Encyclopedia
Troy is a legendary city and center of the
Trojan War, as described in the Trojan War cycle, especially in the
Iliad is, together with the
Odyssey [i], one of two ancient Greek [i] epic [i]...
, one of the two epic poems attributed to
Homer.
Today it is the name of an archaeological site, the traditional location of Homeric Troy,
Turkish Truva, in
Hisarlik in
Anatolia, close to the seacoast in what is now
Çanakkale province in northwest
Turkey, southwest of the
Dardanelles under Mount Ida.
A new city of
Ilium was founded on the site in the reign of the
Roman Emperor Augustus. It flourished until the establishment of
Constantinople, and declined gradually during
Byzantine times.
In the 1870s the
German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated the area. Later excavations revealed several cities built in succession to one another. One of the earlier cities is often identified with Homeric Troy. While such an identity is disputed, the site has been successfully identified with the city called
Wilusa in Hittite texts;
Ilion is thought to be the Greek rendition of that name.
Legendary Troy
The story of the Trojans first began in myth and legend. According to
Greek mythology, the Trojans were the ancient citizens of the city of Troy in the
Troad area, in the land of
Asia Minor . Troy was known for its riches, gained from port trade with east and west, fancy clothes, iron production, and massive
defensive walls. The Trojan royal family was started by
Electra and
Zeus, the parents of Dardanus. Dardanus, who according to Greek myths was originally from
Arcadia but according to Roman myths was originally from Italy, crossed over to Asia Minor from the island of
Samothrace, where he met Teucer. Teucer was himself also a coloniser from Attica, and treated Dardanus with respect. Eventually Dardanus married Teucer's daughters, and founded Dardania . Upon Dardanus' death, the Kingdom was passed to his grandson Tros, who called the people Trojans and the land Troad, after himself. Ilus, son of Tros, founded the city of Ilium that he called after himself.
Zeus gave Ilus the
Palladium.
Poseidon and
Apollo built the walls and fortifications around Troy for Laomedon, son of Ilus the younger. When Laomedon refused to pay,
Poseidon flooded the land and demanded the sacrifice of Hesione to a
sea monster. Pestilence came and the sea monster snatched away the people of the plain.
One generation before the
Trojan War,
Heracles captured Troy and killed Laomedon and his sons, except for young Priam. Priam later became king. During his reign, the Mycenaean Greeks invaded and captured Troy in the
Trojan War . The Maxyans were a west Libyan tribe who said that they were descended from the men of Troy, according to
Herodotus. The Trojan ships transformed into
naiads, who rejoiced to see the wreckage of
Odysseus' ship.
Trojan rule in Asia Minor was replaced by the Herakleid dynasty in
Sardis that ruled for 505 years until the time of
Candaules. The
Ionians, Cimmerians,
Phrygians, Milesians of Sinope, and
Lydians moved into
Asia Minor. The
Persians invaded in 546 BC.
Some famous Trojans are: Dardanus , Laomedon,
Ganymede, Priam,
Paris,
Hector, Teucer, Aesacus, Oenone, Tithonus,
Antigone, Memnon, Corythus,
Aeneas, Brutus, and Elymus. Kapys, Boukolion, Aisakos, and
Paris were Trojan princes who had
naiad wives. Some of the Trojan allies were the
Lycians and the
Amazons. The Aisepid
nymphs were the
naiads of the Trojan River Aisepos. Pegsis was the naiad of the River Grenikos near Troy.
Mount Ida in Asia Minor is where
Ganymede was abducted by Zeus, where Anchises was seduced by
Aphrodite, where Aphrodite gave birth to Aeneas, where Paris lived as a shepherd, where the nymphs lived, where the "
Judgement of Paris" took place, where the Greek gods watched the
Trojan War, where Hera distracted
Zeus with her seductions long enough to permit the Achaeans, aided by Poseidon, to hold the Trojans off their ships, and where Aeneas and his followers rested and waited until the
Greeks set out for
Greece. The altar of Panomphaean was dedicated to Jupiter the Thunderer near Troy.
Buthrotos was a city in Epirus where Helenus, the Trojan seer, built a replica of Troy.
Aeneas landed there and Helenus foretold his future.
