Location: Northeast Anatolia Map
Troy or Ilion (in Greek Τροία -Troia-, Ίλιον -Ilion-, or Ίλιος
-Ilios) is an ancient Anatolian city located on the site today known
as Hisarlik Hill, in Turkey (in Turkish '[hill] endowed with
fortress'). According to the studies of Frank Starke (1997), J.
David Hawkins (1998) and W. D. Niemeier (1999), the word Wilusa
was the name used in Hittite for the city of Troy.
The
mythical Trojan War took place there. This famous war was described,
in part, in the Iliad, an epic poem from Ancient Greece attributed
to Homer, who would compose it, according to most critics, in the
8th century BC. C. Homer also refers to Troy in the Odyssey. The
legend was completed by other Greek and Roman authors, such as
Virgil in the Aeneid.
Historical Troy was inhabited from the
beginning of the third millennium BC. C. It is located in the
current Turkish province of Çanakkale, next to the Dardanelles
Strait, between the Scamander (or Xanthus) and Simois rivers and
occupies a strategic position at the access to the Black Sea. In its
surroundings is the Ida mountain range and in front of its coasts
you can see the nearby island of Ténedos. The special conditions of
the Dardanelles Strait, in which there is a constant current from
the Sea of Marmara towards the Aegean Sea and where a northeasterly
wind usually blows during the season from May to October, suggests
that the ships that in Antiquity Those who intended to cross the
strait often had to wait for more favorable conditions for long
periods in the port of Troy.
After centuries of oblivion, the
ruins of Troy were discovered in excavations carried out in 1871 by
Heinrich Schliemann, after initial surveys carried out from 1865 by
Frank Calvert. In 1998, the archaeological site of Troy was declared
a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, stating that:
It has immense
importance for understanding the evolution of European civilization
in a basic state of its early stages. It is also of exceptional
cultural importance due to the profound influence of Homer's Iliad
on the creative arts for more than two millennia.
According to Greek mythology, the Trojan royal family
was started by the Pleiad Electra and Zeus, parents of Dardanus. He
crossed to Asia Minor from the island of Samothrace, where he met
Teucer, who treated him with respect. Dardanus married Batiaea, daughter
of Teucer, and founded Dardania. After the death of Dardanus, the
kingdom passed to his grandson Tros. Zeus kidnapped one of his sons,
named Ganymede, because of his great beauty, to make him cupbearer to
the gods. Illus, another son of Tros, founded the city of Ilion and
asked Zeus for a sign. Coincidentally, he found a statue known as
Palladium, which had fallen from the sky. An oracle said that as long as
the Palladium remained in the city, it would be impregnable. Then Ilus
built the temple of Athena in his city, in the same place where he had
fallen.
The inhabitants of Troy are called Trojans, while Troy
and Ilion are the two names by which the city was known; therefore
Teucer, Tros and Ilus were considered its eponymous founders. The Romans
related the name of Ilion with that of Iulus (in Latin Iulus), son of
Aeneas and mythical ancestor of the gens Iulia or Iulii, to which Julius
Caesar belonged.
The gods Poseidon and Apollo built the walls and
fortifications around Troy for Laomedon, son of Ilus. When Laomedon
refused to pay them the agreed wage, Poseidon flooded the land and sent
a sea monster that wreaked havoc on the area. As a condition for the
evils on the city to cease, an oracle demanded the sacrifice of Hesione,
the king's daughter, to be devoured by the monster, so she was chained
to a rock on the coast. Heracles, who had arrived in Troy, broke The
Trojans and Athena built a wall that was to serve as a refuge for
Heracles. When the monster reached the defensive work, it opened its
enormous jaws, and Heracles threw himself armed into the monster's jaws.
After three days in his belly wreaking havoc, he emerged victorious and
completely bald.
In other versions, the confrontation with the
monster was located within the outward path of the Argonauts'
expedition, and the way in which Heracles killed the monster was by
throwing a rock at its neck.
But Laomedon did not fulfill his
part of the pact, since he replaced two of the immortal mares with two
ordinary mares and, in retaliation, Heracles, enraged, threatened to
attack Troy and embarked back to Greece. After a few years, he led an
expedition of punishment of eighteen ships, after recruiting an army of
volunteers in Tiryns, among which were Iolaus, Telamon, Peleus, the
Argive Ecles, son of Antiphates, and Deimachus, the Boeotian. Telamon
had an outstanding performance in the siege of the city by breaching the
walls of Troy and entering first. Once Troy was captured, Heracles
killed Laomedon and his sons, except for the young Podarces.
Hesione was given to Telamon as a reward and he was allowed to take any
one of the prisoners. She chose her brother Podarces and Heracles
arranged that he must first become a slave and then be rescued by her.
Hesione removed the golden veil from her head and gave it as a ransom.
