The Archaeology of Troy | Myths & Reality

Having explored the Epic narratives around Troy, I now want to turn our attention to the archaeological site of Hisarlik itself to explore the evidence we have for the settlement, along with the historical war, siege & eventual destruction. As I mentioned, archaeologists have been digging at the site of Hisarlik on the western coast of Turkey since the 19th century. The site itself has been in near-constant occupation since the Neolithic period around 3600 BCE. 

It first peaked around the EBA II, building monumental walls and architecture and playing a pivotal role in early Minoan & Cyclades trade networks between Mesopotamia, Anatolia & mainland Greece. Following this, it seems to have lost a bit of importance until we reach the LBA around 1300 BCE where we observe a major change in the city and it becomes much larger. Notably, during this period the city consisted of a steep fortified citadel and a sprawling lower town. It was a thriving coastal city with a considerable population, equal in size to second-tier Hittite settlements. It had a distinct Northwest Anatolian culture and extensive foreign contacts.

This LBA period is usually referred to as Troy VII in the stratigraphy of the site. While Homer tells us that Troy was destroyed and abandoned after the Greeks won the war, this clearly isn’t true. There is plenty of evidence that Hisarlik was occupied in both the Late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age up to the Classical period. The question therefore becomes, when (or if) the Trojan war actually happened. Establishing this chronology has become the focus of excavations at the site. Despite its popularity in the Mythos and the Greek Heroes’ reputation for Hubris, motivated by Kleos & Timē, there has currently been no inscriptional evidence recovered that references a war, let alone a definable battle as described in the Iliad. 

In the LBA we have evidence for warfare and conflict all across the Aegean. Hittite texts, primarily written in Luwian hieroglyphs, frequently discuss issues and cultural conflicts between their own empire and the wider Aegean. A place known as Wiluša in the Hittite language, is mentioned several times as being somewhere in-between the Aegean and the Western Coast of their empire in Anatolia, and that both the Aegean cultures and the Hittites are frequently fighting for control of it. It is now largely accepted that the Luwian term Wiluša refers to the site of Hisarlik, and that Homer’s name Ilium is a Greek rendering of the native Hittite name. 

This correspondence was first proposed in 1924 by Emil Forrer, who also suggested that the Hittite term Ahhiyawa, a name for a region west of them, corresponds to the Homeric term for the Greeks, Achaeans. Forrer used linguistic similarities, since "Wiluša" and the associated placename Taruisa show strong parallels to the Greek names Wilios and Troia respectively. Subsequent research on Hittite geography has lent these identifications additional support and they are now generally accepted, although they are not completely firmly established

Since the period itself is abound with warfare, that naturally makes looking for a specific conflict very difficult without inscriptional evidence. If we were to take Homer at his word, archaeologically we may expect to find evidence of destruction that erases the entire settlement, but we don’t. In reality, the site of Hisarlik appears to have undergone several phases of destruction. The first occurred in phase VIh, which is roughly contemporary with the rule of the Wilusan king Kukkunni and roughly corresponds to the Late Helladic III A2 period around 1300 BCE, but this seems to have been very short-lived as the city was rebuilt almost immediately afterwards. 

The builders reused many of the earlier city's surviving structures, mainly its citadel wall, which they renovated with new stone towers and mudbrick breastworks. Numerous small houses were added inside the citadel, filling in the old open areas and new houses were also built in the lower city, whose area appears to have been greater in Troy VIIa than in Troy VI. In many of these houses, enormous storage jars called pithoi were found buried in the ground. As far as we can tell, the city of Troy VIIa seems to have been built by survivors of Troy VI's destruction, as evidenced by continuity in material culture. However, the character of the city appears to have changed, with the citadel growing crowded and foreign imports declining.

There was then a second destruction around 1180 BC, roughly contemporary with the Late Bronze Age collapse but after the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces. This destruction layer shows evidence of violence & siege, mainly through scorch marks on certain buildings. Yet again however, the city was rebuilt shortly after as Troy VIIb. Older structures were again reused, including Troy VI's citadel walls. Its first phase, Troy VIIb1, appears to be largely a continuation of Troy VIIa. While it may be tempting to assume Achaean aggression for these destruction layers, imported Mycenaean-style pottery attests to some continuing foreign trade. However, the city's population appears to have dropped considerably, and rebuilding seems to be confined to the citadel.

