In Search of the Trojan War (30 page)

The terms of Alaksandus’ treaty with the Hittites included the
obligation owed by a subject king in time of war to bring his army, his infantry and chariots, to the Hittite king’s hosting (‘The following campaigns from Hattusas are obligatory on you … the King of Egypt … the King of Assyria’). Now, it has been suggested by Egyptologists that the
Drdny
, who are named as being present among Muwatallis’ allies at the battle of Kadesh in Syria in 1275 or 1274 BC (the period of the Wilusa treaty), are none other than ‘Dardanians’, a Homeric name for the people of the Troad. So a young man who fought at Kadesh with Muwatallis’ 2500 chariots and the ‘troops of sixteen nations’ could perhaps as an old man have defended ‘sacred Wilios’ against the Achaians! If the king of Wilusa was as important as the treaty suggests, then the people of the Troad could well have been among his minor states whose rulers were his vassals, just as he was of the Great King. In the preceding 150 years many of the smaller states which had made up the Assuwan confederacy had doubtless been incorporated into Arzawa or Wilusa, just as Midea, Prosymna or Berbati had been brought into the kingdom of Mycenae.

The possibility should therefore be considered that in the mid-thirteenth century BC Troy lay within ‘greater Wilusa’, and that Wilusa does indeed lie behind Homer’s Wilios with its prince Alexandros. But exciting as such speculations are, they are at present no more than that, for until the hotly contested theories over Hittite geography are settled such ideas are incapable of proof either way. Nevertheless there seems a strong case for thinking that the kingdom of Wilusa may have included the Troad; thus Wilusa would be the prototype for Homer’s Wilios. If this was so, then it is of great interest that Ahhiyawa and the Hittites may have fought over Wilusa in the mid-thirteenth century BC.

WAR BETWEEN GREEKS AND HITTITES OVER WILUSA?

If we accept the identification of Ahhiyawa with Achaian Greece we can go further in our reconstruction of mid-thirteenth
century diplomacy involving the kingdom of Wilusa, which may have included Troy. In the Tawagalawas letter (
c
.1260?) are two hints that the Hittites and Achaians had actually come to blows over Wilusa. In view of the 400-year history of Wilusan loyalty to Hatti, we must assume that this had been the result of Achaian interference. The references are in Hattusilis’ letter to the Achaian king, in which he asks the Greek to write to the troublesome Pijamaradus: ‘Tell him that the King of Hatti and I, that in the matter of Wilusa over which we were at enmity, he has persuaded me, changed my mind, and we have made friends. A … war is wrong for us.’ Later lines may have told of ‘the matter in question concerning the town of Wilusa over which we made war (and over which we have now come to a settlement)’. This would be important evidence for a major diplomatic and military crisis in western Anatolia, but unfortunately the tablet is too damaged to allow us to be sure.

The quarrel over Wilusa is also hinted at in a tantalising letter of this period addressed to a Hittite king by Manapa-Dattas, king of the Seha River land. (This place was in some way adjacent to Arzawa and Wilusa, and the Seha was presumably one of the main rivers flowing into the Aegean.) Here we learn that a Hittite army has come west, and that someone ‘has gone back to attack the land of Wilusa’. The king of the Seha River land has been overcome by the powerful Greek ally Pijamaradus who has also attacked Lazpas (Lesbos). Unfortunately this tablet is too fragmentary to say any more, but it may be roughly the same time as the Achaian attack on Wilusa. Our last reference to the troubles of Wilusa shows that shortly after these events (
c
.1230) the deposed ruler of Wilusa, King Walmu, took refuge in a neighbouring state, hoping to be reinstated by Tudhalias IV – a royal family in exile. It is in another tablet from the same period as the attack on Wilusa that we discover that the king of the Achaians may have been in person on the shores of Asia Minor, just as the Greek tradition holds.

THE TROJAN WAR IN THE HITTITE TEXTS?

