To this lonely hillside, high above the Valley of Sparta in southern Greece,
pilgrims still come one day a year to make their offerings.
They light their candles to a Christian saint,
but his altar stands on a far more ancient pagan shrine.
For this place was once dedicated to the face that launched a thousand ships.
Helen of Troy.
According to legend, it was because of Helen
that the heroes sailed from Greece to attack the city on the shore of Asia.
Their leader was the most powerful of their kings; Agamemnon of Mycenae.
Helen, queen of Sparta,
had been abducted by paris, the prince of Troy,
and the Greeks wanted revenge.
But after 10 years of war,
they could only take Troy by a trick, by the wooden horse.
They demolished the city, slaughtered its men
and took the women back as concubines or menials.
Ever since, those women have stood as an image of the fate of the conquered in war.
The two most famous facts in the legend are also the most incredible;
that a woman caused the war and
that it was brought to an end by a wooden horse.
Can there be any truth in such fairy tales?
So far in our search, we have found a city did indeed exist
where Greek tradition said Troy had stood,
near the mouth of the Dardanelles in what is now Turkey.
There was a finely built royal fortress here on its windy ridge.
The Greek bards of Homer's day
believed that 500 years before their time,
this wealthy place was sacked by an army which had come from Greece.
For the bards, the incontestable, central fact of the tale
was the fateful overseas expedition to Troy from Golden Mycenae.
Mycenae, in the peloponnese, southern Greece.
The most powerful citadel in Greece in the Bronze Age,
it has given its name to the whole culture; Mycenaean.
The bards of Homer's day said that for three generations
Mycenae was the centre of a loose confederacy of allies,
a kind of empire.
But could a historical Agamemnon have been a great king
who commanded lesser kings to war?
Could he have led an imperial expedition from this tiny place
to devastate the shores of Asia Minor?
In the 13th century BC,
you approached Mycenae by a paved road from the sea at Tiryns.
Road systems are often
signs of imperial power
and even today you can see traces of the roads and their massive bridges
which centred on Mycenae.
As you walked up the valley,
you came to the first of a series of royal tombs,
their facades once decorated with coloured marble
imported from other parts of Greece.
These treasuries, built for kings of Mycenae in the generations before the Trojan War,
made a great impression on the first excavator of Mycenae,
Heinrich Schliemann.
The Treasury of Atreus is
one of the most stupendous monuments
of the Bronze Age.
Nearly 50 feet in diameter, 44 feet to the top of that beehive shape.
The perfectly joined courses of stone,
a single block weighing 120 tonnes at the lintel.
When it was constructed, its interior walls studded with decorations,
bronze rosettes and spirals.
It had been obvious to early travellers,
and it was obvious to Schliemann,
that the society which could construct such a masterpiece,
which could lavish such skill and ingenuity on a tomb for a single king,
must've been not only tremendously powerful
but fantastically rich in artistic achievement.
Once crammed with treasure, the tomb chamber is now wrecked,
but we can imagine its walls adorned with beautifully carved slabs of alabaster.
The royal tombs of Mycenae show that
several generations of great kings ruled here.
500 yards away up the valley on its hill is the royal citadel itself,
the residence of Agamemnon.
The so-called cyclopean fortifications of Mycenae
were built around 1300 BC,
a generation or two before the time of the Trojan War.
Also part of this building programme was the famous Lion Gate.
This was the main gate of Mycenae at the height of its power
and one's first impression is of being almost
overwhelmed by the sheer monumental force of the masonry and sculpture.
It's a prehistoric masterpiece of architecture.
The emblem shows two lions with their paws on an altar on either side of a column.
On top of the column, the representation of a building structure,
presumably Mycenae itself.
In other words, this is the coat of arms of Agamemnon's family,
the earliest in Western art.
Just inside the Lion Gate, to the right,
you come upon one of the most interesting features of the later citadel of Mycenae
and one that gives a fascinating insight into the psychology
of the kings who ruled in the 13th century,
the kings who ruled at the time to which tradition assigns the Trojan War.
This is the great grave circle excavated
so sensationally by Heinrich Schliemann.
It lay originally outside the walls of the citadel,
but at just this time, a new, enclosing cyclopean wall was constructed
in order to bring this grave circle within the walls of the fortress itself.
