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also Il·i·on (ĭl'ē-ən, -ŏn') or Il·i·um (-ē-əm) An ancient city of northwest Asia Minor near the Dardanelles. Originally a Phrygian city dating from the Bronze Age, it is the legendary site of the Trojan War and was captured and destroyed by Greek forces c. 1200 B.C. The ruins of Troy were discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in 1871.
For more information on Troy, visit Britannica.com.
Large tell near Hissarlik on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor overlooking the Dardanelles, discovered by Schliemann, Heinrich in ad 1871 and proclaimed as the lost city of Troy referred to by Homer in The Illiad. Schliemann excavated at the site between 1871 and 1890. The results from this and subsequent work, notably by Carl Blegen in the 1930s, allow the identification of seven successive cities, each with numerous subphases, spanning the period 3000 bc to 1000 bc.
Troy I dates to the period 3000 bc to 2500 bc and was a small settlement of 0.5ha defended by a mud-brick wall set on stone foundations. Houses of the period had built-in cupboards and sleeping platforms. Tin-bronze was introduced during Troy I. Late in the 4th millennium the site was destroyed.
Troy II, dated to 2500 bc to 2300 bc, was larger and wealthier than its predecessor, but the buildings were still modest in scale. Most were of megaron form. It was from this phase of the site that Schliemann recovered a massive hoard of nearly 9000 objects that have become known as the Treasure of Priam.
Troy III–V dates to the period 2300 bc down to 1900 bc. During this time the citadel grew in size, but was not especially wealthy.
Troy VI, broadly 1900 bc to 1350 bc saw a new fortification built around a town of 2ha. This was a wealthy town with evidence of trade with the Mycenaean centres of Greece. The defensive wall was of fine ashlar masonry with a pronounced batter. The destruction of the site around 1300 bc was probably the result of an earthquake.
Finally, Troy VII was probably the town that should be identified with Homer's Troy. It was destroyed in the mid 13th century bc, perhaps by Greeks fighting the Trojan War.
Around 700 bc the site was re-occupied by Greeks from Lemnos and, as Illium, became the capital of a league of cities in the coastal region of Anatolia formed in 306 bc. There were further prosperous times in the later Roman period before a period of decline and decay that led to the town's disappearance for many centuries.
[Sum.: C. Blegen, 1963, Troy and the Trojans. London: Thames & Hudson]
Bibliography
See H. Schliemann, Troy and Its Remains (1875) and Ilios: The City and the Country of the Trojans (1881, repr. 1968); J. L. Angel, Troy (1951); C. W. Blegen, ed., Troy (4 vol., 1950–58; supplementary monographs, 1961–63) and Troy and the Trojans (1963).
The ancient city inhabited by the Trojans; the site of the legendary Trojan War of classical mythology. The ruins of Troy were found in the nineteenth century in the western part of what is now Turkey.
| Archaeological Site of Troy* | |
|---|---|
| UNESCO World Heritage Site | |
| State Party |  Turkey |
| Type | Cultural |
| Criteria | ii, iii, vi |
| Reference | 849 |
| Region† | Europe and North America |
| Inscription History | |
| Inscription | 1998 (22nd Session) |
|
* Name as
inscribed on World Heritage List. † Region as classified by UNESCO. |
|
Troy (Greek: Τροία, Troia, also Ίλιον, Ilion; Latin: Troia, Ilium,[1] Turkish: Truva) is a legendary city and center of the Trojan War, as described in the Epic Cycle, and especially in the Iliad, one of the two epic poems attributed to Homer. Trojan refers to the inhabitants and culture of Troy.
Today it is the name of an archaeological site, the traditional location of Homeric Troy, Turkish Truva, in Hisarlık in Anatolia, close to the seacoast in what is now Çanakkale province in northwest Turkey, southwest of the Dardanelles under Mount Ida.
A new city of Ilium was founded on the site in the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus. It flourished until the establishment of Constantinople and declined gradually during Byzantine times.
