Post by Senbecc on May 5, 2008 0:19:58 GMT -5
Meet Helen of Troy: bald-headed, bare-breasted and bloodthirsty
The face that launched 1,000 ships was no such thing, claims a new book.
For centuries, Helen of Troy has been portrayed as a woman whose beauty was so great that it caused a war. Revered for her flowing hair and breathtaking features, she eloped with Paris, sparking the siege of Troy after her husband raised an army to take her back.
But, more than 3,000 years after events described in The Iliad, Helen is to undergo a dramatic historical reappraisal. According to a controversial new book, she was more likely to have been a shaven-headed, bare-breasted warrior princess whose appetite for sex was matched only by her insatiable bloodlust.
The book, the first detailed biography produced on Helen, seeks to identify the real woman behind the myth. And the face that emerges bears little resemblance to the one fondly imagined by generations of artists and poets launching those thousand ships.
The author, the historian Bettany Hughes, claims that the real Helen was a powerful Bronze Age princess, living in the Greek city-state of Sparta around 1250BC. Basing her argument on extensive archaeological research, as well as surviving friezes from the period, Hughes conjures a picture of Helen as a dominant woman who would have worn a handful of snake-like strands of hair over an otherwise shaven, and perhaps brightly dyed, head. Her breasts would almost certainly have been exposed to reinforce her power and sexuality, and she would have been a fit, trained fighter.
www.archaeology.eu.com/weblog/2005_10_01_archaeologyeu_archive.html
The face that launched 1,000 ships was no such thing, claims a new book.
For centuries, Helen of Troy has been portrayed as a woman whose beauty was so great that it caused a war. Revered for her flowing hair and breathtaking features, she eloped with Paris, sparking the siege of Troy after her husband raised an army to take her back.
But, more than 3,000 years after events described in The Iliad, Helen is to undergo a dramatic historical reappraisal. According to a controversial new book, she was more likely to have been a shaven-headed, bare-breasted warrior princess whose appetite for sex was matched only by her insatiable bloodlust.
The book, the first detailed biography produced on Helen, seeks to identify the real woman behind the myth. And the face that emerges bears little resemblance to the one fondly imagined by generations of artists and poets launching those thousand ships.
The author, the historian Bettany Hughes, claims that the real Helen was a powerful Bronze Age princess, living in the Greek city-state of Sparta around 1250BC. Basing her argument on extensive archaeological research, as well as surviving friezes from the period, Hughes conjures a picture of Helen as a dominant woman who would have worn a handful of snake-like strands of hair over an otherwise shaven, and perhaps brightly dyed, head. Her breasts would almost certainly have been exposed to reinforce her power and sexuality, and she would have been a fit, trained fighter.
www.archaeology.eu.com/weblog/2005_10_01_archaeologyeu_archive.html
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