Apologies again for my absence, which has gone on a bit longer than I’d hoped, but I should hopefully be back semi-regular soon enough. In the mean time, let’s take a look at the question that has been consuming me and my free time during my absence: Was the Trojan War Really a Thing?
We all know the story.
Helen, the queen of Sparta and the most beautiful woman in the world, was abducted from Sparta by Paris, a prince of Troy – or perhaps they fell in love and eloped, or perhaps a goddess stole her away and sent an image of her to Troy instead; the details, as always with these things, are hazy. Helen’s husband Menelaus, with the help of his powerful brother Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, raised a mighty army and an enormous fleet from all the great kingdoms of Greece. For ten years the Greeks besieged the walls of Troy, and for ten years the walls held as heroes of both sides fought and died on the battlefield. Even the gods took sides – Hera, Athena and Poseidon supporting the Greeks, while Aphrodite, Ares and Apollo helped the Trojans. Finally, with both sides’ greatest warriors – Achilles, the leader of the Myrmidons, and Hector, the eldest prince of Troy – dead, the cunning Ithacan king Odysseus and the architect Epeius came up with a plan to end the war once and for all. They crafted a huge wooden horse, claiming that it was an offering to appease the gods, left it outside the gates of Troy and sailed away with the rest of the Greek army, apparently in defeat and surrender. The ‘victorious’ Trojans brought the horse into the city and took it to the temple of Athena before spending the night in a drunken celebration of the war’s end. But the horse was not all it seemed – it was hollow, and a small contingent of the Greeks’ most elite warriors was hidden inside. In the dead of night, they slipped out of the horse, slaughtered dozens of the sleeping Trojan warriors, took control of Troy’s gates, and opened them wide for the returning Greek army. A few hours later, every member of the Trojan royal family was dead or in chains, Helen was back with her husband, the city was in flames, and the war was over. Yes, we all know the story.
But did any of it actually happen?
The common sense answer is “no.” We have, in the modern world, a very clear distinction between fiction and non-fiction, between myth and history. The battles of Alexander the Great are history, the sacrifice of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae, likewise – as solid and real as the conquests of Napoleon, or the Second World War. The Trojan War is a myth, an imagining of a great creative mind, captivating and important as a work of literature, but no more ‘real’ than the Titanomachy, the great war between the Olympians and the Titans at the beginning of time. Throughout the 18th century and for much of the 19th, it was broadly accepted that ‘Homer,’ the poetic genius of the Iliad and the Odyssey, whoever he really was, had made the whole thing up. A siege ten years in length – impossible! Gods and demigods running this way and that – pure fantasy! The fanciful ruse of the wooden horse – ridiculous! The ancient Greeks may have been deceived by their own patriotic spirit, but we moderns are cleverer than that. Obviously the whole thing belongs to the realm of fiction.
To the ancient Greeks themselves, though, myth and history were not so different. Myth was their way of recording the distant past and the deeds of their remote ancestors, and it held the authority of tradition and community, while history itself was a form of storytelling too, an art meant to convey moral lessons and uplift the human soul through exposure to great ideas. Even the most sceptical of them, the Athenian general and historian Thucydides, believed without question that the Trojan War had really happened. Perhaps the poet had been guilty of much elaboration and exaggeration, and perhaps some of the details had eluded him – after all, he lived hundreds of years after the war had ended – but surely some essential core of the narrative had truth to it. After all, it was the first and oldest story of their shared culture, known, told and repeated everywhere in Greece – how could they all be wrong?
The question suddenly became very interesting in the 1860s when we actually found Troy.
There is a place on the northwest coast of Anatolia, right at the west end of the Dardanelles, called Hisarlık. In the 1860s, the area was owned by Frank Calvert, an English diplomat who worked in the Ottoman Empire. Calvert, based on the descriptions given in the Iliad of the local geography of Troy, became convinced that Hisarlık was the location of the ancient city, buried beneath one of the huge mounds of earth that often cover ancient settlements. He attracted the attention of Heinrich Schliemann, a German archaeologist – though some archaeologists today would probably be uncomfortable sharing the title with him; professional archaeologists didn’t really exist in the 19th century, and archaeological work in that period was often… haphazard (in fact, Schliemann… kinda ruined the Iron Age strata of Troy a little bit; I mean, the Hellenistic Greek builders had already done that to some extent when they cleared the citadel to lay foundations for their new temples, but Schliemann certainly didn’t help). Schliemann conducted several excavations at the site between 1868 and his death in 1891, finding the remains of a Roman city, and the remains of a Hellenistic Greek city beneath that, and more and more the deeper he went. This was all to be expected; we already knew that there was a Classical Greek city which claimed, based on Homer’s descriptions, to have been built on the site of Troy, and that it widely and successfully publicised this idea as a source of cultural power. Where the story gets interesting is that seven layers of the city predated any sort of ‘historical’ record of ancient Greek civilisation. When he reached the second city from the bottom, Schliemann hit the jackpot: this period of the city had left behind all kinds of fantastic golden treasures. This, he thought, must surely be the fabled wealth of Troy’s legendary king, Priam. Finding the treasure only fuelled his obsession with Greece’s mythic past, and in 1878 he found and excavated the ancient city of Mycenae, the city the Greeks had linked with the great king Agamemnon – which, like Hisarlık, proved to have occupation layers that went back well before the dawn of recorded history. Today, we now know that almost all of the locations that are prominent in Homer – places like Mycenae, Pylos, Argos, the island of Crete – though many of them were relatively insignificant in the classical period, were in the Bronze Age the sites of huge stone buildings we call ‘palaces,’ the centres of powerful states with complex administrative practices and carefully regulated economies. We now call this proto-Greek civilisation “Mycenaean,” after the first site, though we don’t know what they called themselves, or even whether they considered themselves a single cultural group at all. Something of the political situation Homer described in the Iliad seemed, at last, to be grounded in reality – could the epic truly be a distorted memory of a Mycenaean assault on Troy?
