Troy

Related civilizations: Mycenaean, Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman Greece.

Date: c. 3000 b.c.e.-700 c.e.

Locale: Western coast of Turkey in the Hellespont, at the present-day city of Hisarlik

Troy

The site of Troy was inhabited as early as 3600 b.c.e. by Neolithic Asian peoples of the Dardanelles, but permanent structures do not appear until the third millennium. The name “Troy” refers to a number of different settlements at various times across four millennia. The first Troy, the Neolithic Asian settlement, took advantage of the strategic height of a plateau overlooking the Aegean Sea at the western mouth of the Dardanelles. The plateau is now nearly four miles (six kilometers) inland because of the silting of the rivers Scamander (Menderes) and Simoïs (Dümrek), but in the second millennium b.c.e., it was right on the bay at Cape Sigeum (Yenişehir). The natural defensive advantage of this promontory (known to archaeologists as Troy I) was strengthened sometime after 2500 b.c.e., making Troy II a royal fortress.

Somewhere around 2200 b.c.e., the royal fortress was sacked and burned, an event that Troy’s first archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, mistook for the Trojan War recorded by Homer. The fire-scarred ruins of Troy II, however, were nearly one thousand years too early to be Agamemnon’s Troy. Had he insisted on employing Greek mythology to guide archaeology, however, Schliemann could have justified his mistake by pointing to the tradition that Heracles sacked Troy a generation before the war over Helen. Three more successive “Troys” were constructed over the ruins of Troy II throughout the next four centuries. Then the Indo-European migration brought the ancestor of the Greek language (and perhaps a prototype of its mythology) into the region around 1800 b.c.e. This group introduced the art of domesticating and breeding horses, for which Troy was to become famous in Homeric tradition. Archaeological evidence of numerous Bronze Age horse bones corroborates the poetic claim: Troy was rich in horses.

Troy VI

The city of these Indo-European people, Troy VI, was the longest-lived settlement at Troy and may have been the city whose destruction sometime near 1250 b.c.e. was the nucleus of the Greek epic cycle. By 1500 b.c.e., Troy VI had documented contacts with a Mycenaean Greek empire. It may be possible, in fact, to consider Troy VI a part of that empire. It has been known since the early twentieth century that Troy and Mycenae shared architectural and pottery styles in the late Bronze Age. With the translation of the Linear B writing in the 1950s, it was further learned that the two cities shared a common language as well, an ancestor of Homer’s Greek.

The architectural features that Troy VI shared with Mycenae include the dome-vaulted tomb, the thick, upward-sloping sandstone walls, and high towers. The pottery style was dubbed “grey Minyan” by Schliemann, and archaeologists still use the term. The dome-shaped tomb, or tholos, was the telltale sign of Mycenaean architecture and provided rich finds to the archaeologist. The kings of Troy VI had their wealth buried with them much as the Egyptian pharaohs did. The walls were even more distinctively Mycenaean, matching walls of the same period excavated at Mycenae and Tiryns on the Greek mainland and at Knossos on the island of Crete. Greeks of the classical period called the style “cyclopean” because they could not imagine such massive sandstone rocks—square cut and more than three feet (a meter) thick—to be the work of human hands. Their peculiar pitch, a seventy-degree slope from the base, was noted by German archaeologist Friedrich Wilhelm Dörpfeld, who discovered the “cyclopean” walls of Troy VI in 1893. Poet Homer may have had this feature in mind when he related that Patroclus climbed the “angle” of the wall in the Iliad (c. 800 b.c.e.; English translation, 1616). Dörpfeld’s assistants were able to scale the walls easily. Finally, the tower on the southern gate of Troy VI recalls similar structures in Mycenae and Tiryns.

Troy VII and beyond

The destruction of Troy VI about 1250 b.c.e. may well have been caused by war, though there is ample evidence of a major earthquake about that time. Troy lies on a major Anatolian fault, and archaeologist Carl Blegen had demonstrated earthquake damage in the previous three Troy settlements (III, IV, and V). Whatever the cause, the devastation of Troy VI led to a considerable drop in the standard of living in the subsequent settlement, Troy VII. Artifacts from Troy VII suggest a siege or refugee society, with rude shacks built over storage jars embedded in the ground. This “shantytown” Troy, built within the now-compromised walls of Troy VI, fell to invaders from the sea about 1180 b.c.e. Egyptian, Hittite, and other records corroborate the Trojan evidence of these marauders, though it is not clear where they came from.

Some time after the marauders left, new settlers arrived at the site. They brought with them a style of pottery that was a distinct step backward from the level of craftsmanship of Troy VII, the so-called knobbed-ware found at this time along the Danube or in Hungary. The style was also known much closer to Troy, in Thrace, and these new settlers may have been Thracians. By the end of the second millennium b.c.e., there was no trace of Troy VII. In fact, there is virtually no archaeological evidence of any human habitation of Troy from 1000 to 700 b.c.e.

Sometime before 700 b.c.e., colonists from the nearby island of Lesbos began a permanent settlement in Troy. The small market town (Troy VIII) was connected to Greek trade routes and became the focus of an odd custom in the Greek region of Locris on the Gulf of Corinth. The Locrians, beginning about 700 b.c.e. and continuing into the common era, selected a certain number of young girls each year to be sent to Troy as an expiation for the sin of Aias of Locris. According to Locrian tradition, Aias, a soldier in Agamemnon’s expedition against Troy, defiled a temple of Athena at Troy. To make amends, the Locrians sent their daughters to serve in Athena’s temple. Though many did just that, remaining in the temple of Athene into old age, many, during the nearly eight hundred years of this practice, were killed by the new Greek residents of “Ilion.”

In the Hellenistic period, around 300 b.c.e., one of Alexander the Great’s generals, Lysimachus, decided to rebuild the splendor that he thought must once have existed at Troy. He rebuilt the city walls in a glorious outer work that remained the outer walls for the Roman occupation of the city, New Ilium. Unfortunately, Schliemann’s overzealous and now-outmoded digging methods (including dynamite) destroyed a great deal of this great wall.

Archaeologists consider both the Hellenistic and the Roman Troys to be a continuous settlement, Troy IX, the last structure that could be considered a city at Hisarlik. The city was sacked twice more: by the soldiers of Pontus, the Black Sea empire of King Mithradates VI Eupator, in 83-82 b.c.e., and by the Goths in 259 c.e. The Seljuk Turks took the city in 1070 c.e. and the Ottomans in 1306 c.e., though neither Turkish occupation could be called an invasion. There was by then not much to take, and the Troas had long been a melting pot.

In the Byzantine period, Troy might have become a major center of Constantine the Great’s empire. In the late 320’s c.e., having become the sole ruler of the Roman Empire, Constantine attempted to move the empire’s capital to the site that was, according to poet Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553), the homeland of the Roman people: Troy. The silting of the Scamander and Simoïs, however, made an inland capital at Hisarlik difficult to reach, and Constantine was forced to move his capital to his second choice, Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople in 330 c.e. Nevertheless, Troy remained part of the Byzantine Empire, albeit as a remote backwater. It was a bishopric of the Byzantine church from the fourth to the eleventh century c.e., so it must have had some ecclesial importance, if only a continuation of the pagan importance Troy had as a “holy” city.

Bibliography

Akurgal, Ekrem. Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey. Istanbul: Haset Kitabevi, 1983.

Blegen, Carl William. Troy and the Trojans. London: Thames and Hudson, 1963.

Boedeker, Deborah Dickman. The World of Troy. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Classical Association of the United States, 1998.

Fitten, J. Lesley. The Discovery of the Greek Bronze Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Wood, Michael. In Search of the Trojan War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.