In the 1870s the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated the area. Later excavations revealed several cities built in succession to each other. One of the earlier cities (Troy VII) is often identified with Homeric Troy. While such an identity is disputed, the site has been successfully identified with the city called Wilusa in Hittite texts; Ilion (which goes back to earlier Wilion with a digamma) is thought to be the Greek rendition of that name.
The archaeological site of Troy was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998.
Details concerning Troy were transmitted to the historical Greeks entirely through the written Epic Cycle, of which Homer's Iliad is the familiar part. Other epic material, such as Cypria was known in Antiquity but is lost to us. Further ancient material is only known to us in much later literary recensions, such as the fourth century CE Posthomerica of Quintus of Smyrna. Aside from this mass of material, modern philologists have laboured to tease out the few discernible threads of the earlier legendary material that preceded Homer, from which he worked.
According to Greek mythology the Trojans were the citizens of the ancient municipality of Troy in the Troad region of Anatolia. Troy is presented anachronistically in legend as if it were part of the Greek culture of City states. Since the entire state comprised more than the city of Troy itself, anyone from its jurisdiction, which was mainly the Troad, might be termed "Trojan" in ancient literature.[2] An alternative classical Greek and Latin term was "Teucrians", a name taken from an ethnicity of the south Troad. Troy was known for its riches gained from port trade with east and west, fancy clothes, iron production, and massive defensive walls. The major language spoken there and the derivative cultures remain uncertain. Legend for the most part ignores language and makes the presumption that Trojans had no problem understanding Greek.
The Trojan royal kinship, in Greek eyes, traced its descent from the Pleiad Electra and Zeus, the parents of Dardanus. Dardanus, according to Greek myths was originally from Arcadia but according to Roman myths was originally from Italy, having crossed over to Asia Minor
from the island of Samothrace, where he met King Teucer. Teucer was himself also a coloniser from Attica, and treated Dardanus with respect. Eventually Dardanus married Teucer's daughters, and founded Dardania (later ruled by Aeneas). Upon Dardanus' death, the Kingdom was passed to his grandson Tros, who called the people Trojans and the land Troad, after himself. Ilus, son of Tros, founded the city of Ilium (Troy) that he called after himself. Zeus gave Ilus the Palladium. Poseidon and Apollo built the walls and fortifications around Troy for Laomedon, son of Ilus the younger. When Laomedon refused to pay, Poseidon flooded the land and demanded the sacrifice of Hesione to a sea monster. Pestilence came and the sea monster snatched away the people of the plain.
In Sardis a self-identified Heracleid dynasty ruled for 505 years until the time of Candaules. The dynasty's founding myth legitimizes their rule by asserting that one generation before the Trojan War, Heracles captured Troy and killed Laomedon and his sons, except for young Priam. Priam later became king. During his reign, the Mycenaean Greeks invaded and captured Troy in the Trojan War (traditionally dated to 1193–1183 BC). The Ionians, Cimmerians, Phrygians, Milesians of Sinope and Lydians moved into Asia Minor. The Persians invaded in 546 BC.
The Maxyans were a west Libyan tribe who said that they were descended from the men of Troy, according to Herodotus. The Trojan ships transformed into naiads, who rejoiced to see the wreckage of Odysseus' ship.
Some famous Trojans are: Dardanus (founder of Troy), Laomedon, Ganymede, Priam and his children (including Paris, Hector, Cassandra and Troilus), Oenone, Tithonus, Memnon, Corythus, Aeneas and Brutus. Kapys, Boukolion and Aisakos were Trojan princes who had naiad wives. Some of the Trojan allies were the Lycians and the Amazons. The Aisepid nymphs were the naiads of the Trojan River Aisepos. Pegsis was the naiad of the River Granicus near Troy. "Helen of Troy" was born not at Troy but at Sparta.
