Quote Originally Posted by dsyrow1
I'm not interested in what "most professionals in the field" say. Most professionals in the field, if we are going to go by your standard of judgment, would have said that Troy doesn't exist, that names in Homer are fictitious, that Mycenae even if existed was some mud village, and a ton of other such cynical beliefs. They would not have found the actual site of Troy, the grandeur of Mycenae, the letters from Hittites to "Achaeans" and to "Alexander" of "Troia" or anything else, were it not for Schliemann or other intrepid amateur classicists, who had little patience with such cynical ivory-tower beliefs. These men went and collapsed all of what "most professionals in the field" believed, and suffered ridicule from the "professionals" for decades to boot. None of these "professionals in the field" have contributed by making any such great discoveries, have decoded Linear B, or anything else really worthy of merit. So I suggest you check your premises. Most professionals in the field are just stuck-up ivory tower types, who have contributed little other than their own vituperation to the study of history.
Classicists maybe, but archaeologists are now generally a different breed. I don't know if we can even say that there were "professionals" in terms of archaeology in Heinrich's day. But yeah, classicists certainly pooh-pooh'd the ideas you are talking about. They can all (classicists and archaeologists and historians) be wrong today still, but the view is a lot more balanced. The ivory-tower philologists certainly still exist though!