μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος (Menin aeide, thea Peleiadeu Akileos): Sing, Goddess, the Rage of Achilles. The very first line of the Iliad sets the scene for its climax: Patroclus, the paramour
of the King of the Myrmidons is dead, slain at the hands of Hector, the Prince of Troy. In his grief, Achilles’ wrath knows no bounds.
Consumed with vengeance and bloodlust, no soldier, prince, or even River Spirit is a match for the immortal son of Thetis.
As the Trojan army flees back behind their gates, one warrior remains outside: the eldest Prince of Troy. As Achilles chases Hector around the walls of his city, Zeus considers rescuing him from
the Myrmidon’s wrath. Alas, Hector’s fate has been weighed upon the golden scale, and his life is forfeit. Knowing the Gods have abandoned him, the Prince of Troy turns to face his foe, and prepares
to make his final stand. The showdown between Hector and Achilles is one of the most well-known and enduring scenes in all of western literature.
Yet equal to its impact is the everlasting question: did it really happen? Was there ever a war between the Greeks and the City of Troy? Was there even a city of Troy?
In this video, we will compare fact to legend, and explore the true history of the iconic Iliad. This episode is brought to you by Intel thanks to their long-standing partnership with Creative
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The real history of the Trojan War is dubious at best. The Iliad itself is inseparable from the magic of the Olympian Gods, who constantly provide
divine intervention for both sides: In Book 12, Zeus conjures a massive thunderstorm that wreaks havoc through the Greek army, allowing the Trojans to push them all the way back
to their Ships, only for Poseidon to grow jealous of his brother’s power and imbue Ajax with superhuman strength, allowing him to force back the Trojan advance.
When this magic is stripped away, is there enough left to prove the existence of a real city of Troy, or a great war fought outside its walls?
Before we talk about the potential existence of Troy, we should perform a brief survey of the wider world it existed in.
The Epic Cycle, which the Iliad belongs to, is often associated with Classical Antiquity . This is the most famous era of Ancient Greece, and features the golden ages of Athens and
Sparta, the iconic Hoplite, and the Persian Wars. However, in truth, the stories of Homer’s Iliad would have been as distant a memory
to a classical Athenian as the fables of King Arthur are to modern Britons. Indeed, to understand the historical context behind the Iliad, we must go back nearly a
millennium earlier, to the early Bronze Age, and explore the world of the mysterious Myceneans. Rising to prominence around 1600BC, these ancient forebears to the Classical Greeks
would have been familiar, yet alien, to the 5th century Athenian Playwright. They worshipped an early form of the Olympian Pantheon and wrote their records in a script
known as Linear B, which was wholly distinct from the ancient Greek Alphabet. Their power was centered in aristocratic palace complexes across Crete and Southern Greece,
the most important of which was the titular Mycenae, located in Argos, where the semi-mythical Agamemnon of the House of Atreus was said to have ruled.
The Mycenaeans were a thalassocracy, with greater ships than nearly all their contemporaries. They roamed the seas, growing rich by trade with the Hittites, the Assyrians, and Egypt.
The Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age world was tethered by trade connections often established by the ambitious Mycenaean sealords.
However, the Myceneans were as much warriors as they were merchants, and as often as they came to trade, so too did they come to conquer.
Across the Mediterranean, the sight of bird-beaked prows atop Mycenaean galleys struck fear in all who saw them.
This golden age was not to last, for in the early 12th century BC, all the great civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, save Egypt, would all topple in a crash of apocalyptic
proportions known as the Bronze Age collapse. What brought about this destruction of civilization remains a mystery, but is most likely linked
to the brutal invasions of the vaguely defined “Sea Peoples”, among them possibly some Mycenaeans pirates. Whatever their origin, the great Bronze Age palaces of Mycenae were entirely abandoned
in their wake, and in the fallout, Ancient Greece entered a four century long period known as its Dark Ages: Trade links were severed, towns shrunk, society became more rural, and
artwork became more simplistic. Most importantly, Linear B was abandoned, giving way to an illiterate society. However, even as the Greeks of the Dark Ages became centuries removed from the palaces
of Mycenae, they never forgot the stories of the great Kings, Heroes and Wars of their mighty seafaring ancestors.
Over time, the Mycenaean era came to be seen as a more magical age where Gods and spirits walked freely amongst mortals.
To the Peloponnesian shepherd, the Gods were real as earth and water, and their presence in an ancient tale did not compromise its realism.
Without a writing system, these stories were preserved orally from generation to generation. One poet who probably existed at the end of the period was Homer.
Modern historians are split on whether Homer was one man, or a series of chroniclers building upon each other’s works, so for the sake of linearity, we will choose to depict him as the former.
The seminal poet told the story of a vast armada of ships that had once set out across the Aegean sea to lay siege to the Great City of Troy.