Homeric Troy
In the
Iliad, the Achaeans set up their camp near the mouth of the river Scamander , where they had beached their ships. The city of Troy itself stood on a hill, across the plain of Scamander, where the battles of the Trojan War took place. The site of the ancient city today is some 15 kilometers from the coast, but the ancient mouths of alleged Scamander, some 3,000 years ago, were some 5 kilometers further inland, pouring into a bay that has since been filled with alluvial material.
Besides the
Iliad, there are references to Troy in the other major work attributed to Homer, the
Odyssey is one of the two major ancient Greek [i] epic poem [i] ...
, as well as in other ancient Greek literature. The Homeric legend of Troy was elaborated by the Roman poet
Virgil in his work the
Aeneid : is a Latin [i] epic [i] written by Virgil [i] in the 1st century BC [i] th ...
. The Greeks and Romans took for a fact the historicity of the Trojan War, and in the identity of Homeric Troy with the site in Anatolia.
Alexander the Great, for example, visited the site in 334 BC and made sacrifices at the alleged tombs of the Homeric heroes
Achilles and
Patroclus.
Ancient Greek historians placed the
Trojan War variously in the 12th,
13th or 14th century BC:
Eratosthenes to 1184 BC,
Herodotus to 1250 BC, Douris to 1334 BC.
In November 2001, geologists John C. Kraft from the
University of Delaware and John V. Luce from
Trinity College, Dublin presented the results of investigations into the
geology of the region that had started in 1977. The geologists compared the present geology with the landscapes and coastal features described in the
Iliad and other classical sources, notably
Strabo's Geographia. Their conclusion was that there is regularly a consistency between the location of Troy as identified by Schliemann , the geological evidence, and descriptions of the
topology and accounts of the battle in the
Iliad.
A small minority of contemporary scholars argue that Homeric Troy was not in Anatolia, but located elsewhere: England, Croatia, and Scandinavia have been proposed. These theories have not been accepted by mainstream scholars.
Kenneth J. Dillon argues that the Trojans were originally a steppe people related to the Magyars. After attacking and destroying the Hittite Empire, they came to control the Straits. During the Trojan War, the Greeks used a naval blockade to prevent Trojans on the European shore and on Lemnos from coming to the aid of Troy. Once Troy fell, the Trojans on the European shore fled northward and ended up as the Etruscans in Italy.
Archaeological Troy
The layers of ruins on the site are numbered Troy I – Troy IX, with various subdivisions:
- Troy I 3000-2600
- Troy II 2600-2250
- Troy III 2250-2100
- Troy IV 2100-1950
- Troy V: 20th – 18th centuries BC .
- Troy VI: 17th – 15th centuries BC.
- Troy VIh: late Bronze Age, 14th century BC
- Troy VIIa: ca. 1300 – 1190 BC, most likely candidate for Homeric Troy.
- Troy VIIb1: 12th century BC
- Troy VIIb2: 11th century BC
- Troy VIIb3: until ca. 950 BC
- Troy VIII: around 700 BC
- Troy IX: Hellenistic Ilium, 1st century BC
Troy I–V
The first city was founded in the 3rd millennium BC. During the Bronze Age, the site seems to have been a flourishing mercantile city, since its location allowed for complete control of the
Dardanelles, through which every merchant ship from the
Aegean Sea heading for the
Black Sea had to pass.
Troy VI
Troy VI was destroyed around 1300 BC, probably by an
earthquake. Only a single arrowhead was found in this layer, and no bodily remains.
Troy VII
The archaeological layer known as Troy VIIa, which has been dated on the basis of
pottery styles to the mid- to late-13th century BC, is the most often-cited candidate for the Troy of Homer. It appears to have been destroyed by a war, and there are traces of a fire. Until the 1988 excavations, the problem was that Troy VII seemed to be a hill-top fort, and not a city of the size described by Homer, but later identification of parts of the city ramparts suggests a city of considerable size.
Partial human remains were found in houses and in the streets, and near the north-western ramparts a human skeleton with skull injuries and a broken jawbone. Three bronze arrowheads were found, two being in the fort and one in the city. However, only small portions of the city have been excavated, and the finds are too scarce to clearly favour destruction by war over a natural disaster.
Troy VIIb
1 and Troy VIIb
2 appear to have been destroyed by fires.
