In Search of the Trojan War (33 page)

We should not, however, think of these as great folk migrations in the style of the popular view of the ‘folk wanderings’ after the Fall of Rome. The Egyptian inscriptions give us what are clearly accurate figures for casualties among the Sea Peoples: in Merenptah’s battle the dead included at least 6300 Libyans, 1213 Aqaiwasha, 742 Tursha and 222 Sheklesh; other figures are lost. Over 9500 people (including women and noncombatants, etc.) are counted as prisoners. The attack of
c
.1210 BC, then, was by a chiefly Libyan force supplemented by groups
of ‘Sea People’ warriors, perhaps something like 20,000 fighting force in total, of whom maybe a quarter may have been Sea Peoples. Had Sea People bands actually formed settlements in Libya or were they operating from the Aegean? We do not know. A generation or so later Ramses III faced attacks of a similar size: over 12,000 were killed in the Libyan battle in his fifth year, over 2000 killed and 2000 captured six years later; for the Sea Peoples’ attack of year 8 (
c
.1180) we have no figures, but a good guess might be a fighting force of 10,000 with women, children and non-combatants (travelling in ox wagons) to be added to that. These were big armies for the time – the Hittite army at Kadesh with all its allies numbered 35,000, but the armies of individual kingdoms cannot have numbered anything like that: as we have seen, even large Mycenaean kingdoms like Pylos or Tiryns with estimated populations of over 60,000 can only have had a military force of 2000 or 3000
at most
– for offensive expeditionary campaigns.

WHAT HAPPENED?

The tale of this last attack is told on a magnificent relief on the Great Temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu in Egypt.

… the foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands.
All at once the lands were on the move
, scattered in war. No country could stand before their arms. Hatti, Kode [i.e. Kizzuwatna, the region around Tarsus in southern Turkey], Carchemish, Arzawa and Alashiya. They were cut off. A camp was set up in one place in Amor [Amurru: Syria, presumbably the coastal plain]. They devastated its people and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were advancing on Egypt while the flame was being prepared for them. Their league was Puliset [Philistines], Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh, united lands. They laid their hands upon the lands to the very circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting: ‘Our plans will succeed.’ … I [Ramses] organised my frontier in Djahi [between Egypt and Palestine] … I caused the river
mouth [of the Nile], to be prepared like a strong wall with warships, transports and merchantmen, entirely manned from stem to stern with brave fighting men. …(My italics.)

Two battles followed, one by land, one at sea. The invaders had probably penetrated as far as the Egyptian frontier: perhaps they were taken by surprise, for the relief scenes at Medinet Habu show a confused mêlée with ox carts loaded with women and children caught up with the fighters; the unencumbered Egyptians were able to use their horse and chariots to advantage, boosted by mercenaries including Sherden auxiliaries. The land invaders were comprehensively defeated. The climax came in the Delta with a fierce sea battle against the Sea Peoples’ fleet. Here, somehow, they were trapped and annihilated in a confusion of capsizing boats:

As for those who came on the sea, the full flame was in front of them at the river mouths, while a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore [or ‘canal bank’]. They were dragged ashore, hemmed in and flung down on the beach, grappled, capsized and laid out on the shore dead, their ships made heaps from stern to prow, and their goods. …

Many prisoners were taken from all the races, each delineated on the reliefs with their distinctive war gear, and among them were ‘leaders of every country’, who were executed: ‘Like birds in a net … their leaders were carried off and slain’. The rank-and-file prisoners were settled at strategic points on the frontier, rather as the Romans used Germanic federates in the Late Empire: ‘I settled them in strongholds bound in my name,’ says Ramses. ‘They were numbered in hundred-thousands. I taxed them all, in clothing and grain from the shore-houses and granaries each year.’ Among these were the Philistines, who in the twelfth century BC make their appearance in the ‘way of Canaan’, the line of Egyptian forts running up the Gaza Strip. Here their tombs have been found, revealing a strange mixture of burial
customs: anthropoid coffins in the Egyptian style, pottery of a type similar to twelfth-century Mycenaean, and war gear resembling that on the warrior vase from Mycenae. Their ancient traditions stuck with them, if they were indeed originally from the Aegean world, as the Bible asserts: when the Philistine champion Goliath fights the boy David, he is wearing what is still recognisably Mycenaean war gear! So the climax to the great land and sea raid of
c
.1180 can be reconstructed with some certainty. But what had preceded it? Where had the league of Sea Peoples come from, and why was it on the move? Did they really exist as a unified movement? These are questions with which experts are still grappling.

