Art & Culture

Turns Out, The Arab World Has Been Part of ‘The Odyssey’ All Along

BYYassine Hariss

August 4, 2026

It’s been nearly a month since Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey landed in cinemas, and judging by the discourse surrounding it, the film is already earning cult-classic status. And as audiences continue to dissect every frame, the film has also reignited interest in Homer’s epic, introducing some to the story for the first time while giving others a reason to revisit it from a different angle.

After leaving the cinema, I couldn’t stop thinking about one thing. If Ulysses spent a decade wandering the Mediterranean trying to get back to Ithaca, surely he ended up in North Africa at some point. Given the size of the sea and just how spectacularly lost he kept getting, it almost felt impossible that he wouldn’t.

As it turns out, that instinct wasn’t entirely off. While Homer’s Odyssey never provides modern place names and scholars continue to debate the exact geography of Ulysses’ route, several of the locations described throughout his journey have long been associated with parts of North Africa, most notably present-day Tunisia and Libya.

The strongest connection is found in Tunisia. One of the earliest stops on Ulysses’ journey is the land of the Lotus-Eaters, whose mysterious fruit causes anyone who eats it to forget their home and lose all desire to leave. Since antiquity, many scholars have linked this episode to the island of Djerba, off Tunisia’s southeastern coast, a theory supported by its abundance of lotus trees and references stretching back to Greek and Roman writers.

But the North African connections don’t end there. Some scholars have argued that the land of the Laestrygonians—a race of giants who ambush Ulysses’ fleet and destroy all but one of his ships—may have been inspired by the Libyan coast. Others have connected Libya more broadly to Homer’s description of fertile lands where sheep, cattle, and crops flourished year-round. These theories are far from universally accepted, but together they point to a much larger idea: that the southern shores of the Mediterranean were never absent from the Greek imagination.

So the next time you watch The Odyssey and see Ulysses drifting from one mysterious land to another, remember that he may not have been quite as far from our region as you think. Somewhere between the myths and the maps, there’s a compelling case to be made that one of literature’s greatest journeys also brushed against the shores of what is now the Arab world.

Turns Out, The Arab World Has Been Part of ‘The Odyssey’ All Along

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Turns Out, The Arab World Has Been Part of ‘The Odyssey’ All Along

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