This earned Podarces the name Priam, which means "rescued." After having
burned the city and devastated the surrounding area, Heracles left the
Troad with Glaucia, daughter of the river-god Scamander, and left Priam
as king of Troy, by virtue of his sense of justice, since he was the
only one of the sons of Laomedon who opposed their father and advised
him to hand over the mares to Heracles.
During the reign of Priam, and due to the kidnapping
of Helen of Sparta by the Trojan prince Paris, the Mycenaean Greeks,
commanded by Agamemnon, took Troy after having laid siege to the city
for ten years. Eratosthenes dated the Trojan War between 1194 and 1184
BC., the Marmor Parium between 1218/7 and 1209/8 BC., and Herodotus in
1250 BC.
Most of the heroes of Troy and their allies died in the
war, but two groups of Trojans, led one by Aeneas and the other by
Antenor, managed to survive and sailed until they reached Carthage and
then the Italian peninsula, where they arrived. to be the ancestors of
the founders of Rome, while the latter arrived on the northern coast of
the Adriatic Sea and were also attributed with the founding of Padua.
The first settlements of these survivors in Sicily and Italy were also
given the name Troy. The Trojan ships in which they traveled were
transformed by Cybele into naiads, when they were going to be burned by
Turnus, Aeneas' rival in Italy. According to Thucydides and Helanicus of
Lesbos, other surviving Trojans settled in Sicily, in the cities of
Erice and Egesta, receiving the name Elymians. In addition, Herodotus
comments that the Maxi were a tribe from western Libya whose members
claimed being descendants of men who arrived from Troy. Some of these
mythical stories, sometimes with contradictions among themselves, appear
in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the famous Homeric poems, and in other
later works and fragments.
The problem of the historical authenticity of the
Trojan War has given rise to all kinds of conjectures. The archaeologist
Heinrich Schliemann admitted that Homer was an epic poet and not a
historian, and that he could exaggerate the conflict for the sake of
poetic freedom, but not that he invented it. Shortly after,
archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld argued that Troy VI was a victim of
Mycenaean expansionism. Sperling joined this idea in 1991. The studies
of Blegen and his team admitted that an Achaean expedition must have
been the cause of the destruction of Troy VII-A around 1250 BC.
—Currently the end of this city is usually set closer to 1200 BC.—,
however until now it has not been possible to demonstrate who the
attackers of Troy VII-A were. Hiller, on the other hand, also in 1991,
pointed out that there must have been two wars in Troy that marked the
end of Troy VI and Troy VII-A. Meanwhile, Demetriou, in 1996, insisted
on the date of 1250 BC. C. for a historical Trojan War, in a study in
which he was based on Cypriot sites.
Opposite them is a current
of skeptical opinion headed by Moses Finley, who denies the presence of
Mycenaean elements in the Homeric poems and points out the absence of
archaeological evidence about the historicity of the myth. Other
prominent scholars belonging to this skeptical current are the historian
Frank Kolb and the archaeologist Dieter Hertel. Joachim Latacz, in a
study in which he relates archaeological sources, Hittite historical
sources and Homeric passages such as the Catalog of the Ships of Book II
of the Iliad, considers the Mycenaean origin of the legend proven but,
with respect to the historicity of the war , has been cautious and has
only admitted that the existence of a historical substratum is probable.
He has also tried to substantiate the historicity of the legend with
the study of historical texts contemporary to the Late Bronze Age.
Carlos Moreu has interpreted an Egyptian inscription from Medinet Habu,
which narrates the attack on Egypt by the peoples of the sea, in a
different way from the traditional interpretation. According to this
interpretation, the Achaeans would have attacked several regions of
Anatolia, including Troy and Cyprus, and the attacked people would have
established a camp in Amurru and subsequently formed the coalition that
faced Ramses III in the eighth year of his reign. .
The city of Troy was inhabited from the first half of
the 3rd millennium BC. C., but its moment of greatest splendor coincided
with the rise of the Hittite Empire. In 1924, shortly after the
decipherment of the Hittite script, Paul Kretschmer had compared a place
name that appears in Hittite sources, Wilusa, with the Greek place name
Ilios, used as the name of Troy. Scholars, based on linguistic evidence,
established that the name Ilios had lost an initial digamma and had
previously been Wilios. Added to this was another comparison between a
king of Troy who appears written in Hittite documents, called Alaksandu,
and Alexander, used in the Iliad as an alternative name for Paris, a
Trojan prince.
