Troy

This article is about the city of Troy as described in the works of Homer, and the possible location of a historical city of that name. For other uses see Troy (disambiguation).

Troy (Greek Τροία) is a legendary city, the location of the Trojan War, part of which is described in the Iliad, an epic poem in Ancient Greek. The poem was attributed by the Greeks to a blind poet called Homer, and was probably composed in the 8th or 9th centuries BCE, although it contains older material. There are also references to Troy in the other major work attributed to Homer, the Odyssey, as well as in other ancient Greek writings. The Homeric legend of Troy was elaborated by the Roman poet Virgil in his work the ''Aeneid.

The Greeks and Romans believed in the historicity of Troy, and believed it to have been located at a site in Anatolia, now north-western Turkey, near the Dardanelles. This is shown by the fact that Alexander the Great and his companion Hephaestion visited the site in 334 BCE and made sacrifices at the alleged tombs of the Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroclus.

Table of contents

1 Excavations 2 Other evidence 3 Lack of firm evidence 4 Tourism 5 Related articles 6 External links

Excavations

With the rise of modern critical history, Troy and the Trojan War were consigned to the realms of legend. In 1870, however, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated a hill, called Hissarlik by the Turks, near the town of Chanak (Çanakkale) 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 to be the city of Troy, and this identification was widely accepted at that time.

Subsequent excavations, including by Carl Blegen have shown that were at least nine cities built one on top of each other at this site. The first city was founded in the 3rd millennium BCE. 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.

The last city on this site, Ilium or Ilion, 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.

Ancient Greeks historians placed the Trojan War variously in the 12th, 13th or 14th century BCE. Eratosthenes said 1184 BCE, Herodotus said about 1250 BCE, Douris said 1334 BCE. The archaeological layer known as Troy VII, which has been dated on the basis of pottery styles at 1275-1240 BCE, is the most often cited candidate to have been 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 is a hilltop fort, not a city, and certainly not the city of the size described by Homer.

Since 1988 excavations have been 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.

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 Troy. It is claimed by Korfmann that the ditch may have once have 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 BCE.

Other evidence

In the 1920s the Swiss scholar Emil Forrer claimed that placenames found in Hittite texts - Wilusiya and Taruisa - should be identified with Ilium and Troia respectively. He further noted that a "Wilusian" king mentioned in one of the Hittite texts - Alaksandu - was quite similar to the name of prince Alexander or Paris of Troy.

These identifications were rejected by many scholars as being improbable or at least unprovable, but Trevor Bryce recently championed them in his book The Kingdom of the Hittites (1998), 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 (known in classical times as the Caicus) river, and near the land of Lazpa (better known as the Isle of Lesbos). This remains a speculative subject.

Recent evidence adds weight to the theory that Wilusiya may be Troy. A water tunnel excavated by Korfmann, previously thought to be Roman, has been dated to around 2600 BCE. Hittite texts mention both a water tunnel at Wilusiya, and that the Mycenaeans fought a battle at the city.

In November 2001, geologists John C. Kraft from the University of Delaware and John V. Luce from Trinity College, Dublin presented the results (see [1], [1], & [1]) 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 (and other locations such as the Greek camp), the geological evidence, and descriptions of the topology and accounts of the battle in the Iliad.

Lack of firm evidence

Even if there was a Bronze Age city on the site now called Troy, and even if that city was destroyed by fire and/or war at about the same time as the time postulated for the Trojan War, there is still no evidence that any of the events described by Homer ever took place. In particular, the name Troy does not appear in any of the Greek written records (admittedly not extensive) from the many Mycenean or Bronze Age sites excavated over the past century. If there was a major city called Troy anywhere in the Aegean area, no-one at Knossos or Mycenae or Pylos mentioned it.

It is important to note that no text or artefact has ever been found which clearly identifies this site as that of Troy, or indeed confirms that any such place as Troy ever existed. 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 civilisation. 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 Hissarlik as Troy is, in this view, a late development, following the Greek colonisation of Asia Minor in the 8th century BCE.

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, and many history books confidently identify the site as the location of the Homeric city of Troy.

A large number of tourists visit the site each year, mostly coming from Istanbul by bus or by ferry via Çanakkale. 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 Schliemann's archaeological methods were very destructive and the site has been frequently excavated ever since. For many years also the site was unguarded and was thoroughly looted.

Related articles

• Bronze Age
• Heinrich Schliemann
• Homer
• Lost cities
• Mycenae
• Trojan
• Trojan War
• Trojan asteroid
• Trojan genealogy
• Trojan horse

• Project Troia - The new excavations at Troy

The Roman city of Celeia (now Celje in Slovenia) has been referred to by some writers as Troia secunda - the second Troy.

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