OUA HST 140 Assessment task 5

by Feodor Weissmann

student ID 40899152

Was there a Trojan War? Compare the literary with the archaeological evidence.

I will open this essay by quoting Manfred Korfmann, who is director of excavations at Troy and a professor of archaeology at the University of Tübingen, "Why should the scholars who won't rule out a possible degree of historicity in the basic events in the Iliad have to defend their position?". (1) Trojan war has captured the minds of millions for last couple of millenniums. Iliad has everything, story of love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, epic war and defiance of fate and gods. Ir is probably best know siege in the universe and we owe it all to Homer`s Iliad. His creation inspired both fictional recreations and variation, with latest being a expensive production of a motion picture "Troy" and numerous scientific researches trying to verify an existence of once glorious city. Historians probed the lyrics and compared them with known scripts of same era, measured structure and complexity of society portrayed in Iliad with Homer`s apparent surroundings and known facts about Mycenaean civilization. Military historians compared strategy and tactics of gods heroes and troops with actual Mycenaean and hoplits of Homer`s time. Archaeologist rushed to allocate the grand jewel - location of Troy itself. Students in every university chose Troy subject for they essays and researches. We have evidence of Alexander the grate caring a copy of Iliad with him. Herodotus and Thucydides, both made an analysis of the origins of the Trojan war as part of basic principals defining their approach to the historical past. Homer`s creation should better be examined in a layered view, with writing style in the center, then surrounding historical back ground, then anthropological analysis.

Basic plot of Iliad contains information about a war that a coalition of Mycenaean Greeks waged against some other Greek colony in the Asia minor. The was contained invasion to a kingdom, siege of the city and campaigns against the kingdom`s allies. The outcome of the war was a conquest of the city, complete annihilation of Troy`s male population. Female population was distributed among the victorious Greeks together with the rest of the spoils of war looted from Troy. The city itself wad devastated and burned down. According to Homer military campaign itself lasted for full ten years and ended with Odysseus tricking the Trojans. We are told that Greek forces were led by king Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, who had brought a hundred ships with him. The allied Greek army is portrayed as an armada consisting of a thousand ships, number meaning the invasion force itself must have been about sixty thousand men strong. The reason for the conflict, as Homer tells us was an abducting of Helen, wife of Agamemnon's brother Menelaus, by Paris, son of Troy`s king Priam. We know from the historical writings that Troy was a source of emotions for generations. Greeks and Romans supposing knew the location of the city but it was lost long time ago. Archaeologists tried to reveal the location of the city and one of them claimed that Troy was revealed in Hisarlık, Anatolia. It was close to the seacoast in what is now Çanakkale province in Turkey, under Mount Ida. This location site was found and excavated by German merchant and part time archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1880s. Additional excavations revealed several city layers built on the same location. One of the locations, called Troy VII is regarded by many archaeologists as a location of Homeric Troy. Those assessments are so adopted by the UN and as a result, the archaeological site of Troy was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1998.

Now with the assessment of historical evidence and new information we have from those excavations we are being able to drow a historical map. Excavations site has been identified with the city called Wilusa in the Hittite texts; Ilion (which goes back to earlier Wilion with a digamma) is thought to be the Greek rendition of that name. Hittite empire was Kaneš, and was established in north-central Anatolia from the 18th century BC. The city it self appears to be destroyed around 1180 B.C. , probably as a result of a war the city lost. (2) Translation from Troy to Wilusa was possible after analysis of Greek dialects used by Homer. The sound /w/, spoken and written in Greek until at least 1200 B.C., was discontinued and therefore the "Ilios" city of the Iliad must have been the "Wilios" of the Late Bronze Age and in this way identical with "Wilusa", what is apparently Hittite name of Troy.

There are also very interesting linguistic part of analysis. It reviles that Mycenaean Greeks`s army in the Iliad are consistently addressed as "Achaiói" (or "Achaiwói") or "Danaói," when the Iliad was composed, around eighth century B.C., there were no such names for the Greeks. Could it be that the "Achaiwói" of the Iliad were in fact the inhabitants of Ahhiyawa, a western kingdom from the Hittite documents of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. (The "Danaói" of the Iliad, on the other hand, must be identical with the inhabitants of "Danaya," a northern kingdom described in Egyptian documents of the fourteenth century B.C.) In addition, there are some evidence found in Hittite records, implying that there were some kind of military tensions around Troy exactly around supposed time of Trojan War as presented in Homer's Iliad. That would be somewhere during the thirteenth and early twelfth centuries B.C.

We know today that, the place we consider to be Troy is located in Anatolia. Carl Blegen, who directed excavations at the site in the 1930s, considered Troy VI/VIIa to be a Greek city. At a time general idea was of a Greek Troy, it was also supported by Schliemann so how did that happened? Simply. In Iliad, main theme is war between Greeks and Greeks, not Greeks and Anatolians. Homer portrays the inhabitants of Troy as Greek colonists of Asia minor an since the search is after his Troy, researchers assume that it is a Greek city. Archaeologists come from mainland Greece to Troy and later went back to Greece, and were completely sure about Greek Troy theory. According to Manfred Korfmann, up to 1930 Little was known from the archaeological point of view, to link western Anatolia with Homer`s Troy. At present time, archaeologists, after sorting out the excavation findings came to the conclusion that Bronze age Troy was in fact better linked with Anatolia then with Mycenaean Greece.

Iliad speaks of ten year old siege of the city, it also mentions additional military expeditions to Troy`s allies in order to disrupt support lines and prevent them from providing active military raids agings the aggressors. Could it be that it is compiled out of successive military campaigns taking place in the same area or perhaps against same enemy over wast periods of time? Homer`s Iliad mentions use of chariots, Hittite as Egyptians and Canaans should have been pretty skilled in using them. If we review however use of chariots from the military point of view there is small use of them against fortified camps or in proximity to such. They could be trapped to easy. Could it be that Chariots were added to the poem as part of myths about other engagements with Hittite / Trojans?

In Iliad Homer tend to glorify the act of siege and hostilities around it. When he describes military equipment used by the parties he tends to make it more heroic or grandiose, sometimes on the expense of common sense. From archaeological sources we know the types of equipment used during the bronze age but Homer, due to his own reasons sometimes extends or reduces the amount or quality of weapons and armor. He presents scenes of fatal, glorious combat, heroes against heroes with unique sets of weapons and sometimes single throwing spear. We could have few factors other then artistic creativity to blame on that account. Homer is not an archaeologist, he has limited knowledge about logistics of combat hundreds of years before his time. It could be that he tends to portray military equipment as older version of his contemporary. He tries to hide the knowledge of iron but we have couple of times iron being introduced into the Iliad universe as a weapon (sword) and a plow. That supports the previous claim of contemporary substitution. Other cases could be that Anatolians of Wilusa used a bit different sets of weaponry and armor. Having extensive chariot force they could be using heavier armor to protect the riders, the information available to Homer could have been mixed between heavier and different resulting him to try and explain the types the best way he could. We can see from the Iliad that use of chariots is somewhat transformed into mainly taxing heroes to the battlefield and back, perhaps due to lack of understanding by Homer of chariot use strategy and tactics.

Status system presented in the universe of Iliad is criticized by the scholars as not being in convergence with the political climate of Bronze era kingdoms. Mycenaean Greeks expedition is an alliance of forces from different kingdoms. Those forces led by king Agamemnon but it appears that the allied army managed in almost democratic manner. A lot of assembles taking places we get a feeling that Agamemnon is constantly forced to seek approval of other leaders and has little of execution authority when someone wishes to do something. One of the examples is the case of Achilles refusing to engage in combat after feeling insulted. In fighting terms he is addressed as a best Greek hero, his refusal to fight took heavy toll from Mycenaean forces directly and morally and yet supreme king and army commander, Agamemnon is apart of a problem, he is not beyond a trivial dispute, he is unable to make Achilles fight. After Achilles death his divine armor should have been passed to some over Greek hero. There are versions with Greek chiefs making an assembly and casting a vote on whoever should get the armor. During the summoning of allies by Agamemnon we sea different scenes of the lives of summoned heroes. Those scenes portray kings engaged in plebs activities. There is no escape during the reading and analyzing of Iliad that from anthropological point of view that Mycenaean kingdoms are some kind of oligarchy society, similar in many ways to the surroundings of Homer`s days. It appears that Homer does not completely understands the concept of kingdom and it`s internals.

Overall, if the main question is wherever we can operate ancient literature sources and to what extent. Taking Iliad for example we can see that archaeologists can support Homer`s story by supplying physical pieces of evidence for his events. But what those evidences point to more or less following: "Around 1200 BC a city in the area that was called Wilusa at the time of the Hittite kingdom was devastated, probably as a result of a siege." We have can not positive identify the aggressor, who some evidents point to be Mycenaean Greek or the reasons for armed conflict. After comparing the Iliad, additional literal sources with historical findings and the results of archaeological excavations, much of whom occurred in the past couple of decades, it is now more likely that the area suffered from several lager scaled armed conflicts. It does not mean however that Iliad is not a piece of evidence, rather we should keep in mind that as evidence it is simply not primary one and therefore should be analyzed in context of surrounding changes. Those changes could have accrued from confusion of actual events during the compilation of the poem or by authors misunderstanding of certain facts he was writing about. Analyses of the key motive of Iliad suggests that Homer can and should be taken seriously, that the basics of his story, story about a military conflict between Greeks and the inhabitants of Troy is indeed based on a collective memory of historical events, it is our job now to figure out whatever these events have been.