These proposals of identification of Wilusa with
Wilios and of Alaksandu with Alexander were initially a source of
controversy: the geographical location of Wilusa was doubtful and in
Hittite sources the name of Kukunni also appears as king of Wilusa and
father of Alaksandu, with no apparent relationship with the legend of
Alexander, although some have pointed out that this name could have its
equivalent in Greek in the name Κύκνος (Cycnus), another character from
the Trojan cycle. However, in 1996, Frank Starke proved that, indeed,
the location of Wilusa must be located in the same place as the Troad
region. However, some archaeologists such as Dieter Hertel still refuse
to accept this identification between Wilusa and Ilios. The main Hittite
documents that mention Wilusa are:
The so-called Alaksandu
Treaty, which was a pact between the Hittite king Muwatalli II and
Alaksandu, king of Wilusa, dated to the beginning of the 13th century
BC. From the text of this treaty it has been deduced that Wilusa had a
relationship of subordination with respect to the Hittite Empire.
Among the gods who are named in the treaty as witnesses of the pact
are Apaliunas, who some researchers have identified with Apollo, and
Kaskalkur, whose meaning is 'way to the underworld'. About Kaskalkur,
archaeologist Korfmann indicates that:
In this way, the water
courses that disappeared into the ground of the karst regions and
re-emerged outside were designated, but the Hittites also used this
concept for artificially installed water galleries.
This divinity
has therefore been associated with the discovery of a cave with a spring
200 meters south of the acropolis wall which, after analyzing the
limestone of the walls, has been determined to have already existed at
the beginning of the third millennium BC and around which myths could
have arisen. The coincidence of the author Stephen of Byzantium's
allusion to the fact that a certain Motylos, who could be a
Hellenization of the name Muwatalli, provided hospitality to Alexander
and Helen, has also been pointed out.
A letter written by the
king of the Seha River country (Hittite vassal state) Manapa-Tarhunta to
King Muwatalli II, and therefore also dated to around 1295 BC, where
information is given about a certain Piyamaradu who had led a military
expedition against Wilusa and against the island of Lazba, identified by
researchers with Lesbos.
In the Letter of Tawagalawa (c. 1250 BC),
generally attributed to Hattusili III, the Hittite king refers to
ancient hostilities between the Hittites and the Ahhiyawa possibly over
Wilusa, resolved amicably in this letter: "Now is when we have reached
an agreement on the Wilusa matter regarding which we were at odds."
The last mention of Wilusa preserved in Hittite sources appears in a
fragment of the so-called Letter of Millawanda, sent by King Tudhaliya
IV (1240-1215 BC) to an unknown recipient. In it, the king of the
Hittites explains that he will use all means at his disposal to restore
Walmu, a successor to Alaksandu who had been dethroned and exiled, to
the throne of Wilusa. However, T. R. Bryce says that this fact is
mentioned earlier, recording it in his reinterpretation of the
Tawagalawa Letter. Furthermore, in the annals of King Tudhaliya I/II
(14th century BC), he states that after a expedition of conquest, a
series of countries declared war on him, the list of which includes,
followed: "...the Wilusiya country, the Taruisa country...". Some
researchers, such as John Garstang and Oliver Gurney, have deduced that
Taruisa could be identified with Troy; However, this equivalence is not
yet supported by the majority of hititologists.
The mention of Troy in the Egyptian sources of the
Bronze Age is not certain. However, some scholars have investigated the
relationship it could have with the Medinet Habu inscriptions that tell
of the battle of the Egyptians of the time of Ramses III against the sea
peoples, who attempted an invasion of their territory around 1176 BC. C.
According to the inscriptions, the Egyptians defeated a coalition of
peoples of dubious identification in a land battle and a sea battle.
Among the denominations of the peoples that made up the coalition are
the Weshesh - who could be related to Wilusa - and the Tjeker - who have
been related to the Trojans.
In more recent Egyptian sources, the
testimony collected in the list of pharaohs of Manetho, an Egyptian
priest from the 3rd century BC, which indicates that the fall of Troy
took place during the mandate of Twosret, which would place it between
the years 1188 and 1186 BC.
The first Greek settlers who arrived in the territory
of the Troad must have been Aeolian emigrants. The origin of the city's
sanctuary of Athena could date back to 900 BC. Archaeologist Dieter
Hertel explains that:
At the latest from 900 BC. C. the Greek goddess
Athena was also venerated, as can be deduced from the thick sediment on
the lining of the well of the northeastern bastion, which was completely
filled with the remains of offerings.
Other authors, however,
maintain that the Greeks did not colonize Troy until 700 BC. C. In any
case, until the 3rd century BC it must have been a small population
entity, of a lower level than other nearby coastal colonies such as
Sigeo and Aquileo. Troy was part of the kingdom of Lydia, with the city
of Sardis as its capital, probably since the time of Aliates, one of the
kings of the Mermnada dynasty, at the beginning of the 6th century BC.
The last king of this dynasty was Croesus, who came to reign over almost
all the territories west of the Halis River.
