Troy or Ilion was an ancient city located in present-day Çanakkale, Turkey. It is best known as the setting for the Greek myth of the Trojan War. The modern-day archaeological site, also known as Hisarlık, is open to the public as a tourist destination, and was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998.
Troy was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt during its 4000 years of settlement. As a result, nine archaeological layers have been identified at the site, each corresponding to a city built on the ruins of the previous. Archaeologists refer to these layers using Roman numerals, Troy I being the earliest and Troy IX being the latest.
Troy was first settled around 3600 BC and grew into a small fortified city around 3000 BC (Troy I). Among the early layers, Troy II is notable for its wealth and imposing architecture. During the Late Bronze Age, Troy was called Wilusa and was a vassal of the Hittite Empire. The final layers (Troy VIII–IX) were Greek and Roman cities which served as tourist attractions and religious centers because of their link to mythic tradition.
The site was excavated by Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann from 1871. Under the ruins of the classical city, they found the remains of numerous earlier settlements. Several of these layers resemble literary depictions of Troy, leading some scholars to conclude that there is a kernel of truth underlying the legends. Subsequent excavations by others have added to the modern understanding of the site, though the exact relationship between myth and reality remains unclear and there is no definitive evidence for a Greek attack on the city.
Name In Classical Greek, the city was referred to as both Troia () and Ilion () or Ilios (), hence the name of the epic poem: the Iliad. Metrical evidence from the Iliad and the Odyssey suggests that the latter was originally pronounced Wilios. These names seem to date back to the Bronze Age, as suggested by Hittite records which refer to a city in northwest Anatolia called () or () which is now generally identified with the archaeological site of Hisarlık, near Tevfikiye. In Greek myth, these names were held to originate from the names of the kingdom's founders, Tros and his son Ilus.
In Latin, the city was referred to as or . In Turkish, it is generally known as or .
Identification and excavation
Classical literature
The main literary work set at Troy is the Iliad, an Archaic-era epic poem which tells the story of the final year of the Trojan War. The Iliad portrays Troy as the capital of a rich and powerful kingdom. In the poem, the city appears to be a major regional power capable of summoning numerous allies to defend it. The city itself is described as sitting on a steep hill, protected by enormous sloping stone walls, rectangular towers, and massive gates whose wooden doors can be bolted shut. According to Dares Phrygius, there were 6 of such gates – the Antenorean, the Dardanian, the Ilian, the Scaean, the Thymbraean, and the Trojan. The city's streets are broad and well-planned. At the top of the hill is the Temple of Athena as well as King Priam's palace, an enormous structure with numerous rooms around an inner courtyard.
In the Iliad, the Achaeans set up their camp near the mouth of the Scamander river, where they beached their ships. The city itself stood on a hill across the plain of Scamander, where much of the fighting takes place.
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, such as Aeschylus's Oresteia. The Homeric legend of Troy was elaborated by the Roman poet Virgil in his Aeneid. The fall of Troy with 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 ("Quintus of Smyrna").
The Greeks and Romans took for a fact the historicity of the Trojan War and the identity of Homeric Troy with a site in Anatolia on a peninsula called the Troad (Biga Peninsula). Alexander the Great, for example, visited the site in 334 BC and there made sacrifices at tombs associated with the Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroclus.
Early modern era
Early modern travellers in the 16th and 17th centuries, including Pierre Belon and Pietro Della Valle, had mistakenly identified Troy with Alexandria Troas, a ruined Hellenistic town approximately south of Hisarlık. In the late 18th century, French scholar Jean-Baptiste le Chevalier identified a location near the village of Pınarbaşı, Ezine, a mound approximately south of the currently accepted location. Published in his Voyage de la Troade, it was the most commonly proposed location for almost a century.
In 1822, the Scottish journalist Charles Maclaren was the first to identify with confidence the position of the city as it is now known. The first excavations at the site were trenches by British civil engineer John Brunton in 1855. Pavel, Cătălin, "Recording the Excavations in Troy, 1855–2010", Studia Troica, 19, pp. 255–283, 2011
Frank Calvert The next excavation at Hisarlık was conducted in 1865 by Frank Calvert, a man of English descent who owned a farm nearby. Calvert made extensive surveys of the site and correctly identified it with classical-era Ilion. This identification convinced Heinrich Schliemann that Homeric Troy should be sought beneath the classical-era remains and led to their subsequent partnership.
Heinrich Schliemann
In 1868, German businessman Heinrich Schliemann visited Calvert, and secured permission to excavate Hisarlık. At this point in time, the mound was about 200 meters long and somewhat less than 150 meters wide. It rose 31.2 meters above the plain and 38.5 meters above sea level.