The work of other scholars in subsequent decades curbed the initial wave of enthusiasm created by Schliemann somewhat – in particular, when we figured out how old the different levels of Troy were. It’s easy to tell in archaeology when one thing is older than another, because it will normally be buried deeper, but figuring out exactly how old an object is in calendar years is another matter entirely – until the advent of radiometric dating in the second half of the 20th century, the only way to do it was by the stylistic qualities of artefacts, particularly pottery. Styles and fashions change and develop over time, and if you have enough artefacts of a similar type, you can take note of the similarities and differences, and construct sequences from old to young. Finding two extremely similar artefacts at two different sites means that the levels you found them in are probably similar in age – and if an artefact manages to make it as far as Egypt or Mesopotamia, where we actually have historical records and inscriptions going all the way back to 3000 BC, you can connect that style of artefact with a calendar year (…more or less; personally I tend to place greater value on the more direct results we can get from radiometric dating, though it’s worth mentioning that these come with difficulties and pitfalls of their own). The point is, the Greeks of the classical period believed that the Trojan War had occurred some time between 1050 and 1200 BC. However, when Schliemann’s successor at Troy, Wilhelm Dörpfeld, actually sat down, put all the pottery in order and tried to figure out how old it all was, he realised that the second city on the site, the one with all the magnificent golden treasure – the level we now call Troy II – was more than a thousand years too old to have anything to do with Priam, Homer, or the Trojan War. The great Mycenaean cities of the Greek mainland were barely-civilised backwaters during Troy’s ‘golden age.’ The levels corresponding to the end of the Bronze Age when the Mycenaeans were powerful, the years in which the Greeks placed the war, were the sixth and seventh levels of the city – the levels Schliemann had dug straight through because they just weren’t impressive enough. Even in the 21st century there are still debates about whether Troy was really an important city during the Late Bronze Age or not. Given its position, though, it almost seems like it must have been – Troy controls the entrance to the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara; any trade routes through to the Black Sea have to pass through Troy’s territory. What’s more, the Dardanelles are unforgiving, and the wind and currents are strong – sailors hoping to reach the Black Sea might have had to wait for weeks at a time in order to obtain favourable conditions… in Troy’s harbours, paying Troy’s taxes.
The Mycenaeans themselves are silent on the matter. They spoke an ancestral dialect of Greek, and knew how to write in a script we call Linear B, which was deciphered in the 1950s, but precious little of their writing is preserved for us. Parchment and papyrus decay, so although they may have used these materials to write stuff down, we just don’t know. The Mycenaeans kept extensive administrative records – the palaces seem to have designated certain towns for the production of certain resources and goods, then collected everything together and redistributed all these goods on a regular basis according to what the different towns needed, and every step of the process was meticulously recorded by the palace scribes. This was apparently done on clay tablets, which could be smoothed over and reused (possibly when the records were transferred to another medium like parchment) – but, very occasionally, if a palace burned down, a collection of these tablets would be caught in the fire and baked hard, accidentally preserving these normally temporary records for us to read thousands of years later. They are… a bit of a dry read, to be honest. The information they contain – names and locations of Mycenaean towns, the goods they produced and consumed, the names and titles of various officials and servants, even the resources allocated for things like religious ceremonies (this last is how we know that they worshipped several of the Olympian gods) – is extremely valuable, but there is no hint of anything we would consider literature. If they wrote down the story of an expedition to Troy, it’s long gone now. They did write down the names they gave some of their slaves, and in many cases those names basically mean “man/woman from [place]” – including a number of locations in western Anatolia, so it seems likely, in theory, that they were capable of conducting raids against settlements in that region, but we learn little more than that.