This story was the memory of an ancient war, so grand in scope that all the Gods of Olympus were bound to interfere. By the time Greek civilization re-emerged from the dark ages, Homer’s fantastical
epic had been forever branded into its social memory, magnified by playwrights like Euripides and Sophocles. Thus far we have explained how the Homeric Tradition of Classical Greece is essentially
the mythicized memory of the Mycenaean Bronze Age that preceded it. With that said, to answer whether the Trojan war was real, we must jump far ahead in time
to the late Victorian age, and dive down the rabbit hole of 19th century archaeology. The modern historiography of Troy is tied to an amateur German scholar, Heinrich Schliemann,
to some the father of modern Archaeology, to others a conman and thief. Schliemann was a massive admirer of Greek antiquities, and at some point in the 1860s
decided to dedicate his life to the search for Ancient Troy. Fortunately for him, he was friends with Frank Calvert, a British diplomat in the Ottoman
Empire who just so happened to own a piece of land, a mound called Hisarlik, which he claimed to be the site of Homer’s great city.
Allowed to excavate Hisarlik, the German archaeologist began with fervour in 1870. As his team dug straight down, Schliemann was overjoyed to find not one, but nine ancient
cities, all built atop one another throughout the last 3,000 years. These archaeological layers were promptly named Troy I through to Troy IX.
The German asserted that the second deepest and therefore second oldest site, Troy II, was the city from the Iliad.
He even ‘liberated’ a collection of Bronze and Gold artifacts from that layer and draped them over his problematically young wife, dubbing them “Priam’s Treasure”.
In truth, Troy II most likely dated back to 2300BC or earlier, a thousand years before the Trojan war could have taken place.
To confound matters, in his haste to get to the bottom ruins, Schliemann had carelessly thrown out the artifacts found in Troys VI through IX, the sites more likely to actually be Homer’s Troy.
Schliemann died in 1890, leaving behind an ethically questionable legacy, and never having discovered the true city featured in the Iliad.
Nevertheless, if there ever was a Troy, then the site of Hisarlik was the most likely location for it. To explain why, we must jump back to the Bronze Age.
By the early 1200sBC, the war-like Myceneans had conquered the Aegean Islands, the ancient civilization of Crete, and much of the southwestern Anatolian Coastline.
This expansion put them on the doorstep of another bellicose Empire, the Hittites. Feuding between the Hittites and Myceneans was nothing new at that point, and with the
two civilizations’ spheres of influence inching closer and closer to one another, TOTAL WAR was a possibility. In this climate, northwestern Anatolia was beginning to look more and more like a juicy
catch, a crucial borderland between two war-like, expansionist peoples. Troy itself was strategically crucial for both Empires.
Therefore, if there ever was a Trojan war, then it likely took place around the 1200sBCE at the apex of Mycenaean territorial expansion, and was surely an attempt by the Mycenaeans
to secure a foothold against their Hittite rivals. Such a geopolitically crucial conflict could well have served as the basis from which the legend of the Iliad was born.
Based on the discovery of an inscribed seal at the Hisarlik site by modern archaeologists, the modern consensus is that the Trojans themselves were Luwian, an Anatolian people closely related
to the Hittites. While the Trojans of the Iliad appear to anachronistically follow the religious rites of the Greek’s
Olympian Gods, other clues to their Luwian-Anatolian culture can be found in Homer’s epic. The name of King Priam for example, is likely derived from the Luwian title Pariya-muwa-
meaning “exceptionally courageous”, while his son Paris’s name likely originates from Pari-zitis, another attested title among the Luwians of unknown meaning.
In the Iliad, Priam practices polygamy, a custom commonly associated with bronze age Anatolian Kings, while Paris is a renowned marksman, drawing parallels to Anatolian warriors,
who unlike the Greeks were excellent archers. Furthermore, the young Prince’s characterization as a vain and effeminate pretty boy may be
the legacy of the Mycenaean outlook on the culture of the Anatolians, which they reductively saw as more hedonistic than their own.
Perhaps the most compelling parallels we can draw belong to Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships. Noble women of Hittite-related cultures tended to have more freedom and political influence
than their Greek contemporaries. Homeric tradition relates that Helen was whisked away from her home in Sparta by the goddess of love Aphrodite, and delivered to Paris to be his bride.
In truth, if there ever was a real Helen, she may well have been a Mycenaean Queen of Spartan origin. However, her elopement with a Trojan Prince was certainly not born of godly intervention,
but likely the result of an ambitious woman seeking to escape the confines of Greek social norms by fleeing to a land where freedom and power were more possible.
Overall, these surviving glimpses of Luwian-Hittite culture among the Trojan nobles of the Iliad all point to the fact that Homer was indeed telling a mythicized version of a war that
happened between proto-Greeks and Anatolians, albeit from the distorted perspective of a Greek living 400 years after the conflict.
Other kernels of reliable historiography in Homer’s writings add further evidence that this great war took place in real life.