Mount Ida in Asia Minor is where Ganymede was abducted by Zeus, where Anchises was seduced by Aphrodite, where Aphrodite gave birth to Aeneas, where Paris lived as a shepherd, where the nymphs lived, where the "Judgement of Paris" took place, where the Greek gods watched the Trojan War, where Hera distracted Zeus with her seductions long enough to permit the Achaeans, aided by Poseidon, to hold the Trojans off their ships, and where Aeneas and his followers rested and waited until the Greeks set out for Greece.Buthrotos (or Buthrotum) was a city in Epirus where Helenus, the Trojan seer, built a replica of Troy. Aeneas landed there and Helenus foretold his future.
Ancient Greek historians placed the Trojan War variously in the 12th, 13th or 14th century BC: Eratosthenes to 1184 BC, Herodotus to 1250 BC, Douris to 1334 BC.
In the Iliad, the Achaeans set up their camp near the mouth of the river Scamander (presumably modern Karamenderes), where they had beached their ships. The city of Troy itself stood on a hill, across the plain of Scamander, where the battles of the Trojan War took place. The site of the ancient city today is some 15 kilometers from the coast, but the ancient mouths of alleged Scamander, some 3,000 years ago, were some 5 kilometers further inland,[3][4] pouring into a bay that has since been filled with alluvial material. Recent geological findings have enabled the reconstruction of how the Trojan coastline would have looked, hence they indicate that Homeric geography of Troy is accurate.[5]
Besides the Iliad, there are references to Troy in the other major work attributed to Homer, the Odyssey, as well as in other ancient Greek literature. The Homeric legend of Troy was elaborated by the Roman poet Virgil in his work the Aeneid. The Greeks and Romans took for a fact the historicity of the Trojan War, and in the identity of Homeric Troy with the site in Anatolia. Alexander the Great, for example, visited the site in 334 BC and made sacrifices at the alleged tombs of the Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroclus.
In November 2001, geologists John C. Kraft from the University of Delaware and John V. Luce from Trinity College, Dublin presented the results[6][7][8] of investigations into the geology of the region that had started in 1977. The geologists compared the present geology with the landscapes and coastal features described in the Iliad and other classical sources, notably Strabo's Geographia. Their conclusion was that there is regularly a consistency between the location of Troy as identified by Schliemann (and other locations such as the Greek camp), the geological evidence, and descriptions of the topology and accounts of the battle in the Iliad.
After the 1995 find of a Luwian biconvex seal at Troy VII, there has been a heated discussion over the language that was spoken in Homeric Troy. Frank Starke of the University of Tubingen recently demonstrated that the name of Priam is connected to the Luwian compound Priimuua, which means "exceptionally courageous".[9] "The certainty is growing that Wilusa/Troy belonged to the greater Luwian-speaking community", although it's not entirely clear whether Luwian was primarily the official language or it was also in daily use.[10]
The layers of ruins on the site are numbered Troy I – Troy IX, with various subdivisions:
The archaeological site of Troy was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998.
The first city was founded in the 3rd millennium BC. During the Bronze Age, the site seems to have been a flourishing mercantile city, since its location allowed for complete control of the Dardanelles, through which every merchant ship from the Aegean Sea heading for the Black Sea had to pass.
Troy VI was destroyed around 1300 BC, probably by an earthquake. Only a single arrowhead was found in this layer, and no bodily remains.
The archaeological layer known as Troy VIIa, which has been dated on the basis of pottery styles to the mid- to late-13th century BC, is the most often-cited candidate for the Troy of Homer. It was a walled city with towers reaching a height of nine meters; the foundations of one of its bastions measure 18 meters by 18 meters. It appears to have been destroyed by a war, and there are traces of a fire.
