whole area around it), using a great deal of geographical evidence from the Hittite records. Moreover, the king of Wilusa is called Alaxandus. Homer often refers to Paris – who abducted Helen – as Alexandras of Troia. Wood cites other Hittite records that show the king of the Greeks was in Asia Minor in the reign of Hattusilis III (1265–35
BC
– which would include the date of the Trojan War). If that king was Agamemnon – as seems likely from the dates – then we have powerful evidence for Homer’s story.

There is another piece of evidence for the existence of the Trojan War, unearthed by Blegen in his excavations at Pylos, the home of Homer’s King Nestor. Among the Linear B tablets found at Pylos were many referring to a large number of “Asian” women who were apparently slaves, and whose main tasks were grinding corn and preparing flax. Asia is short for Asia Minor and actually refers to the kingdom of Lydia, south of Troy. But references to the places from which these captives were taken make it clear that they came from many places on the coast of Asia Minor, including Chios and Miletus. We know, of course, that the Greeks were pirates, so these women may have been captured on raids. But the sheer number – seven hundred women, four hundred girls, and three hundred boys – suggests that they were
captives of war. Some of these women are referred to as
To-ro-ja
, which sounds like “people from Troy”. Again, the date is right – the period of the Trojan War. No men are mentioned – and Homer tells us that the men of Troy were killed, and their women and children enslaved and taken back to Greece.

So what seems to emerge from the historical record is this: The period of the Trojan War was, in fact, a period of many wars in Asia Minor. The empire of the Hittites was weakening, and the Greeks took advantage of this to raid “Asian” settlements and to encourage rebellion. Troy (or Wilios) had always been a faithful ally of the Hittites, and records show that the Trojan prince Alaksandus had fought on the side of the Assyrian king Muwatallis (1296–1272
BC
), the elder brother of Hattusilis. Another independent tradition from southwest Asia Minor declares that the lover of Helen is an ally of Muwatallis. So
if
this Alaksandus is indeed Prince Alexandros – Homer’s Paris – then he was not a young man when he seduced Helen but a grizzled veteran.

Some ten years after fighting on the side of Muwatallis at the battle of Kadesh (in Syria) in 1274
BC
, Alexandros went to call on Menelaus, brother of Agamemnon, in Sparta. We may surmise that Menelaus was not a particularly strong character – legend represents him as unlucky in love and war – and that Helen found the battle-scarred veteran Paris much more attractive, and eloped with him.

When Menelaus went to his brother, the mighty “King of the Achaeans”, to complain, Agamemnon may or may not have been indignant at the abduction of his sister-in-law. But he knew perfectly well that the west coast of Anatolia (“Asia”) was highly vulnerable since the Hittites had been forced to go to war with various neighbours, including the Assyrians. It was just the kind of opportunity for plunder that the piratical Greeks loved. So off they sailed with a vast fleet. Achilles, we learn from Homer, landed by mistake in Mysia, south of Troy, but was driven back to his ships by Telephus, the king of Mysia – though not before ravaging the country.

The Greeks attacked Troy, and the Hittites were too weak to send aid. But Troy was virtually impregnable, and it was not until the tenth year of the war that an earthquake caused a certain amount of chaos and finally permitted the Greeks to take the city. The men were killed, and the women and children were taken back to Greece as slaves. Troy itself was burned and its noble houses destroyed. In its place there sprang up a city of “bungalows”. The Greeks continued to make nuisances of themselves with impunity, aiding rebels against the Hittites – who had
to do their best to make peace with them – and carrying off more captives from other cities of “Asia”.

What happened during the next half century is still not clear to historians. All we know is that raiders who are known only as the “sea peoples” wreaked havoc throughout the Mediterranean area; some ancient records credit them with causing the downfall of the Hittite empire. They certainly fought against Egypt and caused the downfall of Agamemnon’s Mycenae, Nestor’s Pylos, and the new “bungalow” Troy. (Agamemnon, of course, had long been dead, murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, who were in turn killed by Agamemnon’s children, Orestes and Electra.)

The identity of the “sea peoples” used to be one of the great mysteries of ancient history: Who were they? Where did they come from? How did they succeed in overthrowing great empires? But the answer that is beginning to emerge shows that the question itself is too simple. The sea peoples were not a single racial group: they came from many countries.

We must remember that Mediterranean civilizations were not as stable as those of, say, northern Europe. To begin with, the Mediterranean is a poor region, where even today, a large proportion of farmers only scratch out a subsistence living. In the midst of this widespread poverty, a few powerful rulers became rich, usually by plundering their neighbours. Piracy was regarded as a respectable way of living. But such a situation was rather like Al Capone’s Chicago; you might become very rich, but you were likely to die violently.

In this crime-ridden Mediterranean slum, empires rose and fell fairly quickly. While you were at your peak, you had plenty of allies; but as soon as you were past your peak, or your attention was distracted elsewhere, your former allies lost no time in attacking you. What happened around 1200
BC
was that the two mighty empires – the Egyptian and the Hittite – were buckling, like the earth’s tectonic plates under stress, and around 1190
BC
there was an earthquake that caused a great collapse and released hordes of “criminal rats” all over the Mediterranean.

