Trojan War: Catalogue of Achaean and Trojan Armies

In this livestream, the presenter of Wanax TV examines the Achaean Catalogue of Ships and the Trojan battle order from Homer's Iliad alongside the Epic Cycle, comparing the epic geography with the historical map of the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Anatolia.

Several passages address Cyprus directly. Discussing how the Catalogue of Ships could have survived from the Bronze Age to the eighth century BC, the presenter notes at 0:33:52 that while mainland Greece lost Linear B, the Cypriot syllabary developed from the Cypro-Minoan script around the 11th century BC and was used throughout the Greek Dark Ages by both incoming Greek colonists and Eteocypriots. At 0:45:39 and in a longer exchange with viewers from 1:01:42, he discusses the Arcadocypriot dialect group, arguing that geographic isolation in Arcadia and on Cyprus preserved archaic Mycenaean features such as the digamma and the royal title wanax, while coastal Peloponnesian dialects evolved into classical Doric.

At 1:27:33 the presenter recalls the mythological episode in which Agamemnon asked the king of Cyprus for fifty ships, received one real vessel and forty-nine clay toy ships, and cursed the Cypriot king in response. Finally, in a discussion of Bronze Age naval warfare at 1:33:31, he cites two Hittite records concerning Cyprus (Alashiya): the Indictment of Madduwatta (c. 1400 BC), which records the Ahhiyawan leader Attarsiya raiding Cyprus alongside Madduwatta, and the account of Suppiluliuma II defeating the Alashiyan fleet at sea before landing on the island to impose temporary vassalage shortly before the Sea Peoples overran it.