Until the 1988 excavations, the problem was that Troy VII seemed to be a hill-top fort, and not a city of the size described by Homer, but later identification of parts of the city ramparts suggests a city "at least ten times larger than earlier excavators - and thus the broader public - had supposed".[11] Manfred Korfmann estimated the area of Troy VII at 200,000 square metres or more and put its population at five to ten thousand inhabitants, which makes it "by the standards of its day a large and important city".[12]
Troy VIIb1 (ca. 1120 BC) and Troy VIIb2 (ca. 1020 BC) appear to have been destroyed by fires. Partial human remains were found in houses and in the streets, and near the north-western ramparts a human skeleton with skull injuries and a broken jawbone. Three bronze arrowheads were found, two being in the fort and one in the city. However, only small portions of the city have been excavated, and the finds are too scarce to clearly favour destruction by war over a natural disaster.
The last city on this site, Hellenistic Ilium, was founded by Romans during the reign of the emperor Augustus and was an important trading city until the establishment of Constantinople in the fourth century as the eastern capital of the Roman Empire. In Byzantine times the city declined gradually, and eventually disappeared.
With the rise of modern critical history, Troy and the Trojan War were consigned to the realms of legend. In the 1870s (in two campaigns, 1871–73 and 1878/9), however, the German, self-taught archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated a hill, called Hisarlik by the Turks, near the town of Chanak (Çanakkale) in north-western Anatolia. Here he discovered the ruins of a series of ancient cities, dating from the Bronze Age to the Roman period. Schliemann declared one of these cities—at first Troy I, later Troy II—to be the city of Troy, and this identification was widely accepted at that time. Schliemann's finds at Hisarlik have become known as Priam's Treasure. They were acquired from him by the Berlin museums, but significant doubts about their authenticity persist.
After Schliemann, the site was further excavated under the direction of Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1893/4) and later Carl Blegen (1932-8). These excavations have shown that there were at least nine cities built one on top of each other at this site.
In 1988 excavations were resumed by a team of the University of Tübingen and the University of Cincinnati under the direction of Professor Manfred Korfmann. Possible evidence of a battle was found in the form of arrowheads found in layers dated to the early 12th century BC. The question of Troy's status in the Bronze Age world has been the subject of a sometimes acerbic debate between Korfmann and the Tübingen historian Frank Kolb in 2001/2002.
In August 2003 following a magnetic imaging survey of the fields below the fort, a deep ditch was located and excavated among the ruins of a later Greek and Roman city. Remains found in the ditch were dated to the late Bronze Age, the alleged time of Homeric Troy. It is claimed by Korfmann that the ditch may have once marked the outer defences of a much larger city than had previously been suspected.
In summer 2006 the excavations continued under the direction of Korfmann's colleague Ernst Pernicka, with a new digging permit.[13]
In the 1920s the Swiss scholar Emil Forrer claimed that placenames found in Hittite texts — Wilusa and Taruisa — should be identified with Ilium and Troia respectively. He further noted that the name of Alaksandus, king of Wilusa, mentioned in one of the Hittite texts is quite similar to the name of Prince Alexandros or Paris, of Troy.
An unnamed Hittite king wrote a letter to the king of the Ahhiyawa, treating him as an equal and implying that Miletus (Millawanda) was controlled by the Ahhiyawa, and also referring to an earlier "Wilusa episode" involving hostility on the part of the Ahhiyawa. This people has been identified with the Homeric Greeks (Achaeans). The Hittite king was long held to be Mursili II (ca 1321-1296), but since the 1980s his son Hattusili III (1265-1240) is commonly preferred, although Mursili's other son Muwatalli (ca 1296-1272) is still considered a possibility.
An Egyptian inscription at Deir al-Madinah records a victory of Ramesses III over Sea Peoples, including some named Tursha (spelled [twrš3] in Egyptian script). These are probably the same as the earlier Teresh (found written as [trš.w]) of the Merneptah Stele, commemorating Merneptah’s victory in a Libyan campaign at about 1220 BC. Although this may be too early for the Trojan War, some scholars have connected the name to the city mentioned in Hittite records as Taruisas, or Troy.[14]
These identifications were rejected by many scholars as being improbable or at least unprovable. Trevor Bryce in 1998 championed them in his book The Kingdom of the Hittites, citing a recovered piece of the so-called Manapa-Tarhunda letter, which refers to the kingdom of Wilusa as beyond the land of the Seha (known in classical times as the Caicus) river, and near the land of Lazpa (Lesbos Island).
