Troy in brief
Troy (Turkish: Truva) is a mound called Hisarlık, near the Dardanelles in northwestern Turkey, close to the Aegean Sea. A city stood there, on and off, from about 3000 BC to the Roman period and later, and the ruins form nine main layers, labelled Troy I to Troy IX. Since ancient times the site has been linked with Troy, the city of Homer’s Iliad, besieged by a Greek army. UNESCO listed it in 1998.
Excavations
In the 1860s Frank Calvert, a British diplomat and amateur archaeologist, bought part of the mound and identified it as Troy. The German businessman Heinrich Schliemann, who had been inspired by Homer, began digging there in 1870 (his main seasons ran from 1871 to 1873). He cut a trench through the mound, and in the process destroyed much of the layers, including those that might have been Homer’s. In 1873 he found a hoard of gold jewellery, “Priam’s Treasure”, and smuggled it out of the country. Most of the treasure went to Berlin, was taken to the Soviet Union in 1945, and is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, while part of it ended up in Istanbul.
Later teams, Wilhelm Dörpfeld, Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati from 1932 to 1938, and Manfred Korfmann of the University of Tübingen from 1988 to 2005, worked out the sequence of layers.
The layers
- Troy I to V (about 3000 to 1800 BC). An early Bronze Age fortified town.
- Troy VI (about 1700 to 1300 BC). A large and wealthy city with high stone walls and towers, and finely made pottery. It was destroyed, perhaps by an earthquake.
- Troy VIIa (about 1300 to 1180 BC). A crowded rebuilt town, which was burned, with signs of violence. This is the best candidate for Homer’s Troy.
- Later Troy. Reoccupied by Greeks and then by Romans, who revered the site as the home of their ancestors, through Aeneas.
Was there a Trojan War?
We cannot know. The Iliad was composed several centuries after the end of Troy VI and VIIa, as a story that had been passed on aloud, and it is a poem, not a history. Hittite texts from the 13th century BC mention a place called Wilusa, which seems to match the Greek name Ilios, and a people called the Ahhiyawa, who may be Greeks. Excavations in the 1990s showed that the city was bigger than expected, with a lower town around the citadel, which would fit with an important place on a trade route. No wooden horse has been found.
Why it matters
Troy shows the long history of a strategic place, at the entrance to the Black Sea, and how legend and archaeology interact. The story of its excavation is also a case study in how early archaeology could destroy what it sought to find.
Visiting
The site is open, with walkways around the walls, a reconstruction of the wooden horse, and a large Troy Museum, opened in 2018 in the nearby town of Tevfikiye. See also Pompeii.
Sources
- Blegen, C. W. and others (1950 to 1958). Troy: Excavations Conducted by the University of Cincinnati, 1932 to 1938, 4 volumes. Princeton University Press.
- Korfmann, M. (2004). Was there a Trojan War? Archaeology 57(3): 36 to 41.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Archaeological Site of Troy.