The Persians, under
the command of Cyrus II the Great, defeated Croesus at the Battle of the
River Halis and invaded his kingdom, including Troy, in 546 BC. Between
499 BC.and 496 BC, during the Ionian revolt, the Aeolians supported the
Ionians against the Persians under the reign of Darius I, but the
rebellion was put down. Himeas was the Persian general who subdued Ilion
in this revolt. Subsequently, Xerxes I's visit to Troy in 480 BC. was
also related by Herodotus, who says that he sacrificed a thousand oxen
to Athena and the magicians offered libations to the heroes. One of the
consequences of the signing of the Peace of Callias between the Persians
and Athenians was that Troy, along with many territories of Asia Minor,
was under the direction of Athens from 449 BC.; then, at the end of that
same century, it became part of a Dardanian principality dependent on
Persia; but shortly after, from 399 BC., became an ally of Sparta until
387 BC it returned to the control of Persia after the signing of the
Peace of Antalcidae with Sparta.
In 360 BC C. Charidemus took
Ilium, which was reconquered shortly after by Athenodorus of Imbros.
Alexander the Great especially protected the city, which he arrived
in 334 BC. He considered himself a new Achilles and kept a copy of the
Iliad as a treasure. The visit of Alexander the Great to Troy is
narrated by Arrian, Plutarch and Strabo, among other authors of
Antiquity:
He went up to Ilium and made a sacrifice to Athena, as
well as libations to the heroes. At the tomb of Achilles, after
anointing himself with oil and running naked with his companions, as is
his custom, he laid crowns, calling him blessed, because in his life he
had a loyal friend and after his death a great herald of the glory of
him.
They say that the city of today's Iliaeans had been for a
time a village with a small, humble sanctuary of Athena, but when
Alexander arrived there after the battle of Granicus, he decorated the
sanctuary with offerings and gave the village the title of city. ,
ordered those in charge to enhance it with buildings and granted it
freedom and exemption from taxes.
Arrian, who places the visit of
Alexander the Great before the battle of Granicus, also indicates that
he paid honors to Achilles while his companion Hephaestion paid them to
Patroclus.
As Strabo's story continues, after defeating the
Persians, Alexander promised to make Ilion a great city, although it was
Lysimachus of Thrace, one of his generals, who was the architect of most
of the reforms and expansion of the city.
Between the years 275
and 228 BC, Troy belonged to the Seleucid Empire, which years before had
been founded by Seleucus, another of Alexander's successors. From 228 BC
to 197 BC., the city was independent, but with links to the Kingdom of
Pergamon. It once again belonged to the Seleucids between 197 BC and 190
BC. Throughout this era the cult of Athena continued to be important. A
ritual that was celebrated in their honor was the sacrifice of oxen,
which were hung from a pillar or a tree and their throats were opened
there.
It was also celebrated, probably since the 8th century
BC., a custom related to the myth of the Trojan War: according to
legend, Ajax Locrio had dragged Princess Cassandra during the sack of
Troy while she, to seek divine protection, had clung to the statue of
Athena . For this reason, the Locrians had been forced by the Oracle of
Delphi to send two or more girls of noble origin to Troy every year for
a period of a thousand years. The girls, once they arrived at the Trojan
coast, tried to reach the temple of Athena; If they succeeded, they
became priestesses of the temple, but the inhabitants of Troy tried to
kill them on their way. If one died, the Locrians were to send another
in her place. Most achieved their goal and reached the temple of Athena.
There is controversy about when this custom stopped being practiced.
Some point out that it ended after the Phocidian war, in 346 BC.; Others
believe that it was practiced until the 1st century.
Troy in Roman historical sources
The prestige of
Troy in Roman times was accompanied by ideological and political
motivations linked to the very roots of the founding of Rome. In 190 BC,
Roman troops arrived at the city and after offering sacrifices to
Athena, they placed Ilium under their protection. After the Peace of
Apamea, the neighboring cities of Gergita and Rhetium were united in
synecism with Ilion and the city was part of the dominions of the
Kingdom of Pergamum between 188 BC and 133 BC, until Pergamum fell under
the power of Rome and Troy became part of the Roman province of Asia.
In the year 85 BC, the Roman general Gaius Flavius Fimbria destroyed
and plundered Troy during the war against Mithridates, who had fought
Roman domination in the East. Later, Emperor Augustus rebuilt the temple
of Athena. Julius Caesar, after the battle of Pharsalia, visited, in the
year 48 BC, the city of Ilium, which he considered the homeland of his
ancestors. He increased the city's territory and freed it from tribute.
At that same time, a coin was minted for the first time with the image
of Aeneas fleeing from Troy with his father Anchises in his arms and the
mythical Palladius. According to Suetonius, Julius Caesar was
considering moving his residence to Ilium.
Emperor Caracalla
arrived in Ilium in the year 214 and consecrated a statue to Achilles
there and organized military parades around the supposed tomb of the
mythical warrior. To make these events more similar to the games in
honor of Patroclus after his death, narrated in the Iliad, he killed his
friend Festus to play the role of Patroclus.
