Trojan War: History, Archaeology and the Legend of Troy

The Trojan War is the legendary conflict in which an army of Greeks, led by King Agamemnon of Mycenae, besieged and destroyed the city of Troy to recover Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta. Ancient Greeks placed it around 1194-1184 BC, and it forms the background of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Whether it really happened has been debated for more than two thousand years; archaeology at Troy and Hittite texts now show that a real city existed and saw conflict, but they cannot confirm Homer’s story.

The legend and its sources

The story is best known from Homer’s Iliad, which covers only a few weeks in the tenth year of the siege and focuses on the anger of Achilles. The Odyssey follows Odysseus on his long journey home. Other episodes, including the Judgement of Paris, the death of Achilles and the wooden horse, come from lost epics of the Epic Cycle, from later Greek tragedy and from the Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid. More on the poems can be found in Homer and the Iliad and Odyssey.

The Homeric poems were probably composed in the 8th or 7th century BC, about five centuries after the events they describe. They grew out of a long tradition of oral poetry in which singers composed as they performed, using fixed phrases and stories passed down through generations.

This tradition preserved some genuine memories of the Bronze Age. Homer describes boar’s tusk helmets and huge body-shields that went out of use centuries before his time. Yet the poems also include later features, such as iron tools and cremation customs, and mix details from different periods. They are not reliable history in any modern sense.

Ancient Greeks themselves treated the war as a real event, but disagreed on its date. Herodotus placed it roughly 800 years before his own time, around 1250 BC. The scholar Eratosthenes, in the 3rd century BC, calculated that Troy fell in 1184/1183 BC, and this became the standard traditional date.

Finding Troy: Calvert and Schliemann

By the 18th century the location of Troy was uncertain. Some travellers favoured a hill at Pınarbaşı, while others pointed to the mound of Hisarlik, near the Aegean entrance to the Dardanelles in north-western Turkey. The British consular official Frank Calvert, who owned part of Hisarlik, made trial excavations in the 1860s and became convinced it was Troy.

The German businessman Heinrich Schliemann began large-scale digging at Hisarlik in 1871, with Calvert’s advice. Determined to reach Homer’s city, he drove a great trench through the mound, destroying much of the upper layers. In 1873 he found a hoard of gold and silver jewellery and vessels, which he named Priam’s Treasure after Homer’s king of Troy.

The treasure in fact belonged to Troy II, a settlement of about 2500-2300 BC, far too early for the Trojan War. Schliemann smuggled it out of the Ottoman Empire to Germany. It disappeared from Berlin at the end of the Second World War and in the 1990s was revealed to be in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

The layers of Troy

Excavations showed that Hisarlik is a mound built up from many settlements, one on top of another, conventionally numbered Troy I to Troy IX, from around 3000 BC to Roman and Byzantine times. Two levels are central to the debate.

Troy VI, from roughly 1750 to 1300 BC, was a powerful city with fine stone walls, towers, gates and large houses on terraces. Schliemann’s assistant, the architect Wilhelm Dörpfeld, excavated these walls in 1893-1894 and argued that Troy VI was Homer’s Troy. Its end around 1300 BC shows signs of damage that many archaeologists attribute to an earthquake rather than war.

Troy VIIa, which followed with the same walls, was more crowded, with small houses packed inside the citadel and storage jars sunk into floors, as if people were preparing for a siege. It was destroyed by fire around 1190-1180 BC. The American archaeologist Carl Blegen, who excavated Troy from 1932 to 1938, argued that Troy VIIa was the city destroyed by the Greeks. Arrowheads, fire damage and a few unburied human remains support a violent end, although who attacked it is unknown.

Korfmann and the lower city

From 1988 to 2005 a German and American team led by Manfred Korfmann of the University of Tübingen worked at Troy. Using geophysical surveys and excavation, they traced a ditch and other features well south of the citadel and argued that Troy VI and VIIa had a large lower town. Korfmann estimated a population of several thousand people, perhaps 5,000 to 10,000.

These conclusions were challenged, most strongly by the historian Frank Kolb, who argued that the lower town was much smaller and that Korfmann had overstated Troy’s importance. The debate became heated in Germany in the early 2000s. Most specialists now accept that Late Bronze Age Troy was a substantial regional centre controlling access to the Dardanelles, even if its exact size remains uncertain.