The whole area was extensively refurbished in order to become an object of show.
A new supporting terrace was built for this side of the circle,
these elaborate standing stones were erected to form an ornate enclosure
and the grave markers themselves,
bearing the emblems of the dead kings, were repositioned.
It's almost like the Westminster Abbey of the Mycenaean royal family.
Graves which were already ancient to Agamemnon, if he existed,
have now become the focus for veneration and for cult.
The Mycenaean royal family itself in the mid-13th century
is showing an acute awareness of history, of dynasty and of pedigree.
At the time of the Trojan War,
the king of Mycenae saw himself as the inheritor of a great tradition
reaching back 300 years to the kings buried in the shaft graves.
And from the top, a truly royal setting.
The plain of Argos stretching below you.
The mountains of Arcadia and the peloponnese,
some still touched by snow, even at the start of May,
and, over there, Argos on its high mound
and the gulf of the sea beyond it.
What a view!
Who's to say that Mycenaean builders didn't choose
the finest positions for their royal patrons?
And, surely, their royal patrons must have enjoyed this.
These are the royal apartments. Spacious columned halls,
floored with soft stucco, gypsum surrounds.
This is the throne room itself,
the door pins for the entrance,
the central hearth, the wooden columns framing it.
Here Mycenaean kings feasted
their guests or their royal kinsmen
after the boar hunts and the lion hunts.
Here, perhaps, they heard bards singing
of their deeds in Mycenaean Greek,
and around them the walls glowed with frescoes
depicting their deeds and the deeds of their ancestors.
The king of Mycenae would seem to have surpassed
the other kings in Greece in the 13th century BC.
But is it possible that, as Homer says,
such a wealthy and powerful king could
have ruined himself in a war for a woman?
For a woman, perhaps, of the kind
portrayed on the walls of the Greek palaces.
Homer's story was that
Agamemnon persuaded his allies to go to Troy to fight for Helen
because other kings of Greece who had been suitors for her hand
had sworn to recover her.
George Mylonas, present excavator of Mycenae.
Agamemnon became the leader of this common expedition
not because everybody that wanted Helen
gave an offer to her father that he was going to defend her,
but because Agamemnon was the most mighty leader of the period.
Therefore even the people that had an opinion there
indicated that for this common enterprise
they chose the best man, and that was Agamemnon.
Not because he was an emperor or anything like that.
Another thing, all these roads that we traced,
they go up to a certain point.
If it was an empire,
you would expect those roads to go beyond that point that was limited.
So you don't believe in
an empire in the modern sense?
No, I don't believe in an empire.
I believe that Mycenae was a very important state.
I believe it had a tremendous commercial activity.
I believe that it communicated to the sea by means of Tiryns.
I believe that Tiryns was a dependency of Mycenae,
that the king of Mycenae had one of his sons,
maybe, out there as a prince.
No ruler would have allowed another person
to build such an important place
that might have become the source of the beginning of an attack.
You must remember that the people that lived there, that formed this state,
lived outside the walls, scattered all over the area.
The plain of Argos could have supported
half a million people in the Bronze Age.
It's ringed by huge fortresses,
the biggest of which is Tiryns.
Tiryns of the Great Walls, as Homer calls it,
from which, legend said, King Diomedes led 80 black ships to Troy.
Tiryns was perhaps the main port of the Argolid.
From the plain, the industrial powerhouse of the Mycenaean world,
trade goods flowed across the eastern Mediterranean.
Factories here produced thousands of stirrupjar
in which oil or perfume were exported.
In return, the Greeks imported raw materials such as tin and copper
to make the bronze weapons on which their power rested.
By the 13th century BC,
the same palace civilisation is found all over Greece.
It has been called the age of imperial Mycenae.
If we use the word "imperial" of Mycenae,
we need to be careful.
Homer says Agamemnon was king
of southern Greece and many islands.
When you look at a map with Mycenaean red
stretching across the Aegean, it seems plausible.
But this is a map of Mycenaean
contacts and settlements,
and it shouldn't delude us.
We need to know the internal political
geography of mainland Greece.
A lot more is known about that than in the days of
Schliemann and Dorpfeld and even Blegen.