For the searcher after a historical basis in the Trojan legend our next evidence is perhaps the most tantalising of all. It comes in a tablet from Boghaz Köy which can now be firmly attributed to Hattusilis III (1265–1235 BC). It is the only Hittite text which may speak of the personal involvement of the Achaian/Ahhiyawan king on the mainland of Anatolia, possibly fighting on Asian soil. The tale is told by Emperor Hattusilis after a successful campaign in the west. My version is from Sommer’s German translation: within square brackets are Sommer’s likely conjectures, for the text is damaged; I have amplified the text where I thought it necessary to aid the sense:

The land of the Seha River again transgressed. [
The people of the Seha River land then said:
] ‘His Majesty’s grandfather did not conquer us with the sword. When he conquered the Arzawa lands [
the father of his Majesty
] he did not conquer us with the sword. We have [
no obligation?
] to him.’ [
So the Seha River land
] made war. And the King of Ahhiyawa withdrew. Now when he withdrew, I, the Great King, advanced. [
Then my enemies retreated into mountainous country:
] I subdued the mountain peak Harana. Then 500 teams of horses I brought back to Hattusas.

On the usually accepted reading of this text there are two crucial deductions: first, that the king of Ahhiyawa was present in western Anatolia, and second, that he was lending aid in war to a rebel against the Hittite king. Unfortunately this is not certain: the key word, the one translated here as ‘withdrew’, is capable of several meanings, including ‘take refuge with’ or ‘relied on’ (i.e. he
relied on
the king of Ahhiyawa for support), and this may be the likeliest interpretation.

We can perhaps take the story of the war in the Seha River land a little further. It does after all tell us that, at about the time to which tradition dates the Trojan War, an Achaian king was directly or indirectly involved in a war on the coast of Asia Minor
in a place which lay close to the Troad. If we accept the translation above, with the king of Achaia-land ‘withdrawing’ from the Seha River country, then the story bears a startling resemblance to Homer’s tale, for, as we noted at the start of this search, Homer tells of a first, failed, expedition when the Achaians under Achilles landed in Teuthrania, which they mistook for Trojan territory. There, in the valley of the Caïcus (now Bakii Çay), they were repulsed by Telephus, king of Mysia, and beaten to their ships (
Odyssey
, XI, 519). This tradition of a ‘shameful retreat’ after the ravaging of Mysia is found in a number of later Greek sources including Pindar and Strabo, and if the Caïcus was indeed the Seha, then the coincidence is certainly worth noting. Unfortunately we do not know the location of the Seha, and the Hittite text does not give the name of the ‘king of Achaia-land’ who ‘withdrew’.

We have gone as far as the Hittite tablets allow on the present evidence, but we can at least feel that this rich mine of diplomatic material has enabled us to get nearer to the real power struggle in western Anatolia in the thirteenth century. It also provides us with a real context for the
kind
of war portrayed by Homer. In the last fifty years the archaeology, the Hittite and Greek tablets – and the Greek legend – have started to converge. We now have clear evidence of Greek aggression and settlement on the Anatolian coast, and the Boghaz Köy archive, if we have interpreted it correctly, makes sense in this light. If we cannot prove that the Trojan War happened as Homer says, we can at least show that something like it
could have happened
: a military invasion of the Troad, attacks on cities to the south and in Mysia, Achilles’ devastation on Lesbos – all would fit very well with the tangled story revealed in the Hittite correspondence. Even some of the same places seem to be named. If there is anything at all in the legend, it must be tested against the only reliable sources for the history of the thirteenth century BC in Asia Minor – archaeological finds, Linear B names, Hittite diplomacy – and it holds up surprisingly well.

THE TROJAN WAR: THE HITTITE VERSION?

That said, we should, of course, be wary of attempting to make direct equations between the primary evidence of the Hittite tablets and an epic poem composed over 500 years later. What the Hittite tablets show, however, is that the Achaians caused major problems to the Hittites in the thirteenth century BC and that they may have sent military expeditions to western Anatolia, possibly even led by the ‘king of Achaia-land’ himself. It does not seem to be pushing the evidence too far to suggest that the Homeric epic reflects this, even though it may compress decades of action into one ‘heroic’ event. Can we go further and present even a tentative model from Hittite sources for what might have happened? Frankly, this is not possible on the present state of research into the Ahhiyawa tablets, but, as in
Chapter 5
, I will add a speculative piece to an already speculative chapter. I suspect it should be read for entertainment only, but it is at least based on the Hittite tablets, accepting the identification of the Greeks with Ahhiyawa.

