Troy
This article is about the ancient city of Ilion as described in the works of Homer, and the location of an ancient city associated with it. For other uses see Troy (disambiguation) and Ilion (disambiguation). For the asteroid family, see Trojan asteroids |
Walls of the excavated city of Troy |
Troy (
Ancient Greek Τροία
Troia, also Ίλιον
Ilion;
Latin:
Troia,
Ilium) is a legendary city and center of the
Trojan War, as described in the
Trojan War cycle, especially in the
Iliad, 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 Hisarlık () 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 (
Troy VII) 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 (which goes back to earlier
Wilion with a
digamma) is thought to be the Greek rendition of that name.
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 (now
Turkey). (Although part of Asia, Troy is presented in the legend as part of the Greek culture of
City states.) 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 (later ruled by
Aeneas). 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 (Troy) 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 (traditionally dated to
1193 BC-
1183 BC). 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 (founder of Troy),
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
naias 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 ("Mount of the Goddess") 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 (‘source of all oracles') was dedicated to
Jupiter the Thunderer (
Tonatus) near Troy.
Buthrotos (or Buthrotum) was a city in
Epirus where
Helenus, the Trojan
seer, built a replica of Troy.
Aeneas landed there and Helenus foretold his future.'''
In the
Iliad, the
Achaeans set up their camp near the mouth of the river
Scamander (modern
Karamenderes), 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 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, 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. 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 (see [
1], [
2], & [
3]) 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.
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 [
4] 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.
The layers of ruins on the site are numbered Troy I – Troy IX, with various subdivisions:
*Troy I 3000-2600 (Western Anatolian
EB 1)
*Troy II 2600-2250 (Western Anatolian EB 2)
*Troy III 2250-2100 (Western Anatolian EB 3 [early])
*Troy IV 2100-1950 (Western Anatolian EB 3 [middle])
*Troy V:
20th –
18th centuries BC (Western Anatolian EB 3 [late]).
*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 VIIb
1:
12th century BC*Troy VIIb
2:
11th century BC*Troy VIIb
3: until ca.
950 BC*Troy VIII: around
700 BC*Troy IX:
Hellenistic Ilium,
1st century BCTroy 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 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 (ca.
1120 BC) and Troy VIIb
2 (ca.
1020 BC) 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.
Schliemann
With the rise of modern critical history, Troy and the Trojan War were consigned to the realms of legend. In the
1870s (in two campaigns,
1871-
73 and
1878/
9), however, the German
archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated a hill, called
Hisarlik 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—at first Troy I, later Troy II—to be the city of Troy, and this identification was widely accepted at that time.
 |
The view from Hisarlık across the plain of Ilium to the Aegean Sea |
Dörpfeld, Blegen
After Schliemann, the site was further excavated under the direction of
Wilhelm Dörpfeld (
1893/
4) and later
Carl Blegen (
1932-
8). These excavations have shown that 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 his person, it is uncertain how and when the excavations will continue.
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 (
Millawanda) 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 (
Achaeans).
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 (known in classical times as the
Caicus) river, and near the land of
Lazpa (the
Isle of Lesbos).
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.
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 (Troy IX), 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
(W)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 (
Millawanda). 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 (many of which centrally involve divine intervention) 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 (which could, however, also have been obtained in Homer's time by visiting the traditional site of the city) and otherwise unmotivated elements in the poem (in particular the detailed
Catalogue of Ships). 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.
|
"Trojan Horse" at the site of Troy |
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.
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.
*
Bronze Age*
Heinrich Schliemann *
Lost cities*
Mycenae*
Trojan*
Trojan War*
Trojan language*
Homer*
Iliad*
Trojan horse*
*Archaeology
**
Project Troia - The new excavations at Troy***
digital reconstructions of the city**
Troy VII and the Historicity of the Trojan War**
Where Is "Troy" Now?**
Ilios. The city and country of the Trojans: the results of researches and discoveries on the site of Troy and through the Troad in the years 1871-72-73-78-79; (searchable facsimile at the University of Georgia Libraries, requires dejavu-plugin)
**
The Identification of Troy by Jan Sammer
*Geography
**
the Troad (with an image of a model of Troy II)
**
Troy pictures