It would appear that mainland Greece was divided into six or seven powerful city states,
much bigger than later classical ones,
with a high degree of prosperity, large populations
and massive military technology,
much aimed against each other.
Two of these we know about because of the Linear B tablets -
Knossos and pylos.
There we have clear pictures of highly centralised states
dominating their areas of central Crete and Mycenaea.
It gives us a plausible model,
at least to work with.
We have here a series of city states,
sometimes friends, sometimes enemies,
who could at times acknowledge the leadership of the most powerful.
For the kings of the palaces of Mycenaean Greece
worshipped the same gods.
They spoke the same language, recorded on identical Linear B clay tablets.
They shared the same artists, architects and stonemasons
and the same taste in decoration.
There was constant exchange between them of luxury goods and raw materials,
whether expensive ornamental stone or oil or perfume in mass-produced stirrupjars.
But if this loose confederacy cooperated so closely in time of peace,
could they not have done so in time of war?
Empires, of course, only exist by war.
They live on aggression and exploitation.
We can see this in our own history.
Retrospectively, we, like Homer,
admire the Victorian values of the empire-builders
and forget their mode of operation.
These are the vaults of what was
one of the oldest private banks in Liverpool, Heywoods.
They were built in 1799.
These are the accounts of a Liverpool family
who owned estates in Jamaica at that time.
They itemise not money or stocks and shares,
but people.
Eleanor, a nurse, aged 42, healthy.
Charlotte, a field hand, aged 37, sickly.
Mary, unemployed, aged three and a half.
They're African slaves, originally from Angola
or the mouth of the Congo River.
It's astonishing to think that only 150 years or so ago,
this is what lay behind the glittering facade of the British Empire.
Well, it's a remarkable fact that records exactly like this exist for Bronze Age Greece,
and they may point us not only to the Trojan War,
but towards the real-life women
who may be the basis of the legend
of the carrying-off of Helen of Troy herself.
The crucial evidence turned up in Carl Blegen's excavation
at the palace of pylos in Mycenaea in the 1950s.
Pylos in Homer's story is the home of
Agamemnon's trusty old ally, King Nestor.
Here, Blegen found the foundations
of a 13th century BC palace.
Even the painted hearth of the throne room was intact.
Here, for the first time, the full detail of a Mycenaean royal hall could be recovered,
the very room Homer imagines so vividly in the "Odyssey".
This is the throne room of pylos,
just as it was found by the excavators.
From these burnt stumps,
you can't get a real idea of what a blaze of colour this must have been,
the ceiling painted with glazed roundels and decoration,
the walls covered with frescoes with griffins and mythological creatures
and the floor above all else absolutely shining with colour.
Most of it's been covered now to protect it from the feet of the many visitors,
but you can make out here that it was originally covered with painted stucco
with criss-cross lines all over it
making about 100 squares of colour with different designs in all of them -
linear designs, wavy designs,
shell designs, fish, octopus...
So the whole floor was a blaze of blues, reds, whites and blacks.
In the middle was the royal hearth.
Opposite the throne over there, where King Nestor sat.
Here's the hearth where the great fire burned.
You can still see the painted design around it.
In the story in Homer, when Telemachos arrives in the room,
the young blades of Nestor's court are
nonchalantly kebabing beef on the fire and drinking red wine with their king.
And here, a noble guest would have received the gifts
appropriate to the hearth of a great royal palace.
But Blegen's most remarkable evidence concerned the lives not of the rich
but of the thousands below stairs.
In the archive room, he found hundreds of
Linear B tablets written in Bronze Age Greek
which itemised the lives of the workers, and especially women workers.
Associated with several groups was a word, "linon", flax,
from which our word, "linen", comes.
Near pylos, at the village of Koukounara
where flax was grown commercially until only 30 years ago,
it is still possible to touch on their lives.
This little stream is called Linaria, "flax river",
and here, for hundreds, probably thousands of years, women have come -
for it is women who perform this back-breaking task -
come to the banks here to crush and break up the fibres of the flax stalk,
before laying it out for a week to rot in the warm, shallow water of the river,
then drying it,
combing it and spinning it so it can be woven.
But in the Bronze Age, they must have used it most of all for rope
and for sails,
the sails of ships perhaps
that wafted Nestor to Troy.