After Emperor Constantine promulgated religious
freedom through the Edict of Milan and the persecution of Christianity
ceased, Emperor Julian the Apostate, a supporter of ancient beliefs,
visited the city in 354-355, and was able to verify that the tomb of
Achilles was still there and that sacrifices were still being offered to
Athena. However, in 391 pagan rites were prohibited.
Around the
year 500, a great earthquake occurred that caused the definitive
collapse of the most emblematic buildings of Troy. It seems that Troy
continued to be a populated settlement during the time of the Byzantine
Empire, until the 13th century, but there is hardly any news of events
that occurred there and shortly after the very existence of the city
fell into oblivion. After the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the hill
on which Troy sat was called Hisarlik, whose meaning in Turkish is
'endowed with strength'.
Since the beginning of the 19th century, the discovery of
inscriptions on coins had convinced Edward Daniel Clarke and John Martin
Cripps that on the hill of Hisarlik, about 4.5 km from the entrance to
the Dardanelles, in the Turkish province of Çanakkale, there was The
city of Troy was located at least when it was a Greco-Roman city. In his
Dissertation on the Topography of the Plain of Troy, published in
Edinburgh in 1822, the Scottish scholar Charles MacLaren had supported
the hypothesis that the location of Greco-Roman New Ilium coincided with
that of the fortress sung by Homer. To corroborate this, he made a trip
to the Troad in 1847 and in 1863 he republished his work in which he
confirmed his hypothesis.
However, not all researchers agreed. In
1776, the Frenchman Choiseul-Gouffier had opined that ancient Troy was
located near the village of Bunarbaschi, about 13 kilometers from the
Dardanelles, and this hypothesis was popularized in 1785 by
Jean-Baptiste Le Chevalier who, upon visiting the area, considered that
the remains must be on the hill called Balli Dag. Thus, in 1864, a team
led by the Austrian diplomat Johann Georg von Hahn carried out
excavations on that hill and found remains of an ancient Greek colony,
but this settlement had only existed between the 7th and 4th centuries
BC and has been identified with the colony of Gentino.
At that
time both possibilities were not followed too seriously by most
academics.
The first to conduct excavations in the area of Hisarlik Hill was the engineer John Brunton, in 1856, but the exact location where he carried them out is unclear. Some years later, in 1865, Frank Calvert undertook excavations in which he found remains of the temple of Athena, of walls and some other ceramic fragments, but he had to abandon the work. When the German Heinrich Schliemann happened to visit Calvert during a brief trip he had made to Troad in 1868, he became convinced that the location of Troy was on that hill. For this reason, from 1871 the German began large-scale excavations there. The continuation of the work led Schliemann to distinguish seven cities or stages of occupation of the place, assigning the Troy II phase to Homeric Troy. Among his most striking finds is the so-called Treasure of Priam. From 1882 he returned to excavate the site together with Wilhelm Dörpfeld, who had worked on the German excavations at Olympia. Schliemann was forced to recognize that the Troy II stratum was much older and it was Troy VI that came to be considered the Homeric city. After Schliemann's death, Dörpfeld excavated again between 1893 and 1894. The result of these campaigns was the discovery of nine cities built successively on top of each other.
Between 1932 and 1938, an American team excavated the site again,
under the direction of Carl William Blegen, who differentiated in
greater detail each of the phases of construction of the cities and
proposed Troy VII A as the city destroyed by the Mycenaean Greeks. In
1988 the excavations were resumed, directed by the German Manfred
Korfmann, who made important discoveries, such as the discovery of a
large slum in Troy VI.
After Korfmann's death in 2005, the
excavations were directed by the Austrian Ernst Pernicka. In September
2009, the remains of two people were found along with other ceramic
remains that, due to their characteristics, could be from around 1200
BC. The results of the excavations were studied in the work unit called
Project Troy, at the University of Tübingen, and each year the most
important part was published in the magazine Studia Troica.
In
2012, the team of archaeologists from the University of Tübingen stopped
working in Troy. As of 2013, the excavations became dependent on the
University of Çanakkale and the director of the excavations, Rüstem
Aslan.
Many of the objects found in the excavations are exhibited in
museums, such as the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Hermitage Museum in
Saint Petersburg, the British Museum in London, the Museum of Prehistory
and Protohistory in Berlin and the Archaeological Museum. National of
Athens.
On the other hand, since 2018 the Troy Museum has been
active next to the archaeological site. It is especially dedicated to
all aspects related to settlement and excavations. It displays
archaeological finds from Troy and its surrounding region brought from
the Çanakkale Archaeological Museum, the Istanbul Archaeological Museum
and other places. The Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at the
University of Pennsylvania purchased a set of 24 Bronze Age gold jewels
from a Philadelphia art dealer in 1966, but the place of origin of this
collection was unknown, although similarities were seen with other
jewels found in Ur, Poliojni (Lemnos) or Troy. In 2009, archaeologists
Ernst Pernicka and Hermann Born examined this collection and, through a
scientific analysis of a dust particle attached to one of the objects,
determined that its origin was compatible with that of the Trojan plain.
