In Search of the Trojan War (35 page)

A large force of determined men armed with crowbars and other equipment could in time demolish almost any wall that men have built; but if they set out deliberately to efface the site of Troy, they would surely have begun by razing the citadel wall to the ground. Furthermore, vindictive destruction after the capture of the town in war would almost surely have been accompanied by great conflagration. Here, however, only the upper parts of the walls have been overturned, and we found
no evidence of a serious fire
. (My italics.) It is true that carbonised matter occurred freely, but … no widespread layer of burning was recognisable. Accordingly it seems
safe to rule out human handiwork … a violent earthquake shock will account more convincingly than any probable human agency for the toppling of the city wall.

There are weaknesses to Blegen’s argument. Clearly any deliberate demolition of the walls
would
most likely have satisfied itself with the destruction of the superstructures of the walls and the ruining of the houses within. The massive bases of the walls were far too solidly built to be easily dismantled; they still stand today almost intact, and archaeology cannot tell us whether the few cracks and the one instance of tilting happened at this time. But the most damning argument against the earthquake comes from a study of the notebooks of the previous excavators of Hisarlik: evidence for the great earthquake of Troy VI seems to be confined to the south-eastern sector of the city, where there may have been a tendency to landslips in earlier settlements. In the opinion of earthquake experts, too, Blegen’s evidence is dubious and his conclusion unproven. From a seismologist’s point of view it is impossible to tell the difference between earthquake damage and man-made destruction; many archaeologists would agree.

The question of pottery dating should also be reconsidered here. Blegen presumably had already come to his conclusions about the dating of Troy VIIa – and hence its likely identification with Homeric Troy – before he looked at Troy VI, the stratum below. With hindsight we have seen that his conclusion about the dating of Troy VIIa was incorrect, and that it fell in the twelfth century BC, not in the mid-thirteenth. As for the date of the Troy VI ‘earthquake’, Blegen favoured a date soon after 1300, the transitional point from the LH III A to LH III B pottery styles. Here he was broadly correct, except for one important proviso. It now appears that no LH III B can be safely attributed to Troy VI; so the city may have been destroyed in the period
c
.1320–1275. Once again, though, we can see how the overall picture which the archaeologist hoped to prove tended to govern the evaluation of all the dating evidence around it.

It therefore seems permissible to bring the legend into this discussion. Greek tradition insisted that the Achaians deliberately demolished the walls of Troy before they departed. This was mentioned in the
Iliou Persis
, the lost epic which followed on Homer’s
Iliad
. The razing of the walls was thereafter a constant feature of the story, down to the famous final scene in Euripides’
Trojan Women
where the captive women listen to the thunder of the towers being battered down, so frightening and turbulent that Hecuba compares it to an earthquake! In Aeschylus, too, the walls of Troy are ‘dug down’ and ‘overturned’. Late as these testimonies are, they are nevertheless part of the tradition, and the archaeology
could
, astonishingly enough, show us this down to the last terrible detail.

Such a remarkable final convergence of archaeology and legend would be intriguing, but is probably beyond final proof. Nevertheless the ruin of Troy
is
the tradition, and Troy VI is certainly the city with which Mycenae had relations, the city which fits the indications of the tradition. ‘Making the city into a mound and a ruin’ was the frequent result of Assyrian sieges, and we may conjecture that this is what the Argives did to the city of Priam, just as the tradition says they did to Thebes: Pausanias confirms that the razed Cadmea of Thebes was still a taboo area in his own day. The tradition may after all be consistent with the findings of modern science.

There is a last point to be considered in connection with the fate of Troy VI. Could the story of the wooden horse actually go back to a Mycenaean siege engine? So Pausanias thought (‘Anyone who doesn’t think the Trojans were utterly stupid will have realised that the horse was really an engineer’s device for breaking down the walls’), and the tale stresses that the wall was broken down when the horse entered the city. Could this be a garbled recollection of a siege machine? They certainly existed in Near Eastern warfare at this time: powerful ‘wooden horses’ containing many men to operate the ram which opened up city walls, they were developed most effectively in Assyria from the twelfth century BC onwards, but we have absolutely no
indication that such devices were used in the thirteenth-century Aegean. Intriguing, but once more unprovable.