Finally, Troy VIIb was destroyed again in the mid 11th century BCE, probably by an earthquake. A few of the buildings were repaired but the town was not systematically rebuilt as it was in earlier periods. Some of the Protogeometric pottery uncovered at the site is paralleled in mainland Greece, especially in and around Euboea, Phocis, and Macedonia, so it was clearly still part of an Aegean trade network at this time. Some houses in the citadel were left intact and the site continued to be occupied, if only by squatters. While this might be the closest style of destruction to that mentioned by Homer, this destruction period is obviously too late to be the one he’s talking about. The VIIb siege is post the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces & LBA Collapse, meaning characters like Menelaus & Agamemnon cannot have been ruling kingdoms during this time. Temporally one could argue the VIIa destruction fits with Homer’s time scales, but this destruction is relatively small and the city was rebuilt fairly quickly while contact with the Mycenaeans was maintained.

Part of the challenge with reconstructing Hisarlik as a site is that Schliemann’s excavations were relatively poor by modern standards. His initial work with the mound had him ignore certain sections and dig straight down through the layers, which included removing features he considered insignificant without first studying and documenting them. These layers are now lost to us. Since Schliemann only really cared about the Bronze Age Troy, he ignored a lot of the earlier layers, digging through them and ultimately damaging them.Work from 2014 onwards has however shown that the early layers of the site are incredibly complex and detailed. Nowadays the ethos behind excavation has changed drastically. No longer are scholars searching for Troy, but acknowledging Hisarlik’s multi-layered occupation and examining each successive city in context and its wider connections.

While seriation is still used, recent work has begun to make use of radiocarbon dating to differentiate periods, but it is nevertheless very complex work. 

Hisarlik as a Site

So, as we now move away from the romanticised version of Troy, what do we know about the site of Hisarlik itself? Schliemann and a lot of the archaeologists following him confined their study to the inner walls of the city, as these were the only parts of the landscape Homer mentioned. However, recent work has made use of ground penetrating radar and field survey to study the remains of an entire town found outside the walls. This external town is actually much larger than was originally expected, and was likely defended by monumental ditches, which looks nothing like what Homer tells us of the city. 

Troy’s city continued to flourish well into the Early Iron Age and beyond, contrary to Homer’s account. We know this from extensive amounts of proto-geometric pottery that was unearthed during the field survey work. Occasionally i’ve seen people try to offer rebuttals to this by saying that, since Proto Geometric Pottery is inherently Greek in origin, its presence at Hisarlik simply indicates Greek travellers or pilgrims who were coming to site after its destruction, probably to perform rituals or remember the war. This would make sense in theory if it were Greek people bringing the pottery. 

To test this, in 2001 the Troia Project which involved Pavol Hnila of the Freie Universität in Berlin, analysed the ceramics and found that many of them were in fact locally made, showing an early iron age community still thriving. This pattern of archaeology always having to answer rebuttals with historical fact is unfortunately fairly common with major literary sites such as Troy. Rather than asking their own questions, archaeologists often get pinned down having to answer questions or doubts posed by people outside of the field, and this has -for the most part, been true of the entire history of Troy’s excavations. 

Part of the resistance brought by Troy, both as a city and an ideal is its position in Western Culture. 

Not only is it the subject of the Greeks’ core myth, but even the Romans traced their ancestry to Aeneas, a Trojan Prince who went on to father the line that culminated with Romulus & Remus, the founders of Rome itself. Prominent during the Victorian era was the belief that the modern West was the cultural heir to the Greeks & Romans. Even today, modern notions of rationality, colonial superiority & western science still trace their roots back to some alleged connection between the wider European West and Greek culture. In other words, how we receive and ultimately interpret Troy has fundamentally been as a Western culture. 

Notions of masculinity, whiteness & heroism are subtly still present even in popular media representations. We cannot forget however, Hisarlik was in Turkiye, and its position on the Western Coast of Anatolia marks it as the essential gateway between the entirety of the East and the Aegean. It was one of, if not the, main point in which Eastern culture & practices met with Greek. A large portion of the Eastern influence that went on to define the Archaic period of Greece would have been mediated through this important site. Huge portions of Greek identity are established here as a cross cultural exchange between West & East.

This is the real story of Troy. Archaeologically, it is a site that has been continually occupied since the Neolithic and stands as the great connector between two continents, and two very different cultures. By examining Troy from the Early to Late Bronze Age, we find pivotal insights into how Eastern & Western cultures interacted and formed each other. As a fundamentally Anatolian site, a lot of Hisarlik’s culture is Eastern in nature, from its living style, architecture & even religious practice. But this is not the side of Troy that is shown to the West. Our reception of it is fundamentally Western, playing on old ideas about Homer.

All of these are ethical and social issues that are still being discussed in modern archaeology, but frequently get pushed to the background in popular discourse. 

Sources

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