Some years later, the museum reached an agreement with the Turkish
Ministry of Culture and Tourism to transfer these works on an indefinite
loan to Turkey and thus become part of the Troy Museum exhibition.
As a result of the different excavations, the history of Troy has been reconstructed and eleven phases of occupation have been established. A first phase, called Troy 0, began around 3500 BC. C. The next four, from Troy I to Troy IV, developed during the 3rd millennium BC, there being a clear cultural continuity until the V. Troy VI attests to a second flowering of the city. Troy VII is the main candidate to be identified with the Homeric Troy. Troy VIII and Troy IX cover archaic Greece, the classical era, the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Troy X is the one belonging to the Byzantine period. From the first settlement until Troy VII there are no remains of written documentation that help in the historical and social assessment of the development of the city.
The remains of a first settlement in Troy originated around 3500 BC. These remains were discovered by Manfred Korfmann, but were pending analysis, which was later carried out by Rüstem Aslan.
The citadel of Troy I presents ten construction phases developed, according to Carl Blegen and others, over five centuries: between 2920-2500/2450 BC, approximately. Its stratigraphic depth is more than four meters and it occupies only the northwestern half of the hill. Brought to light by Heinrich Schliemann, it was made up of an enclosure of fortified stone walls, 2.50 m thick, probably with quadrangular bastions; There are traces of the eastern one, with a height of 3.50 m and which would control the entrance. It was made up of irregular stones and narrowed at the top. The associated dwellings are rectangular in plan and there are remains of a megaron. Ceramics decorated with schematic human faces appear for the first time. It housed a population whose culture, called Kum Tepe, is considered to belong to the Ancient Bronze Age. It was destroyed by fire, rebuilt and thus gave rise to Troy II.
Although Troy I was abruptly destroyed, there is no chronological or
cultural interruption with Troy II. The latter developed between
2500/2450-2350/2300 BC, in eight construction phases during which it
grew to occupy an area of nine thousand m². Its wall, with a polygonal
plan, was built with adobes raised on a stone base. It had two doors
accessible by stone ramps and square towers at the corners. The largest
gates are on the southwest side and gave access to the royal palace, the
megaron, through some small propylaea. This occupation phase was
discovered by Schliemann and re-examined by Dörpfeld.
The most
important building is the megaron, originally 35-40 m and whose largest
room is about 20 x 10 m, where Dörpfeld found the remains of a platform
that perhaps housed a home. The other megara discovered by Dörpfeld must
have been the private residences of the royal family and the central
warehouse with surpluses. According to Dörpfeld, it was a very
prosperous city, as would be proven by the remains of the great walled
enclosure, the so-called King's House and its more than 600 wells, where
provisions were stored and which generally contained fragments of large
conservation jars, probably covered with bricks, scattered throughout
the citadel.
The great simplicity of the buildings of the Troy II
palace complex contrasts with the contemporary official architecture of
Mesopotamia under the kings of Akkad (2300-2200 BC), with rich scenic
apparatus, such as the residences and temples of the governors of
Lagash, and of the III dynasty of Ur, and to the monumental
constructions of pharaonic Egypt from the time of the Old Kingdom
(2950-2220 BC). This simplicity of the buildings of Troy is surprising
when compared to the profusion and richness of the jewelry and
goldsmithing of the time, witnessed by the famous treasure that
Schliemann attributed to Priam and that Blegen assigned to the Troy II
phase. This is the most enormous and significant artistic heritage of
Troy from the third millennium BC.
This treasure is made up of
valuable objects made of precious metals and stones, which were donated
by Schliemann to Germany and after the end of the Second World War were
taken to Moscow, where they are currently housed in the Pushkin Museum.
Of the nine lots, the most important include collections of daggers,
utensils and clothing ornaments, and many gold and silver tableware.
Among the precious objects, a large disc stands out, provided with an
omphalos - literally 'navel', a kind of bulge in the center of the
object - and a long flattened handle, which ends with a small series of
small discs. It was used to sift gold, and is similar to utensils found
in Ur and Babylon, between the end of the third millennium and the
beginning of the second millennium BC. C. Among the jewels there are two
female diadems that adorned the forehead with a fringe of small, thick
gold chains, each ending with a pendant of gold sheets in the shape of a
flower or leaf. They were found, along with a series of necklaces and
earrings, in a large silver jar.
A fire that occurred around
2300/2250 BC. caused the hasty flight of the inhabitants and marks the
end of Troy II.
