The AIA’s 131st National Lecture Program returns this fall, bringing leading archaeologists and scholars from North America and around the world to your screen!
Two movies, twenty-two years apart — Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy with Brad Pitt in 2004 and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey with Matt Damon in 2026. Discussions swirling around both have centered on faithfulness to Homer’s original stories, but what about the actual historical context and content?
This lecture will briefly put these two movies, which have brought Homer’s epics to the silver screen, into historical context by discussing what we know (or think we know) about the end of the Late Bronze Age, the identity of the Sea Peoples, whether there was actually a Trojan Horse, and other questions that are likely to have come up around the dinner table.
All registrants will receive a link to the recording after the webinar!
September 23, 2026 | Eric Cline
8pm ET | 7pm CT | 6pm MT | 5pm PT
Register for September 23 click here
Dr. Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Anthropology, the former Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the current Director of the GWU Capitol Archaeological Institute. He is a National Geographic Explorer, a two-time Fulbright scholar, an NEH Public Scholar, a Getty Scholar, and an award-winning teacher and author. In May 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctoral degree (honoris causa) from Muhlenberg College.
An archaeologist and ancient historian by training, Dr. Cline’s primary fields of study are biblical archaeology, the military history of the Mediterranean world from antiquity to present, and the international connections between Greece, Egypt, and the Near East during the Late Bronze Age (1700-1100 BCE). He is an experienced and active field archaeologist, with more than 30 seasons of excavation and survey to his credit since 1980 in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus, Greece, Crete, and the United States. He is perhaps best known for his work on collapse and resilience in the ancient world, specifically at the end of the second millennium BCE and the early first millennium BCE in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, epitomized by the best-selling 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton 2014; revised edition 2021).