In Search of the Trojan War (36 page)

The city stood on a ridge sticking westwards into the bay; below it was perhaps a mile of alluvial plain stretching to the seashore, much of it marshy in winter but otherwise dry; in this respect it must have resembled the plain of Argos, well watered and green in the spring, russet brown in high summer except around the marshes: ideal horse-raising country. There would have been no real harbour, just a trading shore where boats tied up to stakes or stone anchors on a sandy beach. Among the small local craft we might imagine fishing-boats, especially at the time of the seasonal migrations of mackerel and tunny which come through the Dardanelles each autumn; perhaps like the Turks after them the Trojans had wooden watchtowers on the straits to alert them for the harvest, and its slaughter in the offshore nets.
The bay must also have been especially rich in shellfish, oysters and sea-urchins.

At any one time there would have been only a handful of boats in the bay, though from the archaeology we might be permitted to imagine the odd seagoing Greek ‘tramp’ from Tiryns or Asine with a cargo of pottery – stirrup jars full of perfumed oil, alabastros cups and bowls for use in Trojan noble houses. But this was a small trade to judge by the local wares. Troy had been, and remained, an Anatolian city. Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, the Mycenaean captains had a few things to offer the Trojan royal supervisor – carnelian beads, ivory boxes, an ivory gaming-board with counters, pins of electrum or silver, even perhaps a decorated ostrich egg: such were the luxury products of the Age of Bronze!

The Trojan king presumably had his own ships, not only to protect his shores from the perennial raiders and pirates, but to raid in his turn, to seize slaves and loot, and also to sell some of his own products which went wider afield. He perhaps exported bales of wool, spun yarn and made-up textiles, for, like Knossos, Troy was a sheep town with (we may guess) ‘state-run’ cottage factories in the outlying villages which sent their renders in to the palace stores. The Trojan local grey pottery found its way in small quantities to Cyprus and even to Syria and Palestine, though ‘export’ is doubtless too grand a word for the process which took it there. Lastly, as we have seen, horse breeding may have been a major element in the Trojan economy, not only foals but fully grown warhorses being exported; we may then imagine horses grazing on the lower plain and corrals for breaking and training nearer the town.

From the sea it was a short walk to the city across a mile of alluvial plain. Troy stood on the northern edge of a plateau which fell away precipitously on the north to the marshy valley of the river Dumrek Su (classical Simois). Whether there was an outer town around the citadel on Hisarlik is still not known. Blegen found traces of houses on the south and west and located a cremation cemetery for Troy VI 500 yards south of the city walls
on the southern slope of the plateau. But test pits sunk by Schliemann and Blegen on the plateau revealed no Bronze-Age remains. Perhaps the later building of New Ilium destroyed any trace, and it is at least possible that Troy VI had a sizeable outer town, comparable in area with, say, Eutresis (500 yards square enclosed by the outer walls, the built-up centre 200 by 150, similar to the citadel of Troy VI). If this was so, then the place will have looked far more like a regional capital than would appear today from its ruins. The royal citadel on Hisarlik stood on the western eminence of the plateau and rose in three concentric terraces, the uppermost about 130 feet above sea-level, the lowest about 100 feet. It enclosed an area of 200 yards by 120 – comparable with the ‘capital’ sites in Greece – within which water-supply was ensured by a deep well in the eastern bastion (though there was a spring outside the walls to the south-west). The fine walls of Troy VI had twice been remodelled, the final phase with its towers the product of three or four generations of rulers after 1400. The landward approach was, naturally, the heaviest defended, where the roads from the interior and the western Anatolian states led to the city: here were the tallest walls and the most massive gates and towers.

The visitor to Late-Bronze-Age Troy would have arrived at the south gate past the houses which lay outside the fortress. This gate was the main entrance to Troy and from it a paved street ascended the terraces of the city to the entrance of the king’s palace. To the left of the gate was a great square tower of limestone blocks standing about 50 feet high and projecting 10 yards out from the gate. In this tower was one of the principal altars of the city and in front of it was a line of six stone pedestals on which stood the images of the Trojan gods to greet the visitor. On the right-hand side of the gate stood a long house where burnt sacrifices were performed; here we might imagine the Trojans making offerings before they went on journeys or campaigns, and likewise strangers sacrificing before they entered the city. These cult areas outside the gate and its great tower perhaps help account for the later Greek traditions of ‘holy Ilios’.
To the right of the gate as we look at it Dörpfeld thought there had been two great flagstaffs peeping over the wall. Troy had three main gates, on the south, east and west, all perhaps fronted by idols, and a postern gate by the great eastern bastion. The technique of the masonry distinguished Troy from citadels of the Aegean world, and from Hittite work. The closely fitted limestone blocks, with their characteristic batter going up the first 12 or 15 feet, surmounted by a vertical stone superstructure; the vertical offsets worked out of limestone blocks of many shapes and sizes with the jointing alternated from one course to the next and the cutting of the offsets finished on the wall: all this seems to reflect a native north-west Anatolian style of work which goes back many centuries on Hisarlik, and is later found at the nearby Phrygian site of Gordion.