Troy seems a long way from this idyllic place
but it's this very place that gives us a direct human contact
with the ordinary people who lived and died all that time ago.
It's the flax women themselves who are the contact,
because the tablets from the palace say
that the women who worked the flax in this region
and on this very river 3,000 years ago
were women from the coast of Asia Minor,
the coast below Troy,
from Miletus, Halicarnassus and Cnidus.
They must have been slaves.
The tablets speak of rations for groups of 500 women,
living perhaps on great estates where they worked the state industry, flax.
They were kept together.
The tablets speak of 21 women from Cnidus
with their 12 girls and 10 boys,
not like American slave plantations, where the families were broken up.
That, to my mind, is the strongest connection
with the period of the Trojan War.
That is a real, direct contact.
A truer and more eloquent testimony
than trade routes to the thought world of Agamemnon and the sackers of cities.
The surviving tablets list
1,700 foreign women and children
on the flax plantations around pylos.
The women came from places widely scattered over the Aegean.
From Cnidus, far to the south.
From Zephyrus and Miletus,
where Greek colonists actually settled.
From Lemnos in the north,
an island in sight of Troy.
But most of them are simply called women of Asia,
which originally meant the area south of Troy itself.
If this is the correct interpretation of the table
it's crucial evidence in our search.
Dr John Chadwick, who participated in the decipherment of the Linear B tablets,
is an expert in the pylos Archive.
It is very much as if you tried to reconstruct the administration of present-day England
by going through half a dozen waste-paper baskets in Whitehall
and drawing your conclusions from that.
With that first statement, I would go and say from this
the existence of personal slavery seems to be very questionable.
There are only a few cases where we know of slaves
belonging to important people.
It is not a slave-owning society in the classical sense at all.
There is one exception to this,
and that is in the royal establishments.
At pylos, we know there were about 500 women of menial status.
They've got their children with them but they have no husbands.
Almost certainly, they are slaves
and, for the most part, they're employed as what we would call industrial workers.
If you compare it with Homer,
it's an incredibly bureaucratic society.
It's not heroic at all!
It's not heroic in that sense.
It is a bureaucratic administration
and everything is carefully recorded and docketed.
You cannot spend anything,
you can't issue anything from the stores without filling in a chit.
But it's possible that Mycenaean kings or sons of kings
could have ranged far and wide on predatory forays,
even buying or seizing slaves?
That is quite possible.
Certainly, we can be sure pylos had a fleet.
It was certainly mobilising its fleet,
at the time when the tablets we have were written, for its own defence.
So there is no reason why, in more favourable times,
they should not have been engaged in expeditions overseas.
We know some of these women I've just mentioned
are specifically called booty.
They come from some kind of piratical or warlike operation.
We also have groups of women whose titles
indicate an origin on the east of the Aegean, from Anatolia.
Again, we don't know why they're called by these titles,
but it does suggest that pylos
had wide-ranging contacts across the Aegean.
So Homer was right.
The heroes fought not only for the cities and their loot
but for their women.
The seizure of women could have led to war.
So could Helen have been a real person?
The next stage of the search was to go to Sparta,
where Helen supposedly lived with her husband Menelaus,
brother of Agamemnon of Mycenae.
You would have made this journey by sea in the Bronze Age,
for in Greek history the sea,
not the land, has been the unifier.
This road through the Taygetos
was only blasted through in the 1970s.
Before then, you had a 12-hour mule trek.
The mountains determined
the political geography of Mycenaean Greece.
Any unity can only have been nominal and fragile.
On a steep hill above the plain of Sparta
stands a monument.
The classical shrine commemorating Helen and her husband.
It's called the Menelaion.
From at least the 8th century BC,
pilgrims came here and left offerings to the couple
in the belief that they had really existed.
A century ago, Schliemann came here and found nothing.
New excavations have located part of the palace,
if second-rate, which could've been Helen's.
Does the archaeology give any support to the idea of the Spartan Helen
and her husband from Mycenae?
The Mycenaean site's spread over these three hills,
with their magnificent views over the valley and the Taygetos Mountains.
There's a Mycenaean building even on this hill
under the church of profitis llias.