Recent evidence adds weight to the theory that Wilusa is identical to archaeological Troy. Hittite texts mention a water tunnel at Wilusa, and a water tunnel excavated by Korfmann, previously thought to be Roman, has been dated to around 2600 BC. The identifications of Wilusa with archaeological Troy and of the Achaeans with the Ahhiyawa remain controversial, but gained enough popularity during the 1990s to be considered a majority opinion.
The events described in Homer's Iliad, even if based on historical events that preceded its composition by some 450 years, will never be completely identifiable with historical or archaeological facts, even if there was a Bronze Age city on the site now called Troy, and even if that city was destroyed by fire or war at about the same time as the time postulated for the Trojan War.
No text or artifact has been found on site itself which clearly identifies the Bronze Age site. This is probably due to the planification of the former hillfort during the construction of Hellenistic Ilium (Troy IX), destroying the parts that most likely contained the city archives. In 1995, a single biconvex seal of a Luwian scribe has been found in one of the houses, proving the presence of written correspondence in the city, but not a single text. Our emerging understanding of the geography of the Hittite Empire makes it very likely that the site corresponds to the city of Wilusa. But even if that is accepted, it is of course no positive proof of identity with Homeric (W)ilion.
A name Wilion or Troia does not appear in any of the Greek written records from the Mycenean sites. The Mycenaean Greeks of the 13th century BC had colonized the Greek mainland and Crete, and were only beginning to make forays into Anatolia, establishing a bridgehead in Miletus (Millawanda). Historical Wilusa was one of the Arzawa lands, in loose alliance with the Hittite Empire, and written reference to the city is therefore to be expected in Hittite correspondence rather than in Mycenaean palace archives.
The dispute over the historicity of the Iliad was very heated at times. The more we know about Bronze Age history, the clearer it becomes that it is not a yes-or-no question but one of educated assessment of how much historical knowledge is present in Homer. The story of the Iliad is not an account of the war, but a tale of the psychology, wrath, vengeance and death of individual heroes that assumes common knowledge of the Trojan War to create a backdrop. No scholars assume that the individual events in the tale (many of which centrally involve divine intervention) are historical fact; on the other hand, no scholars claim that the scenery is entirely devoid of memories of Mycenaean times: it is rather a subjective question of whether the factual content is rather more or rather less than one would have expected.
The ostensible historicity of Homer's Troy faces the same hurdles as with Plato's Atlantis. In both cases, an ancient writer's story is now seen by some to be true, by others to be mythology or fiction. It may be possible to establish connections between either story and real places and events, but these connections may be subject to selection bias.
Some archaeologists and historians maintain that none of the events in Homer are historical. Others accept that there may be a foundation of historical events in the Homeric stories, but say that in the absence of independent evidence it is not possible to separate fact from myth in the stories.
In recent years scholars have suggested that the Homeric stories represented a synthesis of many old Greek stories of various Bronze Age sieges and expeditions, fused together in the Greek memory during the "dark ages" which followed the fall of the Mycenean civilization. In this view, no historical city of Troy existed anywhere: the name derives from a people called the Troies, who probably lived in central Greece. The identification of the hill at Hisarlik as Troy is, in this view, a late development, following the Greek colonisation of Asia Minor in the 8th century BC.