With hindsight, then, the fate of Troy VI is more open to debate than Carl Blegen thought, and though the site is dug out, further evidence may perhaps be revealed by the continuing detailed examination of the excavation notebooks of all three explorers of Hisarlik. Until then we should be aware of the problems surrounding the date and circumstances of the end of the greatest city on Hisarlik.

THE DATE OF THE TROJAN WAR

The pottery evidence allows us to make a general estimate of the date of the fall of Troy VI. The fall was followed by an almost complete cessation of imports to VIIa: only one sherd of thirteenth-century Mycenaean pottery can be safely attributed to the latter city (the site was so badly disturbed that Blegen felt other examples could be upcasts from Troy VI). If we tentatively suggest a date of 1275–60, it would fit in very well with the chronology of the Hittite letters. This would be the reign of Hattusilis III, during which Hittite relations with the kingdom of Ahhiyawa became notably hostile. At this time, too, we can say from Linear B tablets preserved at Pylos (
c
.1220 BC?) that the Greeks were making predatory forays towards the north-east Aegean, be it to the island of Lemnos (attacked by Agamemnon’s army, according to Homer) or to the mainland in Aswija, an area south of the Troad where Homer has Achilles campaigning. The fall of Troy could then come into the lifetime of Alaksandus of Wilusa, whom we have seen reason to think could have some connection with Alexandros of (W)ilios. In any case, we can point to the likelihood that in Hattusilis’ time the Greeks (Ahhiyawa) and the Hittites came to blows over ‘the matter of Wilusa’. While admitting the difficulties surrounding the Wilusa question, these are noteworthy coincidences and they suggest that a memory, however dim, of these events underlies the tradition preserved by Homer. As we saw in
Chapter 4
, Greek
epic was so very specific about where Troy was; the tradition had apparently already taken shape by the eighth century BC, incorporating elements which go back to the Bronze Age. If we can add to these facts the possibility that the great city of Troy VI was sacked and deliberately devastated, then we have gone some way towards upholding the basic accuracy of the tradition namely that Troy did indeed stand on Hisarlik, that Troy VI was the city of Homer, and that, as Homer told, Bronze-Age Greeks attacked and sacked it. It would be tempting to put it towards 1260, at the time of Hattusilis’ crisis in the west (
see here
).

A VISIT TO TROY IN THE HEROIC AGE

So we can at least feel certain about the Troy to which the tradition in Homer ultimately refers. The Troy celebrated in epic poetry – perhaps even before the end of the Mycenaean age – was Troy VI, in the last great phase of its life from
c
.1375 to
c
.1275–60. As we saw in the chapter on Homer, though some epithets applied to the city in the
Iliad
are merely stock descriptions, a number are so specific they must refer to the site on Hisarlik; the cumulative effect of the epithets strongly suggests that late Troy VI must be the ‘Homeric’ city. Now that we know the date of the fall of Troy VIIa is too late for the Trojan War, this is made all the more certain. These last phases, culminating in Troy VIh, were the heyday of the city architecturally, economically and in terms of trade and contacts: this was the time when Mycenaean contacts with Troy were at their most intense (to judge by the pottery imports). This, then, was the city which the Greeks knew at the height of the Mycenaean empire.

What would a Bronze-Age traveller – or a bard – have seen if he had visited Troy towards the middle of the thirteenth century BC? It is time for us to put together the evidence found by Schliemann (albeit unwittingly), by Dörpfeld and Blegen, to which we can add further lost details of Troy VI demolished by Schliemann but recoverable from his notebooks. We will journey there as we did to Mycenae (
see here
) with an eye for what it
looked like in its heyday, but this time we will approach it from a distance along one of its trade routes reminding ourselves that archaeology has shown that Troy–Hisarlik was an important place irrespective of its role in Greek legend, and that its life to some extent depended on its contacts with the outside world, Anatolia in the first place, the Aegean, and even farther afield.

Our imagined journey is by sea, in a Bronze-Age Greek merchantman sailing with a cargo of copper ingots from Cyprus; perhaps there is some unworked ivory traded in Enkomi and a few crates of the Cypriot pottery favoured by the Trojans with its distinctive ladder patterns or cross-hatched lozenges. In the pots is opium, cumin and coriander. Ours is coasting traffic, clinging to the shore ‘like a child to its mother’s knee’ as Alexander Kinglake put it, an ancient network of routes from island to island and promontory to promontory, tiny ports of call on the few coastal margins where Bronze-Age man had scratched out a living. It is the trade observed in later centuries by the Anglo-Saxon Saewulf, by the Spaniard Clavijo, by Edward Clarke; they all stopped in the same safe havens, traded the same goods and cooked the same food in the galley – in the case of our thirteenth-century-BC boat, fish kebabs on skewers grilling over a fire on ballast stones in the boat’s belly: such detail the archaeologist can confirm (
see here
).