In book two of the Iliad, the seminal poet lists off the contingents of allies in the united Greek army, a list that has a remarkable amount of similarities to the locations of
late Mycenaean archaeological sites. Later Homeric tradition relates that when the Greeks returned from Troy, their country
fell into chaos and infighting, which corresponds with the fact that our presumed date for the Trojan war takes place right before the Bronze Age Collapse.
Perhaps the conquest of Troy was a last ditch effort by the Kings of Mycenae to preserve their power and prestige, before their civilization crumbled into dust.
It is not only Greek sources that shed evidence of a great clash at Troy. Surviving Hittite texts are full of many mentions of the “Ahhiyawa” people, particularly
their role in aiding the Assuwa rebellion, a confederation of Hittite client cities on the west coast of Anatolia, including a certain Wilusiya, that rose up in revolt against their
Imperial overlords around 1500BC. Wilusiya was almost certainly Troy, and its name could be from where the Greek name for the city, Ilios, was derived.
Meanwhile, the Ahhiyawa were of course, the Mycenaeans, always eager to help anyone willing to rebel against their Hittite rivals.
The word “Ahhiyawa” itself is probably a corruption of the word “Achaeans”. As compelling as it might be to link the Assuwa rebellion to the Trojan war, it is an unlikely match for a few reasons.
Firstly, Hittite records claim that the Greeks and Trojans were allied in this conflict. Secondly, the insurrection was eventually crushed by the Hittite King Tudhaliya II.
Finally, this conflict took place two hundred years before the Trojan war most likely happened. However, the existence of these battles in the Hittite records shows that the struggle
between them and the Mycenaeans for the city of Troy was well underway by the mid-Bronze age, making it very possible that the proto-Greeks would try to establish control over the city
again in later centuries. We’ve now accumulated a healthy amount of historical literary evidence that the Trojan war could well have happened.
But does the archaeological evidence line up with the clues left behind by the ancient chroniclers? Despite Schleimann’s initial bungling, the excavation site was thankfully taken over
in 1890 by a more competent Wilhelm Dörpfeld. Unlike Schliemann, who dug as far down as he could, Dörpfeld focused his efforts on the excavation of the comparatively newer layer of Troy VI.
Through painstaking labour, he managed to unveil the remains of an elevated citadel that had once boasted high walls and towers of stone, and large houses within it for the rich and powerful.
Dated to have been inhabited from 1700 to 1250BC, Troy VI fit well into the timeline of Homer’s war. However, evidence of its eventual destruction pointed not to an invasion of Mycenean Greeks,
but rather a natural disaster: Earthquake. This revelation shook the scholarly world, and led many to create fringe theories that
the destruction of Troy in the Iliad was not a literal war, but instead a metaphor. Poseidon was the Olympian God of Earthquakes, and the Horse was his sacred beast.
Could it be that the iconic wooden horse that destroyed Troy was not a physical object, but Mycenean chroniclers interpreting Troy's natural destruction as a manifestation of Poseidon’s wrath?
These theories would persist until the 1930s, when an American archaeologist named Carl Blegen took charge at the Hisarlik site.
His work centered around the site of Troy VII, and revealed something remarkable. Firstly, Troy VII was not a new city at all, but the same city as Troy VI, rebuilt upon
the same foundations after the earthquake. Secondly, its existence was punctuated by war. Within what had once been its fortified citadel, houses that had once belonged to individual
wealthy families were now subdivided, as if made to house an influx of refugees. The pithoi that had once stored grain, wine and olive oil were buried to make them last longer.
All signs pointed to the fact that Troy VII was a city under siege. Blegen also found signs of fire damage, and arrowheads - potentially of Mycenaean make.
Blegen’s discoveries would be built upon in 1988, when the excavations of one Manfred Korfmann on the site of Troy VII revealed that all archaeologists who had come before
him had barely scratched the surface. While they had focused their excavations around Troy’s elevated citadel and main palace,
Korfmann’s meticulous dig-team revealed the existence of an entire massive lower city, complete with homes, walls, and an underground water system that had been used by the Trojans
for two thousand years. Like the citadel above it, the lower city displayed a scene of desperation. Evidence of fire damage was widespread, arrowheads were embedded into the walls of homes, skeletons
of the dead remained unburied, and piles of sling stones lay on the streets, for the city’s defenders to hurl upon the enemy invading their home.
It was almost certainly war that brought down the city of Troy, sometime in the early 12th century BC. So did that legendary duel between Achilles of the Greeks and Hector of the Trojans happen?
Most likely not. But was there a great city of Troy? The evidence both literary and archaeological tell us almost certainly yes.
Finally, did an armada of Greek warriors ever sail across the Aegean and do battle upon its mighty walls? That, we may never know for sure.
But as archaeologists continue to explore the remains of the once great ancient city, it becomes evident that there is some truth to Homer's legend.
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