The archaeological record perhaps enables us to corroborate the general picture of a period of instability and violent destructions. But Ramses names Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa and Alashiya being ‘cut off’ by the Sea Peoples. Is this believable? Could it really be that all these places were actually destroyed by the attack of 1180? The date certainly agrees very well with the destruction of the Hittite capital at Boghaz Köy, the palace at Mersin in Cilicia (Kode), of Tarsus in Cilicia, and Carchemish. In particular there is this dramatic evidence from the last clay tablets written at the great city of Ugarit in northern Syria:

To the king of Alashia (Cyprus) my father, I say: thus speaks the king of Ugarit your son. Ships of the enemy have come, some of my towns have been burned and they have done wicked things in our country. My father clearly does not know that all my troops are deployed in Hittite territory, and all my ships are standing off the Lycian coast. They have not [so far] returned, so the country is at the mercy of the enemy. Let my father understand this! And that seven enemy ships have appeared offshore and done evil things. Now, if there are more hostile ships on the way, please inform me and of what kind – I
must
know about it!

This letter was still in the oven waiting to be baked when Ugarit was burned – perhaps from the sea, although the excavator
attributes its final destruction to an earthquake. Destructions on Cyprus at the same time may be connected with the same troubles which had led to the Ugaritic fleet sailing westwards.

These last tablets from Ugarit give us another potentially crucial factor: at this critical moment the king of Ugarit is urgently sending grain from Mukish to Ura in Cilicia (southern Turkey) ‘to alleviate the famine there’. If this was more than a local crisis, then it could suggest that climatic and economic conditions in the Aegean and Anatolia were encouraging migration southwards; this in its turn would enable us, for instance, to make sense of archaeological evidence for massive depopulation in Messenia. This kind of approach to the evidence has been pursued by climatologists with interesting results. Studies in climate patterns through tree rings and pollen deposits, examination of the fluctuation in growth phases in European peat-bogs and lake levels, have all suggested to experts that there was a crisis in the climate of the European and Aegean worlds in around 1200 BC which may have assisted in the movement of peoples from the Hungarian plain into Thrace, and thence into the Aegean. Depopulation in Messenia (and central Anatolia?) could then have been linked, with drought as a possible contributory cause. In this connection we may care to remember Herodotus’ story that after the Trojan War Crete in particular was so devastated by plagues and pestilence that it became virtually uninhabited. These are wider questions which, though they have a great bearing on our story, cannot be examined within the scope of this present book, and the reader is recommended to look at the books and articles in the bibliography; but such considerations show how misleading it can be to use traditional methods of historical inquiry to answer what turn out to be very long-term questions of decline.

Our scattered indications – including the Ugaritic reference to famine – suggest that all was not well in the Aegean and Asia Minor at the turn of the thirteenth century BC. It does not allow us to say that the Sea Peoples were responsible for the fall of the Hittite Empire, though if we consider that what the Egyptians
called Sea Peoples were only a part of larger movements, of widespread disruption in the Eastern Mediterranean, then they may not have been. However, though a number of Hittite centres, such as Boghaz Köy and Masat Hüyük, did fall around 1180 BC, the present excavator of Boghaz Köy is inclined to attribute the fire that destroyed them to internal revolt rather than external enemies. With a little licence, though, we can trace the track of the Sea Peoples through Amurru–Syria, which Ramses says they devastated. Tell Sukas on the Syrian coast was sacked at this time, as were Hamath, Carchemish, Açana, Sidon and Tell Abu Hawam, a great site near Haifa;several are associated with pottery the experts call LH III C 1, dating them to around 1180: their destructions certainly fit very well with the great land and sea raid. On Cyprus the catastrophe which overtook Kition, and the burning of Enkomi, likewise point to the Sea Peoples. Interestingly enough, these places were rebuilt by Greeks; for all their close contacts with Cyprus, actual Greek immigration into Cyprus begins only with the period of the Sea Peoples.

