Everything about Troy totally explained
Troy (
Hittite:
Wilusa or
Truwisa,
Greek:,
Troia, also Ίλιον,
Ilion;
Latin:
Trōia,
Īlium,) is a
legendary city and center of the
Trojan War, as described in the
Epic Cycle, and especially in the
Iliad, one of the two epic poems attributed to
Homer.
Trojan refers to the inhabitants and culture of Troy.
Today it's 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 the
Byzantine era.
In the 1870s the
German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated the area. Later excavations revealed several cities built in succession to each other. 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 archaeological site of Troy was added to the
UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998.
Legendary Troy
Details concerning Troy were transmitted to the historical Greeks entirely through the written
Epic Cycle, of which Homer's
Iliad is the familiar part. Other epic material, such as
Cypria was known in Antiquity but is lost to us. Further ancient material is only known to us in much later literary recensions, such as the fourth century CE
Posthomerica of
Quintus of Smyrna. Aside from this mass of material, modern philologists have laboured to tease out the few discernible threads of the earlier legendary material that preceded Homer, from which he worked.
According to
Greek mythology the Trojans were the citizens of the ancient municipality of Troy in the
Troad region of
Anatolia. Troy is presented anachronistically in legend as if it were part of the Greek culture of
City states. Since the entire state comprised more than the city of Troy itself, anyone from its jurisdiction, which was mainly the Troad, might be termed "Trojan" in ancient literature. An alternative classical Greek and Latin term was "
Teucrians", a name taken from an ethnicity of the south Troad. Troy was known for its riches gained from port trade with east and west, fancy clothes, iron production, and massive
defensive walls. The major language spoken there and the derivative cultures remain uncertain. Legend for the most part ignores language and makes the presumption that Trojans had no problem understanding Greek.
The Trojan royal kinship, in Greek eyes, traced its descent from the
Pleiad Electra and
Zeus, the parents of
Dardanus. According to Greek myths, Dardanus was originally from
Arcadia but according to Roman myths, he was originally from Italy, having crossed over to Asia Minor from the island of
Samothrace, where he met
King 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.
In
Sardis a self-identified Heracleid dynasty ruled for 505 years until the time of
Candaules. The dynasty's
founding myth legitimizes their rule by asserting that 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 1193–1183 BC). The
Ionians,
Cimmerians,
Phrygians,
Milesians of
Sinope and
Lydians moved into Asia Minor. The
Persians invaded in 546 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.
Some famous Trojans are:
Dardanus (founder of Troy),
Laomedon,
Ganymede,
Priam and his children (including
Paris,
Hector,
Cassandra and
Troilus),
Tithonus,
Corythus,
Aeneas and
Brutus.
Kapys,
Boukolion and
Aisakos were Trojan princes who had
naiad wives. Some of the Trojan allies were the
Lycians, the Ethiopians led by
Memnon, and the
Amazons, led by their Queen
Hippolyta. The
Aisepid nymphs were the
naiads of the Trojan River
Aisepos.
Pegsis was the naiad of the River
Granicus near Troy. "
Helen of Troy" was born not in Troy, but in
Sparta, of which she was queen until she eloped with Paris to 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.
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.
Homeric Troy
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 the
Iliad, the
Achaeans set up their camp near the mouth of the river
Scamander (presumably modern
Karamenderes), where they'd 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. Recent geological findings have enabled the reconstruction of how the Trojan coastline would have looked, hence they indicate that Homeric geography of Troy is accurate.
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.
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's 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
topography and accounts of the battle in the
Iliad. Further work by John Kraft and others was published in 2003.
After the 1995 find of a Luwian biconvex seal at Troy VII, there has been a heated discussion over the
language that was spoken in Homeric Troy. Frank Starke of the
University of Tubingen recently demonstrated that the name of Priam is connected to the
Luwian compound
Priimuua, which means "exceptionally courageous". "The certainty is growing that Wilusa/Troy belonged to the greater Luwian-speaking community", although it's not entirely clear whether Luwian was primarily the official language or it was also in daily use.
Archaeological Troy
The layers of ruins in the citadel at Hisarlik 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 setting for Homer's story .
- 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
The archaeological site of Troy was added to the
UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998.
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 remains of bodies.
Troy VII
Troy VIIa, which has been dated 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 war.
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.