The ancient world virtually came to an end. The twelfth century
BC
was a period of collapse, a dark age, in which Greece was full of wandering tribes; the age of great kings and great palaces was over. Recovery came slowly. Around 800
BC
Greeks began trading again with overseas partners; some may have settled on the west coast of Italy and founded the city of Rome. Meanwhile, the Assyrians became the new empire builders – the most blood-thirsty and cruel so far. But they did not reach Greece, which became a conglomeration of city-states and
invented democracy. Out of the chaos came law giving and a sense of order. And one of the major voices of this new order was the poet we call Homer, a traveler with an immense appetite for old tales of gods and heroes. We do not know whether Homer memorized these stories or whether he was the first to write them down, in the days before his blindness. All we know is that he became a legend and that he founded a school of bards who continued his work.

If Samuel Butler is correct, Homer’s greatest disciple was a young girl from Sicily, a girl of noble family who shared his passion for ancient tales, and who one day decided that she would write a sequel to the
Iliad
, a sequel that would not be a tale of bloodshed and treachery but a gentler story of the aftermath of the war, and of noble women as well as heroic men. The result was the
Odyssey
, the first novel, whose translation into rough-and-ready prose by Samuel Butler would inspire a twentieth-century novelist, James Joyce, to create his own peculiar version of the Ulysses legend.

Much of this story is speculation. All that we can say for certain is that Homer – whether one person or two – created a concept that is now almost synonymous with the human imagination: the concept of literature.

24

The Hope Diamond

The Famous Cursed Jewel

Like the “skull of doom” (described in chapter 52), the story of the Hope diamond seems to suggest that crystals have some power to absorb human emotions.

The diamond was purchased by Louis XIV in 1668 from a French trader named Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who is believed to have stolen it (like Milton Hayes’s “Green Eye of the Little Yellow God”) from the eye socket of an idol in an Indian temple. (One writer mentions the temple of Rama-sitra, near Mandalay.) Tavernier subsequently went bankrupt, sailed for India to try to recoup his fortune, and died en route.

The King had the diamond cut into the shape of a heart, and it was worn by Mme. de Montespan, the King’s mistress, who was also involved in the notorious “affair of the poisons”, in which a number of old crones who told fortunes provided poisons for killing off unwanted husbands. Black magic was involved, and an abbé named Guiborg took part in black masses in which babies were sacrificed; the naked body of Mme. de Montespan was used in these ceremonies as an altar. The scandal was suppressed, but Mme. de Montespan fell from favour, and the old crones were secretly tried in the
chambre ardente
(“candlelit chamber”) and later burned. So after Tavernier, it would seem that Mme. de Montespan was the next person on whom the “French blue” (as it was then known) brought misfortune.

A century later the stone was given by Louis XVI to his Queen, Marie Antoinette; her involvement in the scandal of the diamond necklace caused her to lose credit with the populace and was an indirect cause of the French Revolution in which she lost her head. The Princesse de Lamballe, to whom Marie Antoinette lent the diamond, was murdered by a mob.

The diamond reappeared in London, but now greatly reduced from its original 112.5 carats (22.5 grams) to 44.5 carats – less than half its
original size. It was purchased in 1830 by the London banker Henry Thomas Hope for £18,000 and from then on was known as the Hope diamond. As far as we know, Hope suffered no ill effects from the diamond. Neither did any other member of his family until the diamond passed into the hands of singer, May Yohe, who married Lord Francis Hope; they were plagued by marital problems, and the wife prophesied that the diamond would bring ill luck to all who owned it. She herself died in poverty, blaming the diamond.

Lord Francis, in severe financial trouble, sold it in the early 1900s to a French broker, Jacques Colot, who went insane and committed suicide – but not before he had sold it to a Russian, Prince Kanitovsi, who lent it to a French actress at the Folies Bergère, then shot her from his box the first night she wore it. He was stabbed by revolutionaries.

A Greek jeweler, Simon Mantharides, bought it and later fell over a precipice (or, according to another account, was thrown). The Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid, known as “Abdul the Damned”, bought it in 1908 and was deposed in the following year; he went insane. Habib Bey, its next owner, drowned.

The diamond then passed, via the French jeweler Pierre Cartier, to America, to Edward Beale Maclean, proprietor of the
Washington Post.
Soon after he purchased it, his mother died, and so did two servants in the household. His son, ten-year-old Vinson, who was always heavily protected and watched over, evaded his minder one day and ran out of the front of the house, where he was knocked down and killed by a car. Maclean himself parted from his wife, Evalyn, was involved in the famous Teapot Dome scandal, and ended as an insane alcoholic. Evalyn kept the diamond and frequently wore it, dismissing stories about its malign properties. But when her daughter committed suicide in 1946 – with an overdose of sleeping pills – it was recalled that she had worn the diamond at her wedding.

After Evalyn Maclean’s death in 1947, all her jewels were purchased by the New York jeweler Harry Winston for a sum rumored to be a million dollars. He displayed the diamond in New York but eventually decided to present it to the Smithsonian Institution; the fact that he sent it by ordinary parcel post seems to indicate that he had no misgivings about the “curse”. The packet is now exhibited together with the diamond.

When it was tested under ultraviolet light at the De Beers Laboratory in Johannesburg in 1965, it continued to glow like a red-hot coal for several minutes afterwards – a unique phenomenon among diamonds.