Of these great walls enough survives today on the south side to gain an impression – particularly at the projecting tower on the south-east, so finely jointed though no mortar is used, and above all at the eastern bastion, 60 feet wide and still standing nearly 30 feet high, once perhaps a watchtower which dominated the plain of the Simois and the eastern approach along the plateau. From this bastion a 200-yard stretch of wall ran along the northern crest of the hill, a ‘splendid wall of large hewn limestone blocks’, as Schliemann put it; already badly damaged by classical builders this was demolished by Schliemann between 1871 and 1873. Just how massively this was constructed was discovered by Carl Blegen when he examined the north-western corner in the 1930s. Here the wall took a sharp turn round the hill, descending 8 yards in a mere 15, and here Blegen found stepped foundations, which had been sunk no less than 23 feet below the Troy VI ground-level to provide support for a bastion which must have been well over 60 feet high: the visitor can still see the bottom courses of this structure which must have been dug out by the builders of Ilium Novum.

Such were the walls of Troy, which were certainly ‘well built’, ‘finely towered’ and ‘lofty-gated’ as later Greek tradition had it. Only on the western side was a small segment of the older circuit
still not replaced. This archaic wall, which can still be seen today, was only half as thick as the new wall and far less strongly constructed, made of smaller, rougher stones and not as deeply founded. Here the city’s defences were weakest and easiest to attack.

Inside Troy all the roads seem to have led up to the western summit of the little hill, where we may assume the palace stood. On the terraces below the palace were about twenty-five large houses or mansions in which the immediate retainers and kinsmen of the royal family must have lived, with perhaps separate houses for kings’ brothers and sons. The biggest were quite impressive large two-storeyed buildings nearly 30 yards long, resembling the megara at Tiryns and Mycenae though entered by side-doors. One of them, the so-called Pillar House near the south gate, was 28 yards long and 13 wide with a main hall and kitchen area, its roof supported by large central columns of stone, one of which survives today; presumably the upper storey was wood-framed with mudbrick and plaster, with windows, or possibly a clerestory roof (a style of architecture still to be seen in north-west Anatolia). Interestingly enough, Blegen thought that this building was converted into an arsenal or a barracks in the last phase of Troy VI, for a hoard of slingshots was found inside, along with evidence that large quantities of food had been consumed there; and, as we have seen, in the street to the west, Blegen also found – ‘inexplicably’ – a human skull.

What of the palace itself? The conventional view since Dörpfeld has been that no trace survived of the top of Hisarlik, sheared off when the civic centre of Roman Ilium was built. But modern research has shown that the left summit of the hill was still partly preserved when Schliemann began his dig in 1870, for there he came upon the footings of the archaic temple visited by Alexander the Great with parts of Troy VI buildings close to it. Conceivably, then, the Greek colonists who founded Ilion in
c
.730 BC built their temple over the ruins of ‘Priam’s palace’. Furthermore, 10 yards or so to the south-east, almost in the centre of Hisarlik at a height of 120 feet, in investigating an
‘island’ left by Schliemann and Dörpfeld, Carl Blegen found a shabby 5-yard stretch of wall with another running parallel to it: these lay directly under the footings of a Roman colonnade of shops. This fragment of late Troy VI stood immediately to the west of where we would expect the palace entrance to have been, at the top of the road which curves up from the south gate. Tiny remnant as it is, this may be our only surviving fragment of the palace of Bronze-Age Troy.

Of the appearance of the palace we know nothing, but it must have resembled the characteristic megara of Troy VI (a style going right back to the great buildings of Troy II – there is remarkable architectural continuity on Hisarlik). Like Pylos it must have been surrounded by storerooms and domestic accommodation. There, presumably, like all Late-Bronze-Age rulers, the king of Troy had magazines and workshops, stores of hundreds of jars for oil, grain, figs, wine. Perhaps, as at Pylos, there was a chariot workshop with craftsmen and stores of axles, bodies and wheels; there must also have been a smithy where bronze weapons were made, in styles influenced by both Aegean and Hittite forms. Potters there must have been in numbers, making the masses of local wares and local imitations of Greek pots; presumably their kilns lay outside the citadel. As befitted a textile town there were workshops inside the walls, where thousands of spindle whorls were found by all three diggers of Hisarlik; it is not unreasonable to imagine a royal store of cloth and wool with made-up cloaks like those at Pylos: ordinary ones, ‘cloaks for followers’, royal garments and ‘cloaks suitable for guest gifts’. If we wish to push our speculations a little further, on analogy with the Hittite and Linear B tablets we might assume that the king of Troy employed a goldsmith in addition to his bronze-smiths. He may have had a craftsman to make the fine sword pommels of alabaster or white marble which were evidently prized in Late-Bronze-Age Troy. He must have had dyers to colour his linen and wool: this job, like the spinning and weaving, and the grinding of grain, would have been done by women. In addition to his potters he must have had a fuller, a cutler, unguent boilers,
bakers, huntsmen, woodcutters, priests to tend his shrine, a soothsayer – even perhaps a physician (such as the
i-ja-te
in Linear B). Like the kings of Mycenae he may have had a singer of tales who could tell of the deeds of his ancestors; he will certainly have had royal messengers and heralds, and may even have employed a scribe who could write in Hittite on tablets of clay or wood. All these ideas are plausible, but we simply cannot prove them. Looking at the surviving houses we may guess that the total population of Troy VI can hardly have exceeded 1000 within the walls; how many more lived in the lower town and plain we do not know, but 5000 would seem roughly right. However, archaeology could suggest that a still wider area shared the culture of Troy VI – including, for instance, settlements on Gallipoli;Thermi on Lesbos clearly also had links. So we may yet find that Troy VI was a greater power in the north-east Aegean than has been supposed. On his own, however, the king of Troy could hardly have raised an armed force of more than a few hundred heavily armed warriors. If he could call upon his Arzawan neighbours for help in a crisis – or even the Great King of Hatti himself – we do not know it. So much of the history of Hisarlik remains a mystery, though it is exciting to think how much new discoveries could change this situation: especially if (as must surely happen) an archive is discovered of one of Troy’s western Asiatic neighbours.

Troy–Hisarlik, then, was an Anatolian culture in contact with the Aegean world. Troy VI and Troy VIIa were just two of the settlements which were destroyed in Anatolia and the Aegean at the end of the Bronze Age. If we wish to link their destructions to the later Greek traditions about ‘Troy’, we should not forget that they also have a context in the wider historiographical problems posed by the destruction of cities in Mediterranean lands in the Late Bronze Age. In one sense there were many Troys and many Trojan wars, and it is to that broader picture that I shall turn in my final chapter.

EIGHT

THE END OF THE BRONZE AGE

After diligent inquiry I can discern four principal causes of the ruin of the Roman Empire, which continued to operate in a period of more than a thousand years. I. The injuries of time and nature. II. The hostile attacks of the barbarians … III. The use and abuse of the materials [i.e. raw materials, commodities and their markets]. And IV. The domestic quarrels of the Romans
.

GIBBON,
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, VI
, Chapter LXXI (AD 1787)

In the later years of dynasties, famines and pestilences become numerous. As far as famines are concerned, the reason is that most people at that time refrained from cultivating the soil. For, in the later years of dynasties there occur attacks on property and tax revenue, and through customs duties, on trading. Or, trouble occurs as the result of the unrest of subjects and the great number encouraged by the senility of the dynasty to rebel. Little grain is stored. The grain and harvest situation is not always stable from year to year. The amount of rainfall in the world differs by nature. The rainfall may be too little or too much. Grains and fruits vary correspondingly. Still for their food requirement people put their trust in what it is possible to store. If nothing is stored they must expect famines. The price of grain rises. Indigent people are unable to buy any and perish. If for some years nothing is stored, hunger will be general. The large number of pestilences [which follow] are caused by these famines; or by the many disturbances which result from the disintegration of the dynasty. There is much unrest and bloodshed, and plagues occur … as there is now overpopulation
.