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Grok you, Elon

 

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Paul Camp

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So Elon Musk claims he will use Grok to create a "historically accurate" movie of The Odyssey. First, the notion of a "historically accurate" movie of an epic poem that is a fantasy about gods pushing people around doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Second, Grok is a piece of shit, an also ran AI. Third, as far as I am concerned, if an actor thinks they can bring something new or powerful to a role, go for it. Actors have a right to portray any character they want, even if they do it badly. This applies equally to the black female version of Hamlet (https://www.broadwayblack.com/black-woman-hamlet/) as it does to Scarlet Johannson as Motoko Kusanagi in the live action version of Ghost in the Shell, a Japanese anime and manga (https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Ghost_in_the_Shell_(2017...). Fourth, as an AI, Grok is a total POS so I'll believe it when I see it. Highly likely to be just another instance of a racist drug addict shooting his mouth off again.
And last, what does Musk mean by historically accurate? Why, only white people, of course. But that led me down a deep dark hole a couple of days ago, when I spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out who the Trojans were.
That turns out to be surprisingly difficult. And that's because Heinrich Schliemann, the first to excavate Troy, discovered there were a lot of Troys, stacked on top of each other like a birthday cake. He reasoned that the Trojan War was a long time ago so Homeric Troy must be on the bottom. In order to expedite reaching it, he performed his excavation with dynamite and literally blew up most of Homeric Troy (Troy VIIa) on his way to the bottom. That means there are no surviving images or documents from the time. Troy I was constructed 1000 years before the Greeks even arrived in the Mediterranean area.
So what now? I tried to discover what language they spoke as that would give a hint. Homer has them speaking Greek, not being able to equip everybody with a Star Trek universal translator, probably didn't want to spend an inordinate amount of time on a boring and inessential plot point. After all, Virgil has the same people speaking Latin. And in the medieval epic Cantar de mio Cid, everyone, whether Christian, Arab or Moor, speaks Spanish.
The fact that Troy I was founded around 3600 BCE, in the late Neolithic and well before the Mycenaean Greeks arrived, suggests another possibility. They might have been the aboriginal inhabitants of Anatolia. There is one language from the time that is preserved to any significant extent, that of the Hatti, because we have a lot of Hittite documents and they conquered the Hattians in the Bronze Age, around 1700 BCE, and basically absorbed their culture and religion. But the region occupied by the Hatti is nowhere near Troy. Still Hattian is definitively not Greek, and that would have been true throughout Anatolia. You can't speak a language that isn't there yet. So pre Indo-European languages were still being spoken in Anatolia around the time of the Trojan War.
They would have evolved from a neolithic group called the Anatolian Neolithic Farmers. Farming was basically invented in the region and spread elsewhere by migration. And it turns out archaeologists have a body from that time, Otzi the Ice Man, found mummified and frozen in the Alps some years ago. And his skin was definitely not white. Nor was he black. His skin is an intermediate shade of brown.
So the leading candidates for the language spoken in Homeric Troy are Greek (Indo-European, probably light skinned) or one of the aboriginal languages (pre Indo-European, and Otzi says they were brown).
As near as I can tell, it is about equally likely for the Trojans to be white or unwhite. That's historical accuracy, Elon. He seems to be mainly put out by Athena being played by Zendaya. But, you know, Athena is a god and a god can look like whatever she wants to look like. And besides, if you don't like it, don't watch it. But don't try to order other people around.
Once an Afrikaner, always an Afrikaner.

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