It's never been excavated but here there's the column base,
presumably from a mansion or even a palace that stood on this site.
It seems that this, the Menelaion, was the capital site
of the kingdom of Sparta during the 15th and 14th centuries.
But at that time it was abandoned for about 100 years.
And then, in around the very generation of the Trojan War,
a new palace was erected on that flat plateau
to the right of the later shrine.
That palace had everything in common in its material culture
with the palaces at Mycenae and at pylos.
It is, on the face of it, very tempting to think
that this must've been the palace of Menelaus and Helen.
But we don't really know what we mean by royal families at this time.
I suspect they were like
the Saudi royal family today or the great African kings' families,
where there were many royal wives, royal sons, brothers and queen mothers,
all of whom had palaces.
But this was the biggest palace at this time
and surely has the best qualifications to be the palace of Menelaus.
If it was, then the rebuilding fits rather well with the legend.
The legend says it was not a Spartan who was king at the time of the Trojan War
but a foreigner, an outsider from the dynasty of Mycenae who had come here.
So is it not possible that the rebuilding of the palace
was by Menelaus himself, in order to provide a new palace
on an ancient site for his new wife Helen?
And long after Christianity had replaced ancient paganism,
the holy aura of the hill remained.
Even today, pilgrims come here, the aged and the sick,
to keep their vigil once a year with the saint,
and perhaps his shadowy predecessor, whoever she was.
So Helen remains a tantalising and ambiguous image.
Whether she left for love or, as Homer has it,
she was seized forcibly by paris of Troy,
when, he says, the Trojans took her with her women to the island of Krani.
And that seems a suitably Homeric way to leave mainland Greece for the moment,
because it was on Krani that Helen of Troy
and paris spent their first night of passion after her abduction from Sparta.
When, as Homer says, paris "carried her off in his seagoing ships
"from lovely Laconia and we spent the night in bed in each other's arms
"on the island of Krani."
So they sailed overseas to Troy,
to be followed by a Greek armada of 1,000 ships,
bringing ruin upon the city and,
as Homer says,
"pains a thousandfold upon the Greeks."
The story of paris and Helen is usually dismissed as romantic fiction,
but some scholars think an abduction could have a place
in the motives for
a war against the city of King priam.
Professor John Luce of Trinity College, Dublin.
It was a general attempt to cause such difficulties for priam's kingdom
that they would capitulate to the Greek demands.
And I would even go so far as to say that one of those demands was for the return of Helen.
In the conditions of fighting in...
Well, I was going to say, heroic ages, but I view the background as more medieval
in the sense that it is a world of pageantry, of kings and nobles,
of knights whose honour is all-important.
And I can give you a good parallel from the history of my own country,
as the Normans first came into Ireland.
They were asked to do so by a local king called MacMurrough Kavanagh
whose wife had left him and he wanted help to get her back, you see.
So, historically, there's nothing out of key, to my mind,
with the abduction by a Trojan of a Greek princess.
Obviously, the spheres of the Trojans and the Greeks
were closely intermeshed in terms of trade -
they had been for 100, 150 years before.
A lot of coming and going between the two areas.
And this could be a cause. I don't...
In a complex situation, it's oversimplification to say it's the only cause.
It might have been something that Agamemnon was glad to take up
this personal quarrel on behalf of his brother.
- As an excuse for war. - An excuse for war,
which would lead to aggrandisement, to plunder,
to a further expansion of Mycenaean power on the Anatolian mainland.
But you wouldn't rule out the possibility that Helen existed?
Not a bit, no!
Helen's story is seductive,
though, in the end, we cannot prove she existed.
There may have been more pressing economic motives
which led the Mycenaean military on overseas expeditions
to Asia Minor in the 13th century BC.
The massive building projects at Mycenae and Tiryns
came at the end of a long and stable period of economic growth
but despite the outward show,
the 13th century BC seems to have been a period of growing economic decline.
The king of Mycenae and his confederacy of allies
had troubles at home.
There was overpopulation,
their trade routes were under threat,
the factories in the Argolid were on half production.
The kings needed treasure, loot and slaves
to keep their army loyal.
They needed foreign war.
It was in the nature of their rule.
Economic necessity, or the world's most beautiful woman?
The motive hardly mattered.