With the passage of the third millennium BC., a first wave of invasions by Indo-European peoples marks sensitive changes in the Mediterranean area, also recorded in Troy in phases III-V of the city's life, whose cultural life does not seem to be interrupted, but does slow down drastically. The remains of the buildings are meager and of lower quality than those of the previous ones and the overall image of the site responds more to that of a shopping center than to the prosperous city of the third millennium BC. c.
On top of the ruins of Troy II, Troy III (2350/2300 BC-2200 BC) was built, smaller in size but with a wall of carved stone. The little that is known was also built almost completely of stone, unlike the preceding buildings which were made of adobe. Characteristic of Troy III are the anthropomorphic vessels, such as the one found by Schliemann in 1872 and which according to him represented Athena Ilias.
With an area of 17,000 m², Troy IV (2200-1900 BC) shows the same walling technique as Troy II and Troy III. On the other hand, the domed ovens and a type of house with four rooms are new.
Troy V (1900 BC-1700 BC) is a total reconstruction of Troy IV, based on a more regular urban plan and with spacious houses, but without a cultural break with respect to the preceding settlements. With it, the pre-Mycenaean phase of the history of Troy ends.
Troy VI (1700-1300 BC or 1250 BC) corresponds to the crucial period
of Anatolian history between the end of the Assyrian trading colonies of
Kültepe-Kanish—around the middle of the 18th century BC. —and the
formation and expansion of the Hittite Empire—until the first half of
the 13th century BC. —, when a strong earthquake probably destroyed the
city, which had reemerged to a new life, after the long preceding phase
of a "market city."
It was a prosperous place, seat of a king,
prince or governor and administrative center that was progressively
expanded until reaching the 14th century BC its final form. It was
inhabited by immigrants of Indo-European origin who dedicated themselves
to new activities such as breeding and training horses, greatly
developed bronze technology and practiced the funerary rite of
cremation. Most of the ceramic fragments are of the so-called "Anatolian
gray pottery." The Mycenaean vessels that have also been found are proof
of the existence of commercial relations between Troy and the Mycenaean
civilization.
Among the fundamental structures of Troy VI, the
fortress stands out, with the monumental bastion 9 m high and very acute
angles, in a position analogous to that of Troy II, in the Early Bronze
Age, dominating the course of the Scamander. In case of a siege, it had
a huge cistern 8 m deep inside the central bastion. The layout of the
walls, with a diameter of about 200 m – twice the size of the oldest
enclosure – unfolds into a second enclosure concentric to the previous
one with an average height of 6 m and a thickness of 5 m. It was reached
through a main gate, controlled by a fortified tower and by three other
secondary ones, from which wide streets radiated converging towards the
northern center of the city, which has now disappeared. When passing
through the doors there were rectangular stones, in the shape of a
pillar, each one fitted into another block of stone, approximately the
size of a person. This type of architectural elements is quite common in
the Hittite area. The archaeologist Peter Neve believes that they could
be related to the cult of protective divinities of the doors, while
Manfred Korfmann suggests that they could be related to the cult of
Apollo.
The construction technique is complex, with the stone
base structure and the adobe superstructure at a height of 4-5 m. Inside
the walls there are still a few rectangular-shaped houses with a
portico, but only the ground floor is preserved: among the most
impressive ruins of Troy VI we must highlight the so-called "House of
the Pillars", with a trapezoidal shape, 26 m long and 12 m wide. It is
made up of a hall, to the east, and a large central room, which ends in
three small rear rooms. It was a public building for official royal
ceremonies.
In Troy VI, the layout of the buildings and
circulation axes adapted to the circular shape of the walls, the center
of which must have been the palace and its temple. On another hill
called Yassitepe, closer to the sea, a necropolis from the Bronze Age
period has been found with burials of men, women and children, as well
as funerary goods made from the same types of ceramics found in Troy VI.
Some remains of cremations have also been found in this place.
The large slum of the city was discovered by Korfmann beginning in 1988,
aided by a new technique called magnetic prospecting. After this
discovery, an area of 350,000 m² is attributed to the city, that is,
thirteen times larger than the already known acropolis. Also of
considerable size, Troy surpassed in area another large city of the
time, Ugarit (200,000 m²), and is in fact one of the largest cities of
the Bronze Age. Its population would range between 5,000 and 10,000
inhabitants. In the event of a siege, it is estimated that it could
house 50,000 inhabitants from the entire region. In front of it, two
parallel ditches 1 to 2 meters deep were discovered in 1993 and 1995,
which could have served as defense against an attack carried out with
war chariots. Also found, in 1995, was a gate from the fortification of
the aforementioned neighborhood, the beginning of the wall of the lower
neighborhood and a cobbled road that led from the plain of the
Escamandro River to the western gate of the acropolis.
Troy VII-A
The palace complex of Troy VI was probably destroyed by
a violent earthquake around 1300 BC. C., although some researchers are
inclined to date its end to around 1250 BC.
