On 10 August 2021, the website Greek Reporter published an article written by a contributor named Philip Chrysopoulos titled “Archaeologists Claim They’ve Discovered the Trojan Horse in Turkey.” The article claims that archaeologists have discovered the remains of a wooden structure inside the ancient city of Troy that they think is the actual Trojan horse. On the same day, The Jerusalem Post copied Greek Reporter’s story, publishing their own article titled “Did archaeologists find the Trojan horse?” that cites the Greek Reporter article as its only source.
The problem is that the whole story is a steaming pile of horse manure. The Greek Reporter article contains obvious signs that it is a deliberate hoax written in order to attract views in order to drive up ad revenues. By publishing this ridiculous, easily debunked story, Greek Reporter and The Jerusalem Post are both showing that, at the very best, they do not conduct even the most basic fact-checking or source verification and that they are not trustworthy news sites.
Article is a duplicate from seven years ago
There are several very obvious clues that have convinced me that the article published on the Greek Reporter website is a deliberate hoax. The first clue is that the article is actually an exact word-for-word duplicate of an article that Greek Reporter originally published on 6 November 2014 that has been misleadingly republished with a current date. The article apparently made quite a stir when it was first published seven years ago, since it was shared on both Facebook and Pinterest and was referenced at the time on the long-running Greek mythology blog Bearing the Aegis.
The fact that the article is an exact duplicate of an article that was published seven years ago, however, creates massive problems for its credibility, because the article makes it sound as though the archaeologists just found the remains of the Trojan horse recently—but, if it was originally published seven years ago, then it is not recent news at all.
Contradiction about the nationality of the archaeologists
The problems for the article’s credibility, however, run far deeper. The second obvious sign that the article is a deliberate hoax is the fact that the article appears to blatantly contradict itself about where the archaeologists are from. The first sentence of the article reads as follows:
“Turkish archaeologists claim they have found what they believe are pieces of the Trojan Horse.”
Later on, however, the article claims:
“The two archaeologists leading the excavation, Boston University professors Christine Morris and Chris Wilson, say that they have a ‘high level of confidence’ that the structure is indeed linked to the legendary horse. They say that all the tests performed up to now have only confirmed their theory.”
Obviously, Boston University is in Boston, Massachusetts—not in Turkey. If the archaeologists doing the excavation are from Boston University, then they are American, not Turkish.
It is possible that the article’s description of the archaeologists as “Turkish” could be construed to mean that the archaeologists are currently excavating in Turkey, but this would be a very strange and unconventional use of the word “Turkish.” Usually when someone describes someone else as “Turkish,” they mean that the person is a Turkish citizen or at least of Turkish ancestry; they don’t usually mean that the person happens to be in Turkey at the moment.
ABOVE: Map from Google Maps showing the distance between Boston and Turkey, which are, believe it or not, located on nearly opposite sides of the planet on entirely separate continents
Archaeologists who do not actually exist
Believe it or not, this is still only the beginning of the Greek Reporter article’s credibility problems. Flint Dibble, a specialist in Greek archaeology who is currently a fellow at Cardiff University’s School of History, Archaeology and Religion, points out in a tweet that there are no researchers or professors of any kind affiliated with Boston University named “Christine Morris” or “Chris Wilson.”
Bettina Joy DeGuzman notes in a reply to Dibble’s tweet that there is a real, respected archaeologist named Christine Morris who specializes in the study of the Aegean Bronze Age—but she is a professor at Trinity College Dublin, not Boston University. Furthermore, from reading the real Christine Morris’s faculty webpage and researching her public scholarship, I can find no evidence that she has ever even excavated at Troy; she mentions on her faculty webpage that she is involved in excavation of the Atsipadhes peak sanctuary in western Krete, but she mentions nothing about any work at Troy.
If you are interested in learning more about the real Dr. Morris’s work, there are two videos of recorded lectures she has given that you can watch for free on YouTube if you want to:
- An audio-only recording of a discussion about the Bronze Age Minoan civilization titled “Conversing The Classics – Meet The Minoans!” that was posted on 21 October 2016 by Classical Youth Society Ireland
- A video of a lecture she gave over Zoom titled “Minoans reimagined: From ancient images to multiple modern ‘lives,’” dealing with the reception of the Minoan civilization in modern culture, that was posted on 25 November 2020 by the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus
I do recommend watching the lecture about the modern reception of the Minoans if you have an hour to spare. I watched the whole thing and found it truly fascinating.
In any case, moving on, the “Chris Wilson” mentioned in the Greek Reporter article appears to be completely fictional. There is a professor named Christopher Wilson from Boston College, which is an entirely different school from Boston University, but he taught modern United States literature, not Greek archaeology, and he is long retired.
There is also an archaeologist named Christopher Wilson who is a senior lecturer at Flinders University in Australia, but he specializes in Indigenous Australian cultures and has never published anything even remotely connected to ancient Greece or the Aegean.
ABOVE: Photograph from Facebook of the real-life Christine Morris, who is a professor at Trinity College Dublin, not Boston University, and, as far as I can tell, has never excavated at Troy
Outlandishly implausible claims
Even if we ignore the fact that the article is an exact duplicate of one that was originally published seven years ago, the fact that it contradicts itself about such a basic detail as the nationality of the archaeologists who supposedly excavated the horse, and the fact that the archaeologists who are cited in it do not exist, the discovery that the article describes is itself so outlandishly implausible that the most parsimonious explanation is that it is most likely a hoax.
As I discuss in this article I wrote back in March 2019, it is highly unlikely that anything resembling the Trojan War that most people today are familiar with from Greek mythology actually happened. Troy was, of course, a real city that existed during the Bronze Age, but real places can be settings for fictional stories. After all, no one would argue that, because the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral really exists, Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame must be a true story.
The Tawagalawa Letter, a letter written in the Hittite language by King Ḫattušili III of the Hittite Empire (ruled c. 1265 – c. 1240 BCE) to an unnamed “king of the Aḫḫiyawā,” does indicate that there was some kind of conflict during the Bronze Age between at least one Mycenaean Greek state and the Hittite Empire over the city of Troy. There is, however, no evidence from the Bronze Age to suggest that any of the characters described in Greek mythology ever existed or that any of the specific events associated with the Trojan War in Greek mythology actually happened.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the walls of the acropolis of Troy VII
There is no solid evidence that the Greeks were even telling stories about a Trojan horse until many hundreds of years after the time when the Trojan War is traditionally said to have taken place.
The earliest known mention of the Trojan horse in any literary source occurs in the Odyssey, an ancient Greek epic poem that was most likely composed in the early seventh century BCE. This mention occurs in book eight, lines 492–520, when the blind poet Demodokos sings a song summarizing the story of the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy in the hall of the Phaiakians.
Meanwhile, the earliest surviving visual depiction of the Trojan horse may occur on the Mykonos vase, which most likely dates to sometime between c. 700 and c. 650 BCE and was discovered in 1961 on the Greek island of Mykonos. Another image of the Trojan horse may occur on a bronze fibula dating to roughly the same time period.
In addition to the fact that the story of the Trojan horse is not attested until hundreds of years after the Trojan War is traditionally said to have taken place, the story of the horse itself has similarities to many folktales in cultures around the world. In almost every way, it fits far better into the genre of folktale than the genre of historical narrative.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Mykonos vase, which may be the earliest surviving visual depiction of the Trojan horse, dating to sometime between c. 700 and c. 650 BCE
Even if the Trojan horse were real, there is almost no chance it could have survived to the present day. The first reason for this is because the horse is said to have been primarily made out of wood and it is said to have been in the city of Troy when the Greek forces razed it. Wood generally burns very easily, meaning the horse probably would not have even survived the sack of the city.
The second reason for this is because, even if the horse did somehow survive the sack of the city, the likelihood of it surviving for another three thousand years is infinitesimally tiny. Wood rots extremely quickly and easily. As a result of this, wooden structures can almost never survive for thousands of years, except in extremely dry desert climates that almost never receive any rain. Troy is not located in an extremely dry desert climate, so the chances of a large wooden structure surviving at Troy are extraordinarily slim.
Finally, even if the Trojan horse were real and parts of it somehow managed to survive to the present day, it is highly unlikely that it would be in any condition where archaeologists would be able to identify it as a wooden horse. In all likelihood, nothing would survive other than maybe metal nails that were used to hold the structure together and maybe a few small and badly rotted fragments of wood. It certainly would not look anything like a horse.
ABOVE: The Fall of Troy, painted by the German artist Johann Georg Trautmann (lived 1713 – 1769), showing what he imagined the burning of Troy with the Trojan horse inside it might have looked like
Description of the Trojan horse by… Augustus?
The Greek Reporter article also contains statements that immediately stand out as obvious errors that no professional archaeologist specializing in the Aegean world would ever make. For instance, the article claims:
“The structure found fits the description by Virgil, Augustus and Quintus Smyrnaeus.”