Already in our search, we have seen that the Greek bards of the 8th century BC
had traditions which connected heroic Greece with Troy.
But is there archaeological evidence at Troy
to back up their story?
Hisarlik, north-western Turkey.
Here, Greek bardic traditions said Troy had stood.
Even before Homer's day,
this overgrown and obscure ruin by the Dardanelles
had become the focus of the Greeks' national epic.
Here, their bards said, had been a city of fine walls
with strong gates and towers.
A beautiful city, standing high above the windy plain.
A city whose kings were rich
and civilised Oriental potentates,
famous for their fine horses.
Over the last 100 years,
three generations of excavators have dug here.
They've brought to life the city which stood here at the heyday of Mycenae
in the years after 1300 BC.
The city's fine walls, remembered by the bards,
were found by Wilhelm Dorpfeld in 1893.
Its well-built towers included an imposing watchtower.
With 500 years of stability behind it,
this city is the one remembered in Greek tradition as Troy,
though no one has yet been able to prove
the events in the "lliad" happened here.
The last excavator of Hisarlik
discovered the city had extensive outside contacts
which were suddenly severed towards 1250 BC.
In his finds of pottery, Carl Blegen found evidence
of a trade with Cyprus and Syria.
But remarkably - and perhaps this was a clue to its wealth -
the oldest trading connections of the city
were with none other than Mycenae itself.
One of the intriguing things about Troy,
when you consider the Homeric story of a Greek expedition to sack the city,
is that Troy, of all the places on the Anatolian coast,
seems to have had the closest relationship
with Mycenae, judging by the pottery.
Troy in its heyday of Troy VI
imported vast amounts of Mycenaean pottery.
Hundreds of vases were discovered on site.
And especially the ubiquitous stirrupjar that we've already seen
at Tiryns and Mycenae and on the coast of Anatolia.
What Troy gave in return is almost impossible to say.
Perhaps it was textiles, it may have been fish,
or, as Homer says,
maybe they bred and exported horses.
But whatever the reason for their wealth,
this place, at its height, was a wealthy city.
The people who lived in this citadel were able to build grand houses, like this one.
This long, rectangular building -
you can make out its lines - with two central columns.
That one's lost the top level. The ceiling would've been about 10 feet high.
The lower storey built of stone,
the upper one perhaps of wattle and plaster, mud brick or timber,
rather like buildings in Anatolia today.
But this would've been a princely dwelling for
one of the chief citizens of Bronze Age Troy.
Maybe a royal kinsman like Hector himself.
We should imagine 20 or 30 of these houses,
with the royal palace on the hill.
But unlike the palaces at pylos and Mycenae,
we cannot now transport ourselves to the halls of the house of priam,
the palace to which Helen was taken.
Unfortunately, all surviving trace of it was destroyed
when Heinrich Schliemann gouged out the centre of the site in the 1870s.
All that remains is the walls and the outer row of houses.
But, by comparison with other cities in Anatolia,
it is possible to deduce what the city of
Hector and priam probably looked like.
James Mellaart of the University of London.
I'd like to know what the palace was like.
There's enough room.
There's enough room for the sort of palace you would have had
both in western Anatolia or in the Aegean.
So you'd imagine the palace area crammed with buildings and storerooms?
Yes, obviously taking up what remains...
or what is at the moment the blank on the plans of Troy.
And then, presumably, the houses which have been found
are those of palace officials,
the normal Near-Eastern pattern,
people connected with the palace administration.
- Or royal kinsmen. - Yes, or whatever it is.
That's what you'd expect. Presumably, the rest of the population lives outside the walls.
What about its wealth?
The Greek epic says horse-breeding was the source of Troy's wealth.
Do you think that's plausible?
It's a very plausible source of local wealth.
Not Troy so much, but the plains directly to the east
are still horse-breeding territory today in Turkey.
The other thing, from the thousands of spindle whirls,
it's clear that one facet of the economy of Troy is wool.
That's exactly what you would expect.
Of course, the one other thing, if one goes by some of our pylos texts,
slaves, of course, the export of slaves, especially trained slaves,
is always... produces a lucrative trade.
That gives a plausible reason for the Trojan War.
You think there was a Trojan War?
