Troy

Troy (Ancient Greek: Τροία), archaeological site in northwestern Turkey, chief city of the Trojans during the siege by the Greeks in the Trojan War, an event described in poetic terms in Homer's Iliad to have taken place around the 12th century B.C. Archaeological research is centered on Hisarlık Tepe, a small hillock in the province Çanakkale in which archaeologists Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann identified as the most probable site of Troy in the 1860's, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In addition to Homer, the Roman poet Virgil set down the Aeneid, an epic of the founding of ancient Rome by a Trojan prince who fled the city after the Greeks had sacked it.

Origins

According to Greek mythology, the Trojan royal family finds its progenitors in Zeus and one of the Pleiades whose name was Electra, becoming the divine parents of Dardanus and Iasion. The myth has both sons living on the island of Samothrace, but Iasion had an affair with Demeter, resulting in his death at the hands of Zeus, and Dardanus leaving the island for Asia Minor. It was here he met Teucer, who treated him with respect enough to give him in marriage his daughter Batea.

Dardanus eventually became a king of the region he had named for himself, called Dardania. After his death the kingdom passed to his nephew Tros, who soon renamed the region "Troad". Ilus, one of Tros' sons, had won a wrestling tournament in Phrygia and as a prize the king offered fifty youths and fifty maidens, and a cow. Ilus was told the gift of the cow was based on an oracle that he should build a city in his own land where he saw the cow lay down, which it did at the hill Ate, and Ilus laid the groundwork for the foundation of what was to be known as Troy/Ilios. The inhabitants of Troy were collectively called "the Trojan people", while Teucer, together with the descendants of Dardanus, Tros and Ilus, were considered the eponymous founders of the site.

Trojan War

The most famous part of the story of Troy is the Trojan War itself, a conflict between Mycenaean Greeks and the Kingdom of Troy that has generally been told and retold for about four centuries before being put down in writing by Homer, a Greek poet and bard who may or may not have existed. The conflict began when the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, Helen, eloped with the Trojan prince Paris, and to get her back, Menelaus received the backing of King Agamemnon of Mycenae. The army that was created sailed to Troy on a thousand ships and laid siege to the city for ten years; lacking the physical power to enter, the Greeks feigned giving up, leaving a large, wooden horse on the beach as a "gift" to Troy. The horse was pulled into the city, and the Greek soldiers who had hidden inside it crept out, opened the city gates, and allowed the Greek army to enter, resulting in the destruction of the city. Homer's tale involved age-old conflicts of right and wrong; the influence of the gods; the heroes Ajax and Nestor; the intercession of the Amazons in the aid of Priam; the doomed Patroclus who believed he could be a stand-in for his cousin, the nearly-indestructible Achilles, who would take vengeance against Hector on the plain before Troy, dragging his body around the city with his chariot. And when Troy was turned to ashes, Odysseus would face a ten-year journey to get back home to Ithaca, to find his wife the target of unwanted suitors.

The Illiad was first written down about 750 B.C., followed by the Odyssey around 725 B.C. Both works are ascribed to Homer. About 29 B.C. Virgil wrote his epic Aeneid, in which the tale recounted Trojans who fled the destruction to Carthage; led by Prince Aeneas, they would leave for the Italian peninsula, founding the city of Rome on the banks of the Tiber River. Written during the period of the first emperor Augustus, Virgil's epic had the intention of giving the Romans a history as impressive as any the Greeks had.

Archaeological history

Since the early nineteenth century the discovery of a variety of inscriptions had convinced Edward Daniel Clarke and John Martin Cripps that the site of Troy was on the hill of Hissarlik, about 4.5 km from the entrance to the Dardanelles. In his dissertation on the topography of the surrounding plain published in Edinburgh in 1822, the Scottish geologist Charles MacLaren had advanced the hypothesis that the position of the Greco-Roman site known as "New Ilium" coincided with the city sung by Homer.

In 1871 the German businessman and amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann had followed the descriptions given in the Homeric texts and organized an archaeological expedition. His excavations concentrated on the hill of Hissarlik, where a previous archaeological excavation of the French school led by Calvert had taken place; Calvert had owned a portion of the hill at the time, and lived and excavated there for 15 years. Here Schliemann found himself faced with several layers, which corresponded to different periods in the history of Troy.

Excavating at the second layer from the bottom, he brought to light an immense treasure and thought he had discovered the legendary treasure of Priam narrated in the Iliad. Its findings, however, date to the 13th century B.C. and not to the period of the Trojan War. Subsequent excavation campaigns were conducted by Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1893-1894) and Carl Blegen (1932-1938), whose research led to the discovery of nine superimposed levels, with various subdivisions, and dated with the help of the analysis of the objects found and the examination of the construction techniques used.