Were the Sea Peoples in part composed of Aegean warriors? It seems possible, even likely, but at present these events are shrouded in mystery. Where do they fit with the detailed history which has now been worked out for some of the mainland kingdoms? The depopulation of Messenia after the fall of Pylos, for example? Or the swelling of population in the Argolid around Tiryns at this time? And do the Egyptian accounts have any bearing on later Greek legends which speak of migrations after the Trojan War to Anatolia, to Sicily and southern Italy – curiously paralleled in our admittedly uncertain linguistic evidence for Sea People migrations to those parts? Could Odysseus’ raid on the Nile Delta in the
Odyssey
even contain a dim memory of the terrible disaster which overtook the league of Aqaiwasha and the rest?

On the fifth day we came to fair-flowing Aegyptus, and in the river Aegyptus [i.e. the Nile] I moored my curved ships, then I told my trusty comrades to remain there by the ships, and I sent out scouts to
set up lookout posts. But my comrades … set about devastating the fair fields of the people of Egypt; and they carried off the women and little children and slew the men. And the news went swiftly to the city. Then their people came out at dawn and the whole plain was filled with foot soldiers and chariots, and the flashing of bronzes … and then they killed many of us with the sharp bronze, and others they led back to their city alive, to work for them as forced labour. …

Odyssey
, XIV, 245

Attractive and plausible as such speculations are, at present they are no more than that. But there is one important connection with the Sea Peoples’ raid of 1180 which we have not yet examined – could the fall of Troy itself be the work of the Sea Peoples?

TROY VIIA – THE SIEGE OF TROY LOST AGAIN

The reader will recall that we left the question of the sack of Troy with Carl Blegen’s conclusion, that the city called Troy VIIa, the one with the shanties, the soup kitchen, and the storage jars in the floors, was Homer’s Troy; that its destruction by violence and fire was the Homeric siege. We had our reservations about his interpretation but deferred them for a while. Now we cannot put off any longer tackling the problem of the date of the destruction of VIIa, the one Late-Bronze-Age level of Hisarlik which looks as if it fell to attack by an army. Was Blegen right? Here we cannot avoid a few technicalities, and I hope the reader will bear with me. The heyday of Troy VI (phases d–g) contains pieces of imported Mycenaean pottery of the class known as LH III A. The last phase, the city of the great towers (VIh), Blegen thought contained both LH III A and III B. But new research suggests Blegen was wrong: Troy VI had no III B pottery, and hence must have been destroyed around 1300 BC or a decade or two later. Troy VIh was therefore the city known to the Mycenaens at the peak of the power of the palaces in mainland Greece in the fourteenth and early thirteenth centuries, and the masses of Mycenaean imports prove it. So the Troy of the shanties and soup
kitchen, VIIa – a continuation of the same settlement – begins some time after
c
.1300–1275. It contains almost no Mycenaean pottery of this period – only the odd sherd, in fact: most are Trojan imitations of Mycenaean styles. But how long did VIIa last, and when did it fall?

Blegen asserted that ‘not a single piece’ of LH III C pottery was found in Troy VIIa (when he wrote, the beginning of III C was thought to be
c
.1230–1200; it is now placed at 1190–1185 or later). However, it is now clear that several pieces of LH III C
were
found in Troy VIIa, which would suggest it was destroyed around 1180 BC. This is confirmed by the appearance of another kind of pottery, the so-called ‘Granary Class’, in the next phase of Troy, VIIb I: this phase can hardly have begun until the ‘Granary Class’ was widespread in Greece, that is, in 1170–1160. Troy VIIa, then, which Blegen thought Homer’s Troy, is far too late for the Trojan War if it was fought by an expedition in the time of the Mycenaean palaces. Accordingly, if Blegen was right about the duration of the VIIa settlement, the fall of Troy VI could have been improbably late, say between 1250 and 1200. So Blegen was guilty of overenthusiasm in his 1240 date for the sack of VIIa, let alone 1270. This becomes obvious when we work back from the sack of VIIa: Blegen proposed a duration of only a few years, within a half century or ‘even a generation of man’ (clearly he was reluctant to say ten years!). If VIIa fell around 1180 BC, then the fall of VIh would be datable nearer 1200.