Look... Many of these things, as we've already discussed, I mean...
We have no real evidence, we only have belief.
I would put it like that:
If the Trojan War was a figment of Greek imagination,
it wouldn't have gone down very well.
I think there must be some core... some historical core to it.
You wouldn't even rule out the possibility that the seizure of a Mycenaean royal woman
by a Trojan prince could've been the reason for the Trojan War?
The idea that they may have annoyed the Mycenaeans
is by no means impossible.
People pointed out, of course,
that Homer's idea of Alexander or paris of Troy...
...running off with one of the
Mycenaean kings' wives is far-fetched...
I would not say that stranger things haven't happened in the Near East.
So was the city sacked, and was it sacked by Greeks?
The excavator Carl Blegen found the city had been destroyed twice
during the traditional period of the Trojan War.
The city of fine walls apparently fell to an earthquake towards 1260 BC.
Tumbled walls and debris lay heaped everywhere.
A shanty city built on its ruins
was burned by the hand of man some decades later.
This, Blegen thought, was Homer's Troy.
But only the earthquake city fits
the description handed down by the bards.
Only this city comes within the heyday of the Mycenaean world,
when an imperial expedition might have sailed from Greece.
Can the legend be squared with this archaeological contradiction?
The legend says the fall of Troy came about
in a most extraordinary way.
For 10 years, Homer says,
Troy could not be taken.
Its walls were too strong to be broken down by human hands.
Then the Greeks built a wooden horse,
inside which they hid armed men.
Thinking the horse a gift for their gods, the Trojans took it inside their walls.
That night, the Greeks descended from the horse,
opened Troy's gates and the city was destroyed.
Since ancient times, people have found it impossible
to believe in the literal truth of this tale.
But now a new and ingenious theory has offered an explanation.
The horse is the image of the most prominent god
in the Mycenaean pantheon; poseidon.
According to the legend, it was only through poseidon's help
that the walls of Troy were brought down.
And poseidon, the master of horses,
was the god of earthquakes.
The supposed earthquake towards 1260 BC
threw down the tops of Troy's walls and towers.
According to the new theory - it is only theory -
the earthquake delivered Troy to the Greeks,
who seized this moment to sack their enfeebled former friend,
plundering its fabled riches and killing its menfolk.
So, in the strange folk tale of the wooden horse,
the bards were perhaps unknowingly handing down
a garbled memory of the wrath of poseidon.
As for the women of Troy,
the legend says their fate was the same as all women captives
in so-called heroic warfare.
They were divided as chattels among the victorious chiefs,
taken back to Greece to serve them in their fields or in their beds.
Some perhaps to work in the flax fields of pylos,
where a generation or two later,
they are recorded as women of Asia.
"Some", says Homer,
"to draw water at the spring below the hill of Sparta,
"taking their orders from the woman
"who had caused it all.
"Helen, who had returned to Sparta
"to rule as queen again."
Back in Mycenae,
there's one last clue to the Trojan enigma.
A clue which, perhaps, takes us closer
to the people who suffered and died or were enslaved in Bronze Age wars.
This is a piece of grey handmade pottery.
It was made in the region of Troy on the island of Lemnos.
It was found, along with many other pieces,
down there in the workers' hovels which
crouched below the great citadel of Mycenae.
Let the imagination play and is it not possible
that this was made by the same kind of women that we met in the palace at pylos?
Women brought over from Asia Minor as slaves,
from Cnidus, Miletus and Lemnos,
women whose memory, in this case,
will far outlive the physical existence of their home.
The women of Troy.
That is just imagination, I stress.
There is so far in our search
no concrete proof that the Trojan War ever took place.
And the trouble is that, by their very nature,
Homer and archaeology cannot prove such a fact.
In order to do that, you would need primary sources.
Narratives, documents, letters.
You may say it's impossible that they could exist for the Bronze Age.
But astonishingly, they do.
In order to find them, we must go far to the east,
into Asia Minor itself,
to the Hittite empire of Anatolia,
where, amazingly,
diplomatic archives have been discovered
which cover this very period and which could show that
a Mycenaean king was campaigning on the mainland of Asia Minor,
and that perhaps the Trojan War did indeed take place.
Next week, we will look at
the Asian context of the Trojan War.