Its immediate
reconstruction in the subsequent phase of Troy VII-A has raised the
question of which of the two cities was the Homeric Ilium. Carl Blegen
rejected Dörpfeld's thesis that pointed to the Mycenaean fortress of
Troy VI - probably destroyed by an earthquake and not by a fire - and
favored the settlement of Troy VII-A, where there is a thick layer of
ashes and charred remains. which can be dated to around 1200 BC.. Among
the remains found in this stratum are remains of skeletons, weapons,
deposits of pebbles - which could be ammunition for slingshots - and,
interpreted by some as very significant, the tomb of a girl, covered
with a series of Provision vessels, an indication of an urgent burial
due to a siege.
Furthermore, the date of its end is not far from
the dates established in Antiquity by Eratosthenes (1184 BC) and Timaeus
(1194 BC), among others. For all these reasons, some scholars point out
that the "city of Priam" corresponds to Troy VII-A, despite the
undoubted artistic and architectural inferiority that distinguishes it
from the preceding one.
Troy VII-B-1
In the subsequent level
of Troy VII-B-1 (approx. 1200-1100 BC) remains of barbarian pottery have
been found that were not made with a wheel but by hand and with coarse
clay. Due to similar finds that have been found in other areas, it has
been assumed that a foreign people from the Balkans settled at this
time. Furthermore, the city shows a large accumulation of burned land,
up to 1 m, from large and repeated disturbances, which did not interrupt
the continuity of life in the city, where the walls and homes were
preserved. From this it has been deduced that during this time there
were at least two fires and one of them caused the end of this city.
Troy VII-B-2
The most obvious sign of a new component in the
social and cultural order is represented at the Troy level VII-B-2
(1100-1020 BC) by pottery called knobbed ware (although similar pottery
remains have also appeared to that of the previous stage and even a few
remains of Mycenaean ceramics) with decorative protuberances in the
shape of horns, already widespread in the Balkans and probably the
inheritance of recently arrived people, peacefully infiltrated into the
region or the product of cultural exchanges between Troy and other
foreign regions. The construction technique also varies significantly,
with walls reinforced in the lower courses with monumental orthostats.
In 1995, a written document consisting of a bronze seal was found in
this stratum where signs of a writing system of the Luwian language
called luvioglyphics appear. It was deciphered in its special sense,
finding that on one side it contains the word scribe, on the reverse the
word woman and, on both sides, the good sign. For all these reasons, it
has been assumed that the owner of the seal must have been an official
official. Troy VII-B-2 fell due to a fire probably due to natural
causes.
Troy VII-B-3
The differentiation of this stratum from
the previous one is due to the archaeologist Manfred Korfmann, who
argues that after the end of the previous city there was another colony
that must be distinguished from the previous one, characterized by the
use of protogeometric ceramics and that disappeared around 950 BC C.,
leaving the place almost uninhabited until 750 BC. or 700 BC. Faced with
this, Dieter Hertel believes that the Greeks already established
themselves in Troy since the end of Troy VII-B-2.
The history of Troy in ancient Greek times does not go back much
further than the 7th century BC., as occurs with the other numerous
testimonies from the northwestern area of Asia Minor and Byzantium
itself. For about 250 years, between 950 BC. and 700 BC., the Hisarlik
hill must have remained almost uninhabited, although some authors such
as the aforementioned Dieter Hertel argue otherwise.
In Troy
VIII, a flourishing architectural activity appears, especially
religious: the first large cult building of the time discovered, the
so-called temenos (upper enclosure), still preserves a solemn altar in
the center and another, from the time of Augustus, in the western side.
The lower temenos follows, with two altars, perhaps for sacrifices to
two divinities, both unknown. The sanctuary of Athena, whose origin
could date back to the 9th century BC., it was converted into a large
temple, of rigorous Doric order, in the 3rd century BC. For this, and
for the construction of the stoa, some buildings of the acropolis from
previous times were demolished.
Some archaeologists place it in
the 3rd century BC the beginning of Troy IX, in discrepancy with the
chronology proposed by Manfred Korfmann.r
Troy IX (Ilium Novum, or New Ilium) was the Roman city that emerged after the destruction of Troy VIII by Fimbria, one of Gaius Marius's men (86 BC-85 BC). The gens Iulia, Julius Caesar and, to a greater extent, Augustus, enriched the city of Troy with temples and palaces, and expanded the temple of Athena, which was surrounded by monumental colonnades (80 m on a side), and provided with an imposing propylaea. This Roman settlement extends partly across the plain at the foot of the hill, while the acropolis maintains its character as a place for worship with the temple of Athena. Some sections of the wall, the baths, the bouleuterion, a theater and some homes are preserved from this phase.
Korfmann named this stratum of the few remains that belong to the Byzantine period, between the 13th and 14th centuries, in which Troy was a small episcopal see. These had already been discovered previously by Schliemann and Dörpfeld.