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 (Τροία) and Ilion (Ἴλιον) or Ilios (Ἴλιος), 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 Wilusa (𒌷𒃾𒇻𒊭) or Truwisa (𒆳𒌷𒋫𒊒𒄿𒊭) 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 Troia or Ilium. In Turkish, it is generally known as Troya or Truva.
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 20 kilometres (12 mi) 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 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) 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.
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". 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 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.
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. 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 (1893–1894) 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. 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. 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.
One of the major discoveries of these excavations was the Troy VI–VII lower city. This lower town had a wide anti-chariot defensive ditch backed by a wooden palisade. Added to the citadel this lower town would have brought Troy up to an area of around 200,000 square meters. This discovery led to a major reinterpretation of the site, which had previously been regarded as a small aristocratic residence rather than a major settlement.
A number of radiocarbon dates, from charcoal samples, were obtained from various phases of the Troy I level.
From 2006 until 2012, these excavations continued under the direction of Korfmann's colleague Ernst Pernicka, with a new digging permit.
Developments in the 21st century
In 2013, an international team made up of cross-disciplinary experts led by William Aylward, an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was to carry out new excavations. This activity was to be conducted under the auspices of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University and was to use the new technique of "molecular archaeology". A few days before the Wisconsin team was to leave, the Turkish government cancelled about 100 excavation permits throughout Turkey, including Wisconsin's.
Since 2014 excavations have been conducted by a Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University team led by Rüstem Aslan. The excavators claim to have found a "Level 0" at Troy near the entrance of Troy-II with the new level pushing the city's history back 600 years. Since 2016 the University of Amsterdam has conducted a project to examine the 150-year history of excavation at the site.
Archaeological site
The archaeological site of Troy consists of the hill of Hisarlık and the fields below it to the south. The hill is a tell, composed of strata containing the remains left behind by more than three millennia of human occupation.
The primary divisions among layers are designated with Roman numerals, Troy I representing the oldest layer and Troy IX representing the most recent. Sublayers are distinguished with lowercase letters (e.g. VIIa and VIIb) and further subdivisions with numbers (e.g. VIIb1 and VIIb2). An additional major layer known as Troy 0 predates the layers which were initially given Roman numeral designations.
The layers have been given relative dates by comparing artefacts found in them to those found at other sites. However, precise absolute dates are not always possible due to limitations in the accuracy of radiocarbon dating.
Troy 0
Troy 0 is a pre-Bronze Age layer known from limited finds of pottery sherds and wooden beams. It is tentatively dated to c. 3600–3500 BC but little is known about it.
Troy I
Troy I was founded around 3000 BC on what was then the eastern shore of a shallow lagoon. It was significantly smaller than later settlements at the site, with a citadel covering less than 1 ha (2 acres). However it stood out from its neighbours in particular for its massive limestone fortifications, which were regularly renovated and strengthened. Defensive architecture would continue to be a distinctive characteristic in later periods, reflecting perennial security concerns at the vulnerable coastal site.
Residents lived in attached houses made of stone and mudbrick. Some houses had a megaron layout, among which one room is notably larger than the others. Although the city plan is not entirely clear from its limited remains, the houses appear to have been oriented parallel to the southern walls. Artifacts from this era include dark-coloured handmade pottery, objects made of copper, as well as a monumental stone stele with a relief depicting an armed warrior.