Augustus, however, was a Roman emperor, not a writer or a poet. There is no record him having ever written any kind of description of the Trojan horse and I am genuinely confused as to where the author of the Greek Reporter article could have possibly gotten the idea that Augustus wrote any such description. As best as I can tell, this notion seems to have arisen from confusion over the fact that the poet Virgil (or, more correctly, Vergil) wrote his Aeneid during the reign of Augustus.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Augustus of Prima Porta, a famous marble statue of Augustus dated to the first century CE
The obviously fabricated inscription
The Greek Reporter article also claims that the archaeologists found a bronze plate with an inscription alongside the wooden beams that they supposedly think belong to the Trojan horse:
“Another discovery that supports the archaeologists’ claims is a damaged bronze plate with the inscription ‘For their return home, the Greeks dedicate this offering to Athena.’ Quintus Smyrnaeus refers to the particular plate in his epic poem ‘Posthomerica.’ The plate was also found on the site.”
Quintus Smyrnaeus was a real Greek poet who probably lived in around the late fourth century CE who is known for his epic poem, the Posthomerica. There are, however, several problems with the article’s claims. The first problem is that Quintus Smyrnaeus does not mention the inscription that the article quotes. Instead, this inscription is mentioned in an entirely different ancient source, Pseudo-Apollodoros’s Bibliotheke E.5.15.
The second problem is that none of the writing systems that were used in the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE would have still been legible to anyone alive in Pseudo-Apollodoros’s time in the late second century CE, let alone Quintus Smyrnaeus’s time in the late fourth century CE. During the Bronze Age, the Mycenaean Greeks wrote using a writing system known as Linear B, which was completely forgotten after the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization in the eleventh century BCE. Meanwhile, the Hittites wrote in a cuneiform script in their own language, which no one in the second century CE would have been able to read.
In order for Pseudo-Apollodoros or Quintus Smyrnaeus to have been able to read this inscription, it must have been written in Greek, using the Classical Greek alphabet, which did not come into use until the eighth century BCE—over three centuries after the putative date of the wooden structure supposedly excavated by the archaeologists. This is an anachronism that any archaeologist studying the Aegean Bronze Age would instantly recognize and it is further evidence that the Greek Reporter article is a hoax written by someone with only an extremely superficial knowledge of ancient history.
Finally, I should also note that, contrary to what the Greek Reporter article seems to suggest, Pseudo-Apollodoros does not mention anything about the inscription having survived to his own time or about having seen it himself; he only says that the Greeks put the inscription on the Trojan horse in the context of his summary of the myth of the Trojan War.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the title page of a 1541 printed edition of a Latin translation of Quintus Smyrnaeus’s epic poem, the Posthomerica
How a story like this made the news
It is very common for online news outlets to publish sensationalized stories, but usually these stories are at least nominally based on some kernel of truth. This particular story stands out because, as far as I have been able to find in my research, there is no kernel of truth whatsoever. It is purely a fabrication about a nonexistent discovery made by nonexistent archaeologists. This immediately raises the question of how on earth this flagrant nonsense managed to get published.
The answer is that, for better or worse, ad revenues are one of the very few ways that people can make money by publishing written content on the internet, because most people aren’t willing to pay for subscriptions. In fact, my own blog makes money exclusively off ad revenues. I am now getting thousands of views on my blog every day and I am making more money off the blog than I ever have before, but I’m still only making about $250 a month. That’s several times what I was making a year ago, but it’s still not a lot.
If you want to make real money off ad revenues online, you need to get hundreds of thousands or even millions of views every day, which means you need to be constantly churning out articles with eye-catching headlines to make them “go viral.” As a result, online news outlets like Greek Reporter are constantly looking for stories that they think will grab people’s attention and get lots of clicks.
Most reputable news outlets try to balance the need to publish “viral” content and the need for journalistic integrity. Unfortunately, in the case of Greek Reporter, the need to churn out viral articles seems to have led them to abandon any pretense of having even the slightest modicum of journalistic integrity and to publish fabricated stories—apparently knowingly, judging by the misleading republication of the exact same article seven years later with a new date.
As it happens, I have some inside knowledge about the kinds of articles that Greek Reporter is interested in publishing because, in June of this year, their Head of Partnerships, Dimitra Damianidi, contacted me. She told me that they wanted permission to republish a short article that I published on my blog in February 2019 about why fraternities and sororities have Greek letters for names and that they were interested in potentially having me become a contributor.