Troy IX
The last city on this site,
Hellenistic Ilium, was founded by Romans during the reign of the emperor Augustus and was an important trading city until the establishment of
Constantinople in the
fourth century as the eastern capital of the
Roman Empire. In
Byzantine times the city declined gradually, and eventually disappeared.
Excavation campaigns
Schliemann
With the rise of modern critical history, Troy and the Trojan War were consigned to the realms of legend. In the 1870s , however, the German
archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated a hill, called
Hisarlik by the Turks, near the town of Chanak in north-western
Anatolia. Here he discovered the ruins of a series of ancient cities, dating from the
Bronze Age to the Roman period. Schliemann declared one of these cities—at first Troy I, later Troy II—to be the city of Troy, and this identification was widely accepted at that time.
Dörpfeld, Blegen
After Schliemann, the site was further excavated under the direction of
Wilhelm Dörpfeld and later Carl Blegen . These excavations have shown that there were at least nine cities built one on top of each other at this site.
Korfmann
In 1988 excavations were resumed by a team of the
University of Tübingen and the
University of Cincinnati under the direction of Professor Manfred Korfmann. The question of Troy's status in the
Bronze Age world has been the subject of a sometimes acerbic debate between Korfmann and the Tübingen historian Frank Kolb in 2001/2002.
In August 2003 following a magnetic imaging survey of the fields below the fort, a deep ditch was located and excavated among the ruins of a later Greek and Roman city. Remains found in the ditch were dated to the late Bronze Age, the alleged time of Homeric Troy. It is claimed by Korfmann that the ditch may have once marked the outer defences of a much larger city than had previously been suspected.
Possible evidence of a battle was also found in the form of arrowheads found in layers dated to the early 12th century BC.
Korfmann died on 11 August, 2005, and since the digging permit was tied to him personally, it is uncertain how and when the excavations will continue.
Hittite evidence
In the
1920s the
Swiss scholar Emil Forrer claimed that placenames found in Hittite texts —
Wilusa and
Taruisa — should be identified with Ilium and Troia respectively. He further noted that the name of
Alaksandus, king of Wilusa, mentioned in one of the Hittite texts is quite similar to the name of Prince
Alexandros or
Paris of Troy.
The
Hittite king Mursili II in ca. 1320 BC wrote a letter to the king of the
Ahhiyawa, treating him as an equal and implying that
Miletus was controlled by the
Ahhiyawa, and also referring to an earlier "
Wilusa episode" involving hostility on the part of the
Ahhiyawa. This people has been identified with the Homeric Greeks .
These identifications were rejected by many scholars as being improbable or at least unprovable. Trevor Bryce in 1998 championed them in his book
The Kingdom of the Hittites, citing a recovered piece of the so-called Manapa-Tarhunda letter, which refers to the kingdom of Wilusa as beyond the land of the
Seha river, and near the land of
Lazpa .
Recent evidence adds weight to the theory that Wilusa is identical to archaeological Troy. Hittite texts mention a water tunnel at Wilusa, and a water tunnel excavated by Korfmann, previously thought to be Roman, has been dated to around 2600 BC.
The identifications of
Wilusa with archaeological Troy and of the Achaeans with the
Ahhiyawa remain controversial, but gained enough popularity during the
1990s to be considered a majority opinion.
Homeric Ilion and historical Wilusa
The events described in Homer's
Iliad, even if based on historical events that preceded its composition by some 450 years, will never be completely identifiable with historical or archaeological facts, even if there was a Bronze Age city on the site now called Troy, and even if that city was destroyed by fire or war at about the same time as the time postulated for the Trojan War.
No text or artifact has been found on site itself which clearly identifies the Bronze Age site. This is probably due to the planification of the former hillfort during the construction of Hellenistic Ilium , destroying the parts that most likely contained the city archives. A single seal of a
Luwian scribe has been found in one of the houses, proving the presence of written correspondence in the city, but not a single text. Our emerging understanding of the geography of the Hittite Empire makes it very likely that the site corresponds to the city of
Wilusa. But even if that is accepted, it is of course no positive proof of identity with Homeric
ilion.
A name
Wilion or
Troia does not appear in any of the Greek written records from the
Mycenean sites. The Mycenaean Greeks of the 13th century BC had colonized the Greek mainland and
Crete, and were only beginning to make forays into Anatolia, establishing a bridgehead in
Miletus . Historical
Wilusa was one of the
Arzawa lands, in loose alliance with the
Hittite Empire, and written reference to the city is therefore to be expected in Hittite correspondence rather than in Mycenaean palace archives.