Fortunately, there is another civilisation whose writing furnishes us with slightly more promising hints: the Hittite Empire. The Hittites were a central Anatolian people who were among the first civilisations in the world to smelt iron. During the Middle Bronze Age they built a large, powerful state in the regions that are now Turkey and Syria, and were regarded as an equal power by Egypt, with whom they fought several major wars. Like the Egyptian kings, the Hittite rulers often wrote official correspondance to other major leaders in the region like the kings of Assyria and Babylonia, and these letters were recorded by Hittite scribes on stone tablets, along with treaties and other documents of diplomatic import. Many of these documents describe places in the Hittite Empire or within their sphere of influence, and because place names are one of the things most likely to remain relatively constant between languages and across centuries, we can sometimes identify what these places are: Millawanda, for instance, is probably the same place as classical Greek city of Miletus, and Apasa is likely Ephesus. This is of interest to us because some of the names Homer uses for people and places in the Iliad sound suspiciously like certain names from the Hittite texts. For instance, he often calls the Greeks Achaioi and their homeland Achaia, a name which, so say the linguists (for reasons I won’t get into), is descended from an earlier form Achaiwia and may be related to a group of people called the Ahhiyawa whom the Hittites regarded as a persistent thorn in their side. Paris, the prince of Troy, is often called Alexander – which sounds awfully like Alaksandu, the name of a ruler allied with the Hittites in the 13th century BC. An Ahhiyawa commander who invaded Anatolia with a large chariot force in the 15th century was named Attarisiya, which could be a Hittite spelling of Atreus (the father of Menelaus and Agamemnon). “Troy” in Greek is Troia, which sounds a bit like a place the Hittites call Taruisa, but Homer actually more often calls the city Ilion, which comes from an older name Wilion or Wilios – and that, in turn, sounds like Wilusa, the name of the minor kingdom ruled by the aforementioned Alaksandu. The relationship between Wilusa and Taruisa (which seem to be two different things) has yet to be satisfactorily explained; if you want them to be Ilion and Troy, you can say that Wilusa is the kingdom and Taruisa is the city, but there isn’t actually a whole lot in the texts to support that. Anyway. The Ahhiyawa, according to the Hittite documents, lived across the sea but were particularly powerful in the area around Millawanda (which, if it really is Miletus, does look extremely Mycenaean in the archaeological record of the Late Bronze Age). Wilusa was a particular point of contention between the two powers – something that intrigues many people.
So, on to the practicalities. Troy VI was destroyed in the 13th century BC, possibly by an earthquake – the damage to the city’s buildings seems to have been particularly severe, and the area is known to be seismically active. At one point someone had the bright idea that the Trojan Horse might have been a distorted memory of “Poseidon destroying the city,” since Poseidon was a) god of both earthquakes and horses, and b) on the Greeks’ side in Homer’s Trojan War – essentially, a terrible earthquake leaves the city open to major Mycenaean raids. This explanation always struck most people as a bit fanciful though, especially since, although we know that some of the Olympian gods (including Poseidon) were worshipped in the Late Bronze Age, we don’t really know a whole lot about the nature and powers of their Bronze Age incarnations. Not everyone is convinced by the earthquake interpretation now anyway – it might have been destroyed in a battle after all. Even so, there’s no way to prove ‘Greek’ (that is, Mycenaean) involvement. The kicker is that Troy VII doesn’t quite fit either. That city was destroyed by fire in the early 12th century, which could easily have happened during a sack, and seemed to have been stockpiling food in the period immediately before that, as though preparing for a siege – the problem is that this happened shortly after the mysterious and still-unexplained total collapse of Mycenaean civilisation. The reason for the fall of the Mycenaean palaces is a whole debate of its own that would take just as long to explain as this one. Suffice to say that the entire eastern Mediterranean fell into total disarray at the end of the Bronze Age – the Hittite capital at Hattuşa was destroyed and their empire collapsed, the Egyptian New Kingdom lost control of its foreign territories, was wracked by internal conflicts and went into decline, and the Mycenaean citadels were all destroyed and abandoned within the space of a few decades. The chaos is often blamed on a group of marauders the Egyptians call ‘the Sea Peoples,’ but no one really knows who the Sea Peoples are – it’s actually been suggested more than once that they were Mycenaean refugees escaping the fall of their own civilisation, which leaves us just as mystified about what happened to them in the first place. It seems likely that the destruction of Troy VII had something to do with all this, and if the Sea Peoples really were Mycenaean then we do have another candidate for the Trojan War after all – but, again, we have no idea who was responsible for the city’s fall.
None of this really comes anything close to historical evidence for The Trojan War, as it is described in Homer’s Iliad and other works of Greek poetry, but it does start to look quite plausible that there was A Trojan War (possibly even more than one), and that its major players may have had a few things in common with some of Homer’s characters. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean we can start taking the Iliad as a historical source – it would be really nice if we could; the trouble is that we can tell from his poems that Homer himself lived no earlier than the 10th century BC and probably much later, and that he was telling a story for people of his own time in a setting that blended elements of the present and the ancient past (the ‘Homeric Question’ – who ‘Homer’ really was and when he lived – is something I could spend another three or four paragraphs on, but I’ll spare you). Still, for people today reading the Iliad, imagining its world, and retelling the story for others – through prose, poetry, art, cinema, you name it – it’s pretty cool, and opens up a whole new world of inspiration that people who are only familiar with the standard fictional mish-mash of Classical Greece and Rome never get to hear much about. The knowledge that the whole thing is ‘based on a true story’ also has a certain allure in itself, as it certainly did for the Greeks. So, you know what? Go out there and tell those stories. Homer would have wanted it that way.
Pokémaniacal 