Hattusilis III and Tudhalias IV had to strain the resources of their empire to the utmost to maintain their power, faced by the perennial threat of Kaska peoples on their northern frontier; the rivalry with Egypt in Syria where rich commercial cities were under their overlordship; and the new military power of Assyria in the Euphrates valley. To the west each new Hittite king had to enforce allegiance over the group of powerful western Anatolian states led by Arzawa. All these opponents necessitated frequent campaigning in the thirteenth century – against the Kaska enemies, for instance, a dozen campaigns were fought in twenty years. No other empire of the time faced so much pressure on all sides, and it is no wonder that Hittite diplomacy became so refined in the thirteenth century. In all this the increasing interest of the Achaians in western Anatolia was a serious additional pressure. The Hittites were prepared to concede that the area around Miletus was Greek, and to agree on its frontier; but the states of Arzawa, Mira, Wilusa and the Seha River land were in
the Hittite diplomatic orbit, and any interference there – ‘destabilisation’, as the Americans would call it these days – had to be countered. This is what happened. The Greeks were becoming increasingly ambitious. In the mid-thirteenth century BC the brother of the Achaian king was giving aid to the Hittites’ most dangerous western enemy after a war, of which we know no details, between the Achaians and Hittites over the kingdom of Wilusa, whose king was still perhaps Alaksandus: ‘We have come to terms,’ announces Hattusilis, ‘over the aforesaid matter of the town of Wilusa, over which we waged war.’ Only a decade or two later the surviving Wilusan royal family were in exile in a neighbouring western Anatolian state.

This war took place in the north-west of Anatolia, where the Greeks had been taking slaves on the shores and islands, and where they had close trading links with one strong and wealthy fortress, the town on Hisarlik which we call Troy VI. That Hisarlik was called something like Troia or Wilios seems possible. The Anatolian name Taruisa needs to be accounted for in its similarity to Greek Troia and in its association with the Hittite Wilusa, possibly the archetype of Wilios. These vague resemblances do not look like mere chance; Achaiwoi/Ahhiyawa; Alaksandus/Alexandros; Wilusa/Wilios; Taruisa/Troia: each in isolation presents problems, but
four
resemblances is pressing coincidence too far. It would appear, then, that Achaian troops attacked part of Wilusa perhaps in the late 1260s. This incident may be the basis of the Homeric tale, which even remembered the name of the Trojan king. In this case the city which was attacked is more likely to have been Troy VI; but we have yet to explore the implications of our evidence, which tends to point to that city, rather than Blegen’s VIIa, as the Homeric citadel.

This may not have been the only occasion on which an Achaian prince took an army to north-western Anatolia. At about the same time – possibly even on the same campaign – Hattusilis fought in the west, after Achaian interference with a western Anatolian state. One of the Arzawan countries, the Seha River land, maintained they did not owe the allegiance claimed
by the Great King of Hatti, and made an alliance with the Great King of the Achaians, just as the Arzawans had done before them. In this case the Achaian king
may
have landed an army on Anatolian soil, but when Hattusilis moved his army west the Greek king abandoned his ally, possibly ‘retreating shamefully’, as later Greek tradition had it. Hattusilis’ account indicates that the Seha River land was ravaged by his army, the king deposed, and a loyal vassal instated. It may have been on this campaign that Thermi, the main city of Lesbos and one of the biggest towns in the Aegean, was sacked and burned by hostile forces: here again the unequivocal evidence of archaeology can be compared both with the Hittite story of the attack on Lesbos (Lazpas) by the Greek ally Pijamaradus and with Homer’s tale of the sack of Lesbos by Achilles. In this light, then, we should see the
Iliad
as containing a compressed picture of
many
Greek forays in Asia Minor: the Hittite tablets certainly seem to confirm this.

Taking the view from Hattusas, these were serious disturbances in the north-west frontier of an already threatened empire. We have tended to see the Mycenaean kings as brutal and rapacious, cunning buccaneers with an eye to profit, always ready to take advantage of weakness. Perhaps the nature of our evidence for their thought world encourages that view, but I suspect it is not so far off the mark: such
was
the world of the sackers of cities. But as regards grumpy old Hattusilis, the longtime soldier with his painful feet, or the more intellectual Tudhalias, it is easy to imagine them in their private temple at Yazilikaya, or standing in the royal reception hall or the archive room in the ‘great fort’ at Boghaz Köy, and to feel some sympathy for these hard-pressed and hard-working Bronze-Age emperors. Hattusilis, for instance, had been so
reasonable
towards the Achaian king: