Troy

• 1. Introduction

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  Troy sits in present-day Çanakkale, Turkey, where the same patch of earth has been occupied, destroyed, and rebuilt so many times that archaeologists count nine distinct cities stacked on top of one another. Each layer is a city that grew on the ruins of its predecessor. The site stretches back to around 3600 BC, a span of four thousand years that no single story can contain. Most people know Troy as the stage for the Greek myth of the Trojan War. What the ruins actually reveal is something stranger and more layered: a coastal city that served Hittite kings, traded Baltic amber and Afghan lapis lazuli, housed aristocratic elites in multi-story houses, and later attracted sacrifices from Persian emperors and visits from Alexander the Great. When Heinrich Schliemann began digging here in 1871, he believed he was unearthing Homer's city. He was right about the hill, wrong about the layer, and he destroyed a large portion of what he was looking for in the process. The questions that drive this story are not just about myth versus history. They are about what it means to keep rebuilding on the same hill across four thousand years, and what survives when you do.

• 2. Nine Cities, One Hill

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  Hisarlık, the hill where Troy stood, is a tell: a mound built up layer by layer from the accumulated debris of human occupation over more than three millennia. The primary layers are numbered Troy I through Troy IX, with Troy 0 sitting beneath all of them as a pre-Bronze Age foundation known mainly from pottery sherds and wooden beams, tentatively dated around 3600-3500 BC. Troy I was founded around 3000 BC on what was then the eastern shore of a shallow lagoon. Even at this early stage the settlement stood out from its neighbours for its massive limestone fortifications, which were regularly renovated and strengthened. Its residents lived in attached houses of stone and mudbrick, some following a megaron layout in which one room was notably larger than the others. Among the artifacts recovered from this period is a monumental stone stele with a relief depicting an armed warrior. Troy I was destroyed by fire around 2550 BC. The city that replaced it, Troy II, was twice the size and featured a separate lower town as well as an expanded citadel divided into two precincts by colonnades. One of its central buildings, Megaron IIA, is the largest known structure of its kind in the entire Aegean-Anatolian region. Wheel-made pottery appears at Troy for the first time in this layer, alongside caches of treasures made from amber imported from the Baltic, carnelian from India, and lapis from Afghanistan. Schliemann initially believed Troy II was Homer's city, misled by its imposing architecture and catastrophic destruction. Later excavations showed it predated the Mycenaean era by several hundred years.

• 3. The Late Bronze Age City

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  Troy VI was built around 1750 BC and represents the most substantial Bronze Age city at Hisarlık. Its citadel was divided into a series of rising terraces, and its massive limestone walls were periodically renovated, growing from an initial width of 1.2 metres to 5 metres around 1400 BC. During the Bronze Age these walls were overlaid with wood and mudbrick superstructures that reached over 9 metres in height. The walls were built in a "sawtooth" style, composed of 7-10 metre segments joined at shallow angles, a technique also seen in Mycenaean citadels. Five gates gave access to the citadel along paved, drained cobblestone streets. The lower city, only discovered in the late 1980s, covers roughly 30 hectares to the south. Its discovery showed that Troy VI was over 16 times larger than earlier excavators had assumed, making it a major settlement rather than a mere aristocratic residence. The material culture of Troy VI belongs to a distinct Northwest Anatolian cultural group. Its primary pottery styles were wheel-made Tan Ware and Anatolian Gray Ware, both descended from a Middle Helladic tradition related to Minyan Ware. Foreign pottery found at the site includes Minoan, Mycenaean, Cypriot, and Levantine pieces. The language spoken at Troy VI is unknown. One candidate is Luwian, an Anatolian language believed to have been spoken in the general area. A biconvex seal inscribed with Anatolian hieroglyphs often used to write Luwian provides potential but inconclusive evidence. Hittite documents found at Hattusa imply the city may have had a written archive, and the Alaksandu Treaty required its king to read the text publicly three times a year. Troy VI was destroyed around 1300 BC, with damage in its final sublayer showing extensive collapsed masonry and subsidence in the southeast of the citadel, consistent with an earthquake rather than an attack. Troy VIIa, built soon after by what appear to be the same inhabitants, was destroyed around 1180 BC. This destruction layer does show evidence of enemy attack, including scorch marks.

• 4. Troy in Hittite Records

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  Hittite records from this period refer to a city in northwest Anatolia called Wilusa and Taruisa. These correspondences were first proposed in 1924 by E. Forrer on the basis of linguistic similarities: "Taruisa" plausibly corresponds to the Greek "Troia", and "Wilusa" to the Greek "Wilios", the earlier form of "Ilion". Wilusa first appears in Hittite records around 1400 BC, when it was one of twenty-two states in the Assuwa Confederation that unsuccessfully attempted to oppose the Hittite Empire. By the late 1300s BC, Wilusa had become politically aligned with the Hittites, and texts from this period name two kings, Kukkunni and Alaksandu, who maintained peaceful relations with Hittite rulers. Wilusan soldiers may have served in the Hittite army at the Battle of Kadesh. Later Hittite letters suggest that a Wilusan king was either deposed or rebelled, with possible involvement by a Western Anatolian warlord named Piyamaradu who acted on behalf of the Ahhiyawa, the Hittite name for Mycenaean Greeks. The final reference to Wilusa appears in the Milawata letter, in which Hittite king Tudhaliya IV states his intention to reinstall a deposed king named Walmu. Hittiteologist Trevor Bryce cautions that this evidence does not establish an actual Trojan War, noting that "the less material one has, the more easily it can be manipulated to fit whatever conclusion one wishes to come up with." No Hittite text records a Greek attack on the city itself.

• 5. Schliemann and the Excavators

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  In 1822, Scottish journalist Charles Maclaren was the first to identify with confidence the position of the city at Hisarlık, the location accepted today. The first actual excavations were trenches cut by British civil engineer John Brunton in 1855. Frank Calvert, a Turkish Levantine man of English descent who owned a farm near Hisarlık, conducted the next excavation in 1865. Calvert made extensive surveys and correctly identified the site with classical-era Ilion, a conclusion that convinced Heinrich Schliemann to search for Homeric Troy beneath the classical remains. Schliemann, a German businessman, visited Calvert in 1868 and secured permission to excavate. At that time the mound was roughly 200 metres long and somewhat less than 150 metres wide, rising 31.2 metres above the plain and 38.5 metres above sea level. He conducted excavations between 1871-1873 and 1878-1879, then again in 1882 and 1890, the later seasons joined by Wilhelm Dörpfeld. Schliemann was planning a further season in 1891 when he died in December 1890. His methods were destructive: in his rush to excavate Troy II, he removed most remains from Troy III through Troy V without documenting them, destroying evidence he was unable to recognize as significant. Dörpfeld continued after Schliemann and made the chief contributions to understanding Troy VI and VII, which Schliemann had largely overlooked. Dörpfeld's excavation was partly motivated by the need to close what was known as "Calvert's Thousand Year Gap" in the site's chronology. Carl Blegen, professor at the University of Cincinnati, directed the site from 1932-1938 and published the finding that Troy's nine levels could be divided into forty-six sublevels. From 1988 to 2005, Professor Manfred Korfmann led a team from the University of Tübingen and the University of Cincinnati, and it was under his direction that the Troy VI-VII lower city was discovered, transforming scholars' understanding of the site's scale. Bronze arrowheads and fire-damaged human remains buried in layers dated to the early 12th century BC were found as possible evidence of a battle.

• 6. Troy Under Greek and Roman Rule

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  Persian king Xerxes sacrificed 1,000 cattle at the sanctuary of Athena Ilias while marching towards Greece, according to Herodotus. After the Persian defeat in 480-479 BC, the city passed through several phases of control: it joined the Delian League under Athens, was administered by local dynasts at Lampsacus on behalf of the Persian satrap Pharnabazus, and came under Spartan influence during that city's wars with Athens. In May 334 BC, Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont and visited the temple of Athena Ilias, made sacrifices at the tombs of the Homeric heroes, and declared the city free and exempt from taxes. According to plans recorded after his death in June 323 BC, Alexander had intended to rebuild the temple of Athena Ilias on a scale surpassing every other temple in the known world. In 85 BC, the city was destroyed by the Roman general Fimbria following an eleven-day siege. The destruction prompted a new civic calendar at Ilion, which took 85 BC as its first year. The city remained in financial difficulty for decades: in the 80s BC, Roman publicani illegally taxed the sacred estates of Athena Ilias, and in 80 BC the city was attacked by pirates. In 48 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar granted benefactions to the city, partly on the basis of his family's claim to descent from Venus through the Trojan prince Aeneas. In 20 BC, the emperor Augustus visited Ilion and stayed in the house of a leading citizen named Melanippides son of Euthydikos. Augustus subsequently financed the restoration of the sanctuary of Athena Ilias, the council house, and the theatre. Soon after work on the theatre was completed in 12-11 BC, Melanippides dedicated a statue of Augustus there. A series of earthquakes devastated the city around 500 AD, though evidence from the Late Byzantine era shows continued habitation at a small scale, and a Christian bishop was seated at Ilion from the 4th century AD until perhaps as late as the 10th century.

• 7. Troy in Legend and Literature

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  The Iliad portrays Troy as the capital of a rich and powerful kingdom, its city sitting on a steep hill protected by enormous sloping stone walls, rectangular towers, and massive gates with wooden doors that could be bolted shut. According to Dares Phrygius, there were six such gates: the Antenorean, the Dardanian, the Ilian, the Scaean, the Thymbraean, and the Trojan. At the top of the hill in the poem stands the Temple of Athena alongside King Priam's palace, an enormous structure with numerous rooms around an inner courtyard. The Achaean camp is described as near the mouth of the Scamander river, with the fighting taking place on the plain between the camp and the city walls. Beyond the Iliad, references to Troy appear in Homer's Odyssey, in Aeschylus's Oresteia, and in the Roman poet Virgil's Aeneid. The story of the Trojan Horse and the sacrifice of Polyxena, Priam's youngest daughter, is the subject of a later Greek epic by Quintus Smyrnaeus. The Greeks and Romans treated the historicity of the Trojan War as a given, and Alexander the Great's visit to the site in 334 BC, where he made sacrifices at tombs associated with Achilles and Patroclus, reflects how seriously that tradition was held. The Archaeological site was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998, and the Troy Museum opened in 2018 at Tevfikiye village, 800 metres east of the excavation, holding more than 40,000 portable artefacts.