14 DAY TRIAL // One of the most exciting classical discoveries of our time was revealed at a London press conference today and in a new book, Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer's Ithaca.
At the press conference this morning Robert Bittlestone, James Diggle, and John Underhill announced that they have found new and compelling evidence in support of the location of ancient Ithaca, the island described vividly in Homer's Odyssey.
By utilizing computer-based technology, advanced satellite imagery and 3-D global visualization techniques developed by NASA, as well as intensive field expeditions, the team analyzed the mass of data, including literary, geological and archaeological clues and concluded that Homer's Ithaca was not the Greek island now called Ithaki but was instead located on the western peninsula of the island of Kefallinia, in an area now called Paliki.
Homer's description of Ithaca has puzzled scholars for millennia because it does not agree with the location of today's island of Ithaki. The current island of Ithaki is east of the other islands and mountainous while Homer describes Ithaca as being to the west and low-lying.
Over the centuries there have been many previous attempts to explain this discrepancy. Most scholars believe that the inconsistencies occurred because Homer lived after the events depicted in the Odyssey and several hundred miles to the east in what is now Turkey.
Since 2003 a team of geologists, classicists and archaeologists, led by Bittlestone, have been working under the hypothesis that Homer was, in fact, correct in his description of Ithaca and that it was instead a massive geological change that has altered the landscape since.
The results that have emerged are astonishing. The team has been able to reconstruct the former layout of the islands and provide a compelling solution to this centuries-old enigma.
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