As with Calvert and others, in April 1870 Schliemann began by excavating a trench across the mound of Hisarlık to the depth of the settlements, today called "Schliemann's Trench".Schuchhardt (1889) In 1871–1873 and 1878–1879, 1882 and 1890 (the later two joined by Wilhelm Dörpfeld), he discovered the ruins of a series of ancient cities dating from the Bronze Age to the Roman period.Schliemann, Henry, "Recent Discoveries at Troy", The North American Review, vol. 135, no. 311, pp. 339–62, 1882Luce, J.. "FOUR. TROY, HOMER, AND THE ARCHAEOLOGISTS". Celebrating Homer's Landscapes: Troy and Ithaca Revisited, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022, pp. 81–110 Schliemann was planning for another excavation season in 1891 when he died in December 1890. He proposed that the second layer, Troy II, corresponded to the city of legend, though later research has shown that it predated the Mycenaean era by several hundred years. Significant finds included many "owl-headed idols" and stone axes from the lower levels.Yılmaz, Derya, "Some Thoughts on the Troy Type Owl-Headed Idols of Western Anatolia", Praehistorische Zeitschrift 91.2, pp. 369–378, 2016 Sugaya, Chikako, "The stone axes of Troy", pp. 65–69 in Αρχαιολογία και Ερρίκος Σλήμαν. Archaeology and Heinrich Schliemann, 2012
Some of the most notable artefacts found by Schliemann are known as Priam's Treasure, after the legendary Trojan king. Schliemann and his wife stole almost all the precious metal objects and ancient jewelry. Later Schliemann traded some of the treasure to the government of the Ottoman Empire in exchange for permission to dig at Troy again. These are located in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. The rest was acquired in 1881 by the Royal Museums of Berlin (Königliche Museen zu Berlin) and later got confiscated by the Soviet Union in 1945 as a compensation for looting of Russian museums by Nazi Germany. They are now located in Pushkin Museum in Moscow.Akimova, Ludmila, and Vladimir Tolstikov, "The Troy treasures in Russia", ANTIQUITY 69, pp. 11–14, 1995 Even in his own time Schliemann was controversial because of his excavation methods which included removing features he considered insignificant without first studying and documenting them.
Wilhelm Dörpfeld Wilhelm Dörpfeld began working the site alongside Schliemann and later inherited excavation at the site and published his own independent work. His chief contributions were to the study of Troy VI and VII, which Schliemann had overlooked due to his focus on Troy II. Dörpfeld's interest in these layers was triggered by the need to close a hole in the initial excavators' chronology known as "Calvert's Thousand Year Gap". During his excavation, Dörpfeld came across a section of the Troy VI wall which was weaker than the rest. Since the mythic city had likewise had a weak section of its walls, Dörpfeld became convinced that this layer corresponded to Homeric Troy. Tolman, Herbert Cushing, and Gilbert Campbell Scoggin, "Mycenaean Troy: Based on Dörpfeld's Excavations in the Sixth of the Nine Buried Cities at Hissarlik", American Book Company, 1903 Schliemann himself privately agreed that Troy VI was more likely to be the Homeric city, but he never published anything stating so.
Carl Blegen Carl Blegen, professor at the University of Cincinnati, managed the site from 1932 to 1938. Wilhelm Dörpfeld collaborated with Blegen.Blegen, Carl W., "Excavations at Troy 1932", American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 431–51, 1932; Blegen, Carl W., "Excavations at Troy 1933", American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 223–48, 1934; Blegen, Carl W., "Excavations at Troy 1934", American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 6–34, 1935; Blegen, Carl W., "Excavations at Troy, 1935", American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 550–87, 1935; Blegen, Carl W., "Excavations at Troy, 1936", American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 17–51, 1937; Blegen, Carl W., "Excavations at Troy, 1937", American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 553–97, 1937; Blegen, Carl W., "Excavations at Troy, 1938", American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 204–28, 1939 These archaeologists, though following Schliemann's lead, added a professional approach not available to Schliemann. He showed that there were at least nine cities. In his research, Blegen came to a conclusion that Troy's nine levels could be further divided into forty-six sublevels, which he published in his main report. A post hoc correspondence analysis of Blegen's pottery sequence showed a 100-year gap between Troy III and Troy IV. Combined with a similar analysis of the pottery sequences of Korfmann and Schliemann this suggests that for a time in the late Early Bronze Age occupation contracted to the western end of the citadel mound.
Manfred Korfmann From 1988 to 2005, excavations were conducted by a team from the University of Tübingen and the University of Cincinnati under the direction of Professor Manfred Korfmann, with Professor Brian Rose overseeing Post-Bronze Age (Greek, Roman, Byzantine) excavation along the coast of the Aegean Sea at the Bay of Troy. Possible evidence of a battle was found in the form of bronze arrowheads and fire-damaged human remains buried in layers dated to the early 12th century BC. The question of Troy VI's status in the Bronze-Age world was the subject of a sometimes acerbic debate between Korfmann and the Tübingen historian Frank Kolb in 2001–2002. Hertel, Dieter, and Frank Kolb, "Troy in clearer perspective", Anatolian studies 53, pp. 71–88, 2003 Kolb, Frank, "Troy VI: A trading center and commercial city?", American Journal of Archaeology 108.4, pp. 577–613, 2004 Jablonka, Peter, and C. Brian Rose, "Late Bronze Age Troy: A Response to Frank Kolb", American Journal of Archaeology 108.4, pp. 615–630, 2004