Another view is that Homer was heir to an unbroken tradition of epic poetry reaching back some 500 years into Mycenaean times. In this view, the poem's core could reflect a historical campaign that took place at the eve of the decline of the Mycenaean civilization. Much legendary material would have been added during this time, but in this view it is meaningful to ask for archaeological and textual evidence corresponding to events referred to in the Iliad. Such a historical background gives a credible explanation for the geographical knowledge of Troy (which could, however, also have been obtained in Homer's time by visiting the traditional site of the city) and otherwise unmotivated elements in the poem (in particular the detailed Catalogue of Ships). Linguistically, a few verses of the Iliad suggest great antiquity, because they only fit the meter if projected back into Mycenaean Greek, suggesting a poetic tradition spanning the Greek Dark Ages. Even though Homer was Ionian, the Iliad reflects the geography known to the Mycenaean Greeks, showing detailed knowledge of the mainland but not extending to the Ionian islands or Anatolia, which suggests that the Iliad reproduces an account of events handed down by tradition, to which the author did not add his own geographical knowledge.
Kenneth J. Dillon argues[15] that the Trojans were originally a steppe people related to the Magyars. After attacking and destroying the Hittite Empire, they came to control the Straits. During the Trojan War, the Greeks used a naval blockade to prevent Trojans on the European shore and on Lemnos from coming to the aid of Troy. Once Troy fell, the Trojans on the European shore fled northward and ended up as the Etruscans in Italy. A small minority of contemporary writers argue that Homeric Troy was not in Anatolia, but located elsewhere: England,[16] Croatia, and Scandinavia have been proposed. These theories have not been accepted by mainstream scholars.
Such was the fame of the Epic Cycle in Roman and medieval times that it was built upon to provide a starting point for various founding myths of national origins. The progenitor of all of them is undoubtedly that promulgated by Virgil in the Aeneid, tracing the ancestry of the founders of Rome, more specifically the Julio-Claudian dynasty, to the Trojan prince Aeneas. The heroes of Troy, both those noted in the epic texts or those purpose-invented, continued to perform the role of founder for the nations of Early Medieval Europe.[17] Denys Hay noted the widespread adoption of Trojan forebears as an authentication of national status, in Europe: the Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh 1957). The Roman de Troie was common cultural ground for European governing classes,[18] for whom a Trojan pedigree was gloriously ancient, and it established the successor-kingdoms of which they were direct heirs as equals of the Romans. A Trojan pedigree justified the occupation of parts of Rome's erstwhile territories (Huppert 1965).
The Franks filled the lacunae of their legendary origins with Trojan and pseudo-Trojan names; in Fredegar's seventh-century chronicle of Frankish history, Priam appears as the first king of the Franks.[19] The Trojan origin of Franks and France was such an established article of faith that in 1714 the learned Nicolas Fréret was Bastilled for showing through historical criticism that the Franks had been Germanic, a sore point counter to Valois and Bourbon propaganda.[20]
Similarly Geoffrey of Monmouth traces the legendary Kings of the Britons to a supposed descendant of Aeneas called Brutus. Snorri Sturluson, in the Prologue to his Prose Edda, converts several half-remembered characters from Troy into characters from Norse mythology, and refers to them having made a journey across Europe towards Scandinavia, setting up kingdoms as they went.
Today there is a Turkish town called Truva in the vicinity of the archaeological site, but this town has grown up recently to service the tourist trade. The archaeological site is officially called Troia by the Turkish government and appears as such on many maps.
A large number of tourists visit the site each year, mostly coming from Istanbul by bus or by ferry via Çanakkale, the nearest major town about 50 km to the north-east. The visitor sees a highly commercialised site, with a large wooden horse built as a playground for children, then shops and a museum. The archaeological site itself is, as a recent writer said, "a ruin of a ruin," because the site has been frequently excavated, and because Schliemann's archaeological methods were very destructive: in his conviction that the city of Priam would be found in the earliest layers, he demolished many interesting structures from later eras, including all of the house walls from Troy II. For many years also the site was unguarded and was thoroughly looted. However what remains, particularly if put into context by one of the knowledgeable professional guides to the site, is an illuminating insight into civilizations of the Bronze Age, if not to the legends.
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