Beneath part of the Roman city, the ruins of which cover a much larger area than the citadel excavated by Schliemann, recent excavations have found traces of an additional Bronze-Age settlement area (of lower status than the adjoining citadel) defended by a ditch.
Excavation campaigns
With the rise of modern critical history, Troy and the Trojan War were consigned to the realms of legend. However, the true location of ancient Troy had from
classical times remained the subject of interest and speculation, so when in 1822 the Scottish journalist
Charles Maclaren reviewed the available material and published
A dissertation on the topography of the plain of Troy he was able to identify with confidence the position of the
acropolis of Augustus's New Ilium in north-western Anatolia. In 1866
Frank Calvert, the brother of the United States'
consular agent in the region, made extensive surveys and published in scholarly journals his identification of the hill of New Ilium (which was on farmland owned by his family) as the site of ancient Troy. The hill, near the town of
Chanak, was known to the Turks as Hisarlik.
Schliemann
In 1868 the German, self-taught
archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann visited Calvert and secured permission to excavate Hisarlik. In the 1870s (in two campaigns, 1871–73 and 1878/9) he excavated the hill and 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. Schliemann's finds at Hisarlik have become known as
Priam's Treasure. They were acquired from him by the Berlin museums, but significant doubts about their authenticity persist.
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 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. Possible evidence of a battle was found in the form of arrowheads found in layers dated to the early 12th century BC. 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.
Pernicka
In summer 2006 the excavations continued under the direction of Korfmann's colleague
Ernst Pernicka, with a new digging permit.
Hittite and Egyptian 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.
An unnamed
Hittite king 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). The Hittite king was long held to be
Mursili II (ca 1321-1296), but since the 1980s his son
Hattusili III (1265-1240) is commonly preferred, although Mursili's other son
Muwatalli (ca 1296-1272) is still considered a possibility.
An
Egyptian inscription at
Deir al-Madinah records a victory of
Ramesses III over
Sea Peoples, including some named
Tursha (spelled [twrš3] in Egyptian script). These are probably the same as the earlier Teresh (found written as [trš.w]) of the
Merneptah Stele, commemorating
Merneptah’s victory in a Libyan campaign at about 1220 BC. Although this may be too early for the
Trojan War, some scholars have connected the name to the city mentioned in Hittite records as
Taruisas, or Troy.
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 (
Lesbos Island).
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 nation T-R-S is mentioned as one of the "
Peoples of the Sea" in ancient Egyption inscriptions.
Trojan language and script
The language of Trojans is unknown, although several Trojan names may be identified as Luvian. The status of the so-called
Trojan script is still disputable.
Troy in later legend
Such was the fame of the
Epic Cycle in Roman and medieval times that it was built upon to provide a starting point for various
founding myths of national origins. The progenitor of all of them is undoubtedly that promulgated by
Virgil in the
Aeneid, tracing the ancestry of the founders of
Rome, more specifically the
Julio-Claudian dynasty, to the Trojan prince Aeneas. The heroes of Troy, both those noted in the epic texts or those purpose-invented, continued to perform the role of founder for the nations of Early Medieval Europe. Denys Hay noted the widespread adoption of Trojan forebears as an authentication of national status, in
Europe: the Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh 1957). The
Roman de Troie was common cultural ground for European governing classes, for whom a Trojan pedigree was gloriously ancient, and it established the successor-kingdoms of which they were direct heirs as equals of the Romans. A Trojan pedigree justified the occupation of parts of Rome's erstwhile territories (Huppert 1965).
The Franks filled the lacunae of their legendary origins with Trojan and pseudo-Trojan names; in
Fredegar's seventh-century chronicle of Frankish history, Priam appears as the first king of the Franks. The Trojan origin of Franks and France was such an established article of faith that in 1714 the learned
Nicolas Fréret was
Bastilled for showing through historical criticism that the Franks had been Germanic, a sore point counter to Valois and Bourbon propaganda.
Similarly
Geoffrey of Monmouth traces the legendary
Kings of the Britons to a supposed descendant of
Aeneas called
Brutus.
Snorri Sturluson, in the Prologue to his
Prose Edda, converts several half-remembered characters from Troy into characters from
Norse mythology, and refers to them having made a journey across Europe towards
Scandinavia, setting up kingdoms as they went.
Tourism
Today there's 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
Troia 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.
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