The Hittite evidence

Documents from Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite Empire in central Anatolia, have added an important new source. The Hittites refer to a kingdom in north-western Anatolia called Wilusa, and a place called Taruisa. Most scholars accept that Wilusa corresponds to Wilios, an early form of Ilios, Homer’s name for Troy, and Taruisa to Troia. The archive is discussed in Hattusa.

A treaty of about 1280 BC between the Hittite king Muwatalli II and Alaksandu, ruler of Wilusa, made Wilusa a Hittite vassal. The name Alaksandu resembles Alexandros, the alternative name Homer gives to Paris, prince of Troy, though this may be coincidence.

Hittite letters also mention Ahhiyawa, a powerful kingdom to the west whose king the Hittites sometimes addressed as an equal. Many scholars identify Ahhiyawa with Mycenaean Greeks, who in Homer are often called Achaeans. In the so-called Tawagalawa letter of the mid-13th century BC, a Hittite king refers to an earlier dispute with Ahhiyawa over Wilusa. A later letter mentions a king of Wilusa named Walmu who had been driven from his throne.

These texts show that Wilusa was caught up in conflicts between the Hittites and the Mycenaean world in the 13th century BC. They do not describe a ten-year siege or a Greek coalition sacking the city.

Troy after the Bronze Age

The site was not abandoned after the fire of Troy VIIa. The following phase, Troy VIIb, shows new kinds of pottery and continued occupation into the 12th and 11th centuries BC. A bronze seal inscribed in Luwian hieroglyphs, a script used in Hittite Anatolia, was found in a Troy VIIb context in 1995, the only inscription so far discovered at Bronze Age Troy.

After a period of decline, Greek settlers established a town called Ilion on the mound, and the sanctuary of Athena of Ilion became famous because of its link with Homer. Herodotus says the Persian king Xerxes climbed to the citadel in 480 BC and sacrificed a thousand cattle to Athena before invading Greece. Alexander the Great visited in 334 BC at the start of his campaign against Persia and honoured the tomb of Achilles. The Romans, who claimed descent from the Trojan prince Aeneas, favoured the city, and Ilion survived into the Byzantine period before it was finally deserted.

What historians conclude

Opinions range widely. Some scholars, such as Joachim Latacz, argue that the combined evidence makes a historical core very likely: a real Troy, real Greek interest in the region and real conflicts that later poets fused into one great war. Others, following the historian Moses Finley, have held that the epics tell us more about the world of Homer’s own time than about the Bronze Age.

A common middle view is that the legend may preserve memories of one or more attacks on Troy by Mycenaean Greeks, perhaps during the turbulent decades before the Late Bronze Age collapse, while the characters and many details are poetic invention. The traditional date, around 1184 BC, falls close to the destruction of Troy VIIa, but that link remains a hypothesis.

Myths and facts

The Trojan Horse is the best-known image of the war, but it does not appear in the action of the Iliad, which ends before the fall of the city. It is described in the Odyssey and fully told in later works such as the Aeneid. There is no archaeological evidence for it.

It is often said that Schliemann discovered Troy single-handedly. In fact Frank Calvert had identified Hisarlik and dug there first, and Schliemann’s methods destroyed much evidence of the very levels he was seeking. Another common idea is that Helen, Achilles or Agamemnon are attested in Bronze Age records; none of them appears in any contemporary document.

Timeline

• c. 3000 BC: The first settlement, Troy I, is founded at Hisarlik.
• c. 1750-1300 BC: Troy VI flourishes as a fortified city.
• c. 1280 BC: Muwatalli II makes a treaty with Alaksandu of Wilusa.
• c. 1190-1180 BC: Troy VIIa is destroyed by fire.
• 8th-7th century BC: The Iliad and Odyssey take shape.
• 1871-1873: Heinrich Schliemann excavates Hisarlik and finds the so-called Priam’s Treasure.
• 1932-1938: Carl Blegen excavates Troy for the University of Cincinnati.
• 1988-2005: Manfred Korfmann leads new excavations.
• 1998: Troy becomes a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

The Trojan War legend has shaped Western literature, art and ideas of heroism for nearly three thousand years. The search for its truth helped create modern archaeology, and the debate still shows how historians weigh myth, poetry, excavation and ancient documents against one another.