Status of the Iliad
The dispute over the historicity of the
Iliad was very heated at times. The more we know about Bronze Age history, the clearer it becomes that it is not a yes-or-no question but one of educated assessment of
how much historical knowledge is present in Homer. The story of the
Iliad is not an account of the war, but a tale of the psychology, wrath, vengeance and death of individual heroes that assumes common knowledge of the
Trojan War to create a backdrop. No scholars assume that the individual events in the tale are historical fact; on the other hand, few scholars claim that the scenery is entirely devoid of memories of Mycenaean times: it is rather a subjective question of whether the factual content is rather more or rather less than one would have expected.
The ostensible historicity of Homer's Troy faces the same hurdles as with
Plato's
Atlantis. In both cases, an ancient writer's story is now seen by some to be true, by others to be mythology or fiction. It may be possible to establish connections between either story and real places and events, but these connections may be subject to selection bias.
The Iliad as essentially legendary
Some archaeologists and historians maintain that none of the events in Homer are historical. Others accept that there may be a foundation of historical events in the Homeric stories, but say that in the absence of independent evidence it is not possible to separate fact from myth in the stories.
In recent years scholars have suggested that the Homeric stories represented a synthesis of many old Greek stories of various Bronze Age sieges and expeditions, fused together in the Greek memory during the "dark ages" which followed the fall of the Mycenean civilization. In this view, no historical city of Troy existed anywhere: the name derives from a people called the Troies, who probably lived in central Greece. The identification of the hill at Hisarlik as Troy is, in this view, a late development, following the Greek colonisation of Asia Minor in the 8th century BC.
The Iliad as essentially historical
Another view is that Homer was heir to an unbroken tradition of epic poetry reaching back some 500 years into Mycenaean times. In this view, the poem's core could reflect a historical campaign that took place at the eve of the decline of the Mycenaean civilization. Much legendary material would have been added during this time, but in this view it is meaningful to ask for archaeological and textual evidence corresponding to events referred to in the Iliad. Such a historical background gives a credible explanation for the geographical knowledge of Troy and otherwise unmotivated elements in the poem . Linguistically, a few verses of the Iliad suggest great antiquity, because they only fit the meter if projected back into
Mycenaean Greek, suggesting a poetic tradition spanning the Greek Dark Ages. Even though Homer was Ionian, the Iliad reflects the geography known to the Mycenaean Greeks, showing detailed knowledge of the mainland but not extending to the
Ionian islands or
Anatolia, which suggests that the Iliad reproduces an account of events handed down by tradition, to which the author did not add his own geographical knowledge.
Troy in later legend
Such was the fame of the Trojan story in Roman and medieval times that it was built upon to provide a starting point for various legends of national origin. The most famous is undoubtedly that promulgated by
Virgil in the
Aeneid, tracing the ancestry of the founders of
Rome, and more specifically the
Julio-Claudian dynasty, to the Trojan prince
Aeneas. Similarly Geoffrey of Monmouth traces the legendary Kings of the Britons to a supposed descendant of Aeneas called Brutus.
Tourism
Today there is a Turkish town called
Truva in the vicinity of the archaeological site, but this town has grown up recently to service the tourist trade. The archaeological site is officially called Troy by the Turkish government and appears as such on many maps.
A large number of tourists visit the site each year, mostly coming from
Istanbul by bus or by ferry via
Çanakkale, the nearest major town about 50 km to the north-east. The visitor sees a highly commercialised site, with a large wooden horse built as a playground for children, then shops and a museum. The archaeological site itself is, as a recent writer said, "a ruin of a ruin," because the site has been frequently excavated, and because Schliemann's archaeological methods were very destructive: in his conviction that the city of Priam would be found in the earliest layers, he demolished many interesting structures from later eras, including all of the house walls from Troy II. For many years also the site was unguarded and was thoroughly looted. However what remains, particularly if put into context by one of the knowledgeable professional guides to the site, is an illuminating insight into civilizations of the Bronze Age, if not to the legends themselves.
References
See also
Bibliography
External links
- Archaeology
- : the results of researches and discoveries on the site of Troy and through the Troad in the years 1871-72-73-78-79;
- by Jan Sammer
- Geography