After this, I spoke with the chief editor of Greek Reporter over the phone. He explained that they focus on publishing content that they believe will appeal to Greek Americans and that they were interested in my article about fraternities and sororities specifically because they believed that it had the potential to “go viral.” He never asked me anything about whether I had any kind of credentials or background in what I would be writing and never mentioned any need to verify that the stories I wrote were factually correct; he was solely interested in the potential for my writing for “go viral.”
I ended up never agreeing to anything. This was partly because I’ve read articles in Greek Reporter before that have been of, shall we say, dubious accuracy. It was also, however, partly because, after the phone call, I texted the chief editor to ask how much they would be willing to pay me for permission to republish my article and he never responded. I took this as a bad sign.
ABOVE: Logo of the website Greek Reporter, which is apparently a fake news site now
Conclusion
The story that archaeologists have discovered the remains of the Trojan horse is clearly and undeniably a hoax. If Greek Reporter had merely published this article seven years ago and never republished it, that alone would prove that they have absolutely no interest in doing even the most basic fact-checking and that nothing they publish should ever be trusted.
The fact that they have published the article again, keeping the exact same words and misleadingly presenting it as breaking news, even though it was originally published seven years ago, is best explained by the conclusion that they saw how many views the article got the first time they published it and they wanted to get all those views again, so they simply published the article again, presenting it as though it were new. If this is indeed what they have done, it means that they are not just lazy, but openly dishonest.
As for The Jerusalem Post, the fact that they repeated this obviously fraudulent story from Greek Reporter without bothering to do even the most basic fact-checking shows that they are, at best, completely uninterested in making sure that anything they publish has even the vague resemblance of truth and that nothing they publish can be trusted either.
Update: 13 August 2021
In the interest of thoroughness, since I originally published this article, I have written an email to the real-life Dr. Christine Morris of Trinity College Dublin. She has written back to me to confirm that she has not discovered the remains of the Trojan horse, she has never claimed to have discovered the remains of the Trojan horse, she has never excavated at Troy or worked there in any capacity, she has never been affiliated with Boston University in any way, and the story that has been circulating among news outlets is a fabrication. If you are interested in hearing her exact words, I quote her full response in this post.
I’m not disagreeing with the overall thrust of the article, but I don’t see how the language of the inscription is supposed to prove anything. The inscription could have been written in whatever language was used at the time and Quintus Smyrnaeus could have got it translated into Greek by somone who knew both languages. Unless either A: Quintus Smyrnaeus explicitly said the inscription was in Greek, or B: nobody at the time could possibly have been able to translate the inscription for him, I don’t see how this proves that this article is a hoax. (To be clear, your other points prove that it is a hoax, I just don’t this particular point does)
None of the writing systems that were in use in the Aegean or Asia Minor during the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE would have been legible to anyone in Quintus Smyrnaeus’s time. The Mycenaean Greeks of the twelfth century BCE wrote in Linear B, which was completely forgotten as a result of the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization in the eleventh century BCE. Meanwhile, the Hittites in Anatolia wrote in their own language, which no one in Quintus Smyrnaeus’s time could read.
Also, I just double-checked and it turns out that the inscription the article quotes is not, in fact, mentioned by Quintus of Smyrna at all, but rather by a totally different Greek author, Pseudo-Apollodoros, in the Bibliotheke E.5.15. Greek Reporter doesn’t even cite the correct ancient author!
“Meanwhile, the Hittites in Anatolia wrote in their own language, which no one in Quintus Smyrnaeus’s time could read.”
Is there any truth to the Hittite language being English? I remember reading something about the words “bread” and “water” being the keys to deciphering the language. It’s been a long time and my mind is fuzzy about the subject.
No, there is absolutely no truth to the claim that the ancient Hittites spoke any form of English. Hittite is its own language that belongs to the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. English, on the other hand, is a West Germanic language that did not develop until the fifth century CE, many centuries after the Hittite civilization died out. It is true that Hittite and English are very, very distantly related, since both languages are ultimately derived from Proto-Indo-European, but they belong to completely different branches of the Indo-European language family.
Ok, I just updated the post to clarify that the inscription actually comes from Pseudo-Apollodoros, not Quintus Smyrnaeus, and that none of the writing systems that were used in the Aegean during the Bronze Age would have been legible to someone in Pseudo-Apollodoros or Quintus Smyrnaeus’s time.
Noah’s ark was real – how else can you explain the piece of wood I found when digging in my garden?/
Hi, Alex! Great article as always
I would like to ask what you think of egyptologist David A Falk (from channel “Ancient Egypt and the Bible”) who claims to have real evidence for a historical Exodus .