The journey from Cyprus to Troy would have taken two months or more – no different from the eighth century AD when the Anglo-Saxon Willibald was at sea from 30 November until the following Easter (724–5), or, for that matter, the nineteenth century, when Alexander Kinglake spent forty days at sea between Smyrna and Cyprus in 1834. Only the arrival of steam and the telegraph altered the timeless realities of Aegean shipping. Our boat would have put into all of the stopping-places in the islands and the coast opposite: Rhodes, Kos and Miletus with their Mycenaean settlements, Cnidus and Zephyrus, Iasos on its peninsula with its cobbled streets and fisheries. Though thinly populated, the islands were naturally rich and by no means presented the barren aspect they do today – as late as the fifteenth
century AD travellers speak of their extraordinary fertility.

From Miletus the Bronze-Age captain would have had to round Samos through the rough and windy straits opposite Icaria – exactly as Kinglake, Clarke and other travellers to Troy did in the nineteenth century. Then you steered along Chios, that most fertile and productive of all the islands off Asia Minor where, as anyone who has sailed it will know, the passage is sweetened by the wind-borne scent of orchards and olive groves. From Chios, according to the Pylos tablets, Asian slaves were shipped back to work in the mainland palaces, and by ‘Chios’ the Bronze-Age scribes doubtless meant the fine natural harbour of Emborio on the southern tip of the island, where a Mycenaean settlement stood on a steep promontory over a sheltered bay with magnificent views across to the hills of Asia Minor. (The name of the island,
Ki-si-wi-ja
in the Linear B tablets, it has been suggested, is the Phoenician word for mastic, the resinous gum of the lentisk tree which was highly sought after in the ancient world.)

After Chios another important port of call was Thermi in Lesbos. Lesbos has always been an intermediary between the Aegean and Asia Minor, so close to the shores of the Troad. It shared the culture of Troy VI and was sacked at the same time, around 1250 – by Achilles according to Homer, by Pijamaradus according to the Hittite Foreign Office! The port lay halfway along the eastern side of the island, well fortified with a double wall behind which were packed narrow houses and streets paved with beach pebbles. Thermi was one of the biggest towns in the Aegean; its people worked copper, wove textiles and made their local red and grey pottery; they fished with bone fish-hooks, and, so far as the archaeologist can tell, they liked oysters and sea-urchins: one more city of the Bronze Age whose end was fiery. In the centre of the island in classical times was a shrine to the Bronze-Age god Smintheus, a powerful inflicter and averter of plague. His perhaps were the idols sent to the ailing Mursilis II; to him, according to Homer, the Greeks at Troy prayed for relief (
Iliad
, I, 456). Smintheus was also later worshipped in Tenedos and the Troad, where he had a temple at Hamaxitus, and it may
have been for him that the custom began among sailors of making food offerings into the sea off Cape Lekton where his temple stood, a custom which survived into modern times – transferred to an Islamic saint.

Approaching Troy and the mouth to the Dardanelles the Bronze-Age sailor’s feelings were no doubt the same as Edward Clarke’s in 1801: ‘No spectacle could be more grand than this corner of the Aegean Sea …
Tenedos
upon the west, and those small
Isles
which form a group opposed to the
Sigean
Promontory. Nothing, excepting the oars of our boat, ruffled the still surface of the water: no other sound was heard. The distant Islands of the
Aegean
appeared as if placed upon the surface of a vast mirror … (ahead) the mountainous Island of
Imbros
, backed by the loftier snow-clad summits of Samothrace. …’ (
Travels
.) It is often difficult to sail against the wind into the Dardanelles – this was why Lord Byron spent so long kicking his heels in 1810, in company with a score of other vessels (
see here
), but in the Bronze Age the bay of Troy must have been a magnet for seafarers, who had a safe haven once they had turned ‘inside Ilios’. The mouth of the bay between the headlands was about 1½ miles across. Inside, in front of Troy, it opened out to about 3 miles of shallow sea, fringed by the alluvial flats of the rivers, salt marshes, lagoons and wind-blown sand-dunes.