Did the Trojan War really happen?

Where Troy is

Troy is the mound of Hisarlık, near the city of Çanakkale in northwest Turkey. It rises over a coastal plain at the mouth of the Dardanelles, the narrow strait between the Aegean and the way to the Black Sea, so a city here could watch every ship that passed. Greeks lived on the site in later centuries and called it Ilion, and Alexander the Great stopped there in 334 BC to lay a wreath at the tomb said to be Achilles’ before marching into Persia. The Romans kept the town going as Ilium.

Who dug it up

Frank Calvert, an Englishman who lived on the Dardanelles and owned part of the mound, cut the first trial trenches in the 1860s. Heinrich Schliemann, a German businessman, took over from 1870 with far more money and far less care: his great trench sliced through the layers and destroyed much of what it crossed. In 1873 he announced the gold of “Priam’s treasure.” It came from Troy II, a town roughly a thousand years older than any war Homer could have known. Better methods came later, with Wilhelm Dörpfeld in the 1890s, Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati in the 1930s and Manfred Korfmann from 1988, whose team traced a lower town around the citadel. The site has been on UNESCO’s World Heritage List since 1998.

Nine cities, two candidates

The mound holds nine main settlements, numbered Troy I to IX from the bottom up, spanning the early Bronze Age to Roman times. Two of them fit a war in the age Homer describes:

• Troy VI, the city of sloping limestone walls and towers, which ended around 1300 BC. Dörpfeld took it for Homer’s city.
• Troy VIIa, the town built on its ruins, which burned around 1180 BC. Blegen argued that this was the Troy of the poems.

In antiquity the scholar Eratosthenes dated the fall of Troy to 1184 BC, remarkably close to the archaeologists’ date for VIIa. A burned layer, though, cannot say who set the fire.

What the Hittites wrote

The main outside evidence comes from the archives of the Hittite kings in central Anatolia. Their 13th-century BC letters and treaties name a western kingdom called Wilusa, which many scholars equate with Wilios, the older form of Ilios, and a power called Ahhiyawa, which may be Homer’s Achaeans. A treaty of about 1280 BC binds a king of Wilusa named Alaksandu, a name close to Alexandros, Paris’s other name. A later letter mentions a past quarrel over Wilusa between the Hittite king and the king of Ahhiyawa. None of it describes a siege, but it places Greeks and a city near the Dardanelles in the same diplomatic world.

What the Greeks themselves doubted

Thucydides, writing around 400 BC, accepted that the war took place but suspected the poets had inflated it (1.10). Ruins mislead, he warned: if Sparta were ever deserted, later visitors would never guess its power from its plain buildings. Herodotus heard from Egyptian priests that Helen never reached Troy at all, a version told in who was Helen of Troy? The wooden horse has left no trace either, and where that story comes from is a question of its own: was the Trojan horse real?

Many archaeologists sum it up this way. Troy was a real and wealthy city, fought over more than once, and Homer’s war is what centuries of singers made of such memories.