Oh, and someone made a reply of your article on exodus pharaoh: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/o6t5bq/tale_of_times_forgotten_on_the_pharaoh_of_the/
(Sorry by my grammatical errors, greetings from Brazil)
I don’t mean to be rude, but my name is Spencer, not Alex, and no one I know calls me Alex.
I had not seen that post someone made in response to my article about the pharaoh of the Exodus. I will make sure to check it out.
I’m sorry, but I thought your name was “Spencer Alexander McDaniel”.
I guess you don’t know either that Richard Carrier answered your article about Jesus: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/15563
My full, legal name is indeed “Spencer Alexander McDaniel,” but “Alexander” is my middle name. When someone is casually addressing me, they call me “Spencer,” not “Alexander.” How many people do you know who are primarily addressed by their middle names?
Believe me, I am well aware of Richard Carrier’s response to my article about the historicity of Jesus. He wrote that post two years ago in response to a post I made over three years ago when I was still in high school and just barely starting to figure out how to write about history on the internet. Carrier has a vastly bigger audience than I do and, when he wrote that response, it brought dozens of people over to my blog to leave comments, many of them abusive. Carrier and I have had several exchanges in the comments under his posts. Our last exchange, which took place over a year ago, ended with me pointing out that he had blatantly misinterpreted something I had written and him responding by declaring that I must be either a totally incompetent writer or a liar.
Not very professional on his part.
Spencer,
Archaeological excavations in foreign countries are done in collaboration with archaeologists from that country.
Also, seven years is a long time. And academics are known to move around. Have you considered this possibility?
I am also not convinced the Trojan Horse has been found. But your article is equally unconvincing it wasn’t!
I have sent an email to the real Dr. Christine Morris using the email that is listed on her faculty webpage for Trinity College Dublin. In my email, I ask her whether she really has claimed to have discovered the Trojan horse, whether she has ever excavated at Troy, and whether she has ever been affiliated with Boston University in any way. If she emails me back, I will post an update regarding what she says.
This is off-topic, but I wanted to beg you, Spencer, to check out “The Immortality Key” by Brian C. Muraresku. When Michael Pollan pronounced it “excellent” in his most recent book, I got all excited and rushed to read a synopsis. Unfortunately this dampened my enthusiasm somewhat. Just from reading the summary I have grave doubts and a fair amount of frustration that this kind of historical “fake news” gets so much traction. If you’ve read it and have an opinion, I’d love to hear/read it.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard of The Immortality Key, but I just read the synopsis of it on Amazon and I can immediately tell that it is a laughable synthesis of all kinds of misconceptions and conspiracy theories that have arisen over the past century.
There is basically no evidence that the ancient Greeks used psychoactive drugs for religious purposes. People who support this claim are only able to nominally defend it because we know so little about ancient Greek mystery cults in general that they can basically just say “Well, it’s possible!” and get away without presenting any solid evidence.
The argument that there is no archaeological evidence for the original Last Supper is obviously ridiculous, since there are no conditions under which we could reasonably expect to find evidence of a single meal eaten in an unknown building in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. The claim that the Eucharist originally consisted of psychoactive drugs is likewise completely unsupported by any of the ancient sources that actually talk about the Eucharist. (Ironically, the author would have a more plausible argument if he tried to argue that the Eucharist originally consisted of semen and menstrual blood, since that is at least what the early Christian heresiologist Epiphanios of Salamis claims in his Panarion that a bizarre Gnostic Christian sect known as the Borborites or Phibionites consumed as part of their Eucharist.)
The book also somehow manages to incorporate a version of the witch-cult hypothesis, which was popularized a hundred years ago by a woman named Margaret Murray through her book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, which claims that the people who were executed as witches during the Early Modern Period were actually members of a secret pagan cult that somehow survived from antiquity into modern times. This “hypothesis” essentially rests on an extremely selective and naïve interpretation of some testimonies about the supposed activities of early modern “witches” that were, in most cases, extracted via torture. This is a hypothesis that historians and religious studies scholars recognized as ridiculous even when Murray first published her book a hundred years ago.
The book also has a foreword written by Graham Hancock, who is probably the most notorious conspiracy theorist and pseudohistorian who is still publishing books about the ancient world today. (He’s so notorious that, if you look up the Wikipedia article “Pseudoarchaeology,” Graham Hancock’s photo literally appears at the top of the page!)
Thanks so much for this Spencer! To paraphrase Walter White: “The history must be respected.”
Thanks for this systematic debunking. When I saw this supposed discovery on a web article last night, I was able to just link to your post.
Spencer, on a related subject, were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon mythical? I know you are very busy but I would appreciate your opinion. Thank you.