The New World

    Upon my recent fascination of the nature of the relationship between John Smith and Pocahontasd I allowed myself to break down and watch the 2 hour plus movie, The New World. The movie is centered around a romantic relationship that involves handsome Captain John Smith and Powhatan Princess Pocahontas. What I discovered was although the story is not mainly told through dialog the viewer knows at all times what is going on. The love between the main characters is so sweet, natural, and lacking in any ulterior motives. It was just love.
    This a movie that people love or hate. It is filled with random shots of nature thrown in the middle of a scene. However, one has only to know the title of the movie to know the true star, The New World. Shot on location at Jamestown with actors of Native American descent to play the Powhatans, even speaking Algonquian, you feel as if what you are seeing is happening right then and there not on a film set. I was pleasantly surprised by this film. Even though John Smith and Pocahontas may not have been actually romantically involved I found myself wishing it so. I plan on doing an upcoming post that goes more in depth about their relationship.

How did King Tut die?

In honor of Howard Carter's birthday, here is a video of how King Tut died. Nobody really knows how and it has been a center of controversy for thousands of years. This video is courtesy of history.com

Finding Ithaca

Springs once used to water pigs

All through reading Homer's The Odyssey, a reccuring theme is Odysseus's longing to return home. Odysseus had went to fight in the Trojan War, a war that lasted ten years. Odysseus spent an additional ten years trying to return to his island kingdom of Ithaca. Homer wrote:


Around her [Ithaca] a ring of islands circle side-by-side,
Doulichion, Same, wooded Zachynthos too, but mine
lies low and away, the farthest out to sea,
rearing into the western dusk
while the others face the east and breaking day


But was Ithaca a real island, or just the creation of a master storyteller at work?

The narrow isthmus connecting the
 mainland and peninsula

This question not only haunted me but also, thankfully, amateur archaeologist Robert Bittlestone. Bittlestone believes that a peninsula on the island of Cephalonia was once a separate island, Ithaca.He believes that the low-lying isthmus that connects the main island and the peninsula was once not land, but the sea. When a team of geologists dug as far as possible without hitting bedrock they decided, the peninsula, called Paliki, had once been its own island. "I am convinced," said Bittlestone, "that in Ithaca, Homer describes a real place, and I think he talked about locales that people knew and could recognize. His audience say, 'Oh, yeah, I know that cave, that mountain, that bay.'" You can trace the steps Odysseus could have made upon his return home and match all of Homer's descriptions. The mouth of a harbor clearly matches the description of Phorcys Bay, where Odysseus was returned home, "with two jutting headlands sheared off at the seaward side. You can also still see a pig farm matching the location and time period Homer gives as Eumaeus', the swineherd. Up on a 830-foot-high cliff called Kastelli, lie the remains of a once grand palace. Could this be the place where Penelope waited twenty years for Odysseus? More than likely, yes.