It is easy to mock Schliemann’s romanticism and to criticise his gung-ho methods of excavation. But subsequent investigation has proved that his instinctive approach paid dividends. Not all was lost when the massive trench was dug through the mound. Digs in the 1930s20 and 1980s turned up a wealth of clues to the life and influence not of a literary, but a historical, reality – a powerful Bronze Age settlement called, in contemporary texts, ‘Wilusa’.21 This was a city that was home to a rich king, a city that dealt with Mycenaean Greeks and suffered attack and privations in the 13th century BC. It is almost certainly Homer’s Ilios or Troy.22
The campaign of excavations begun in 1988 under Professor Manfred Korfmann, which stretch across the plateau to the south of the mound, right down to the location of Troy’s inland port, offer a satisfying picture of how this Bronze Age community would have operated. Although the scale of the ‘palace’ originally disappointed Schliemann, Troy is indeed turning out to be a massive settlement, one of the largest fortified urban developments of the region. It is now clear that the site is a full fifteen times larger than had been previously imagined. And so if we are to think of a Bronze Age Helen arriving at Bronze Age Troy, we can hold in our mind’s eye her destination: Hisarlik Hill.
The Boston Musem of Fine Arts is home to a vase, painted between 490 and 480 BC, which bears a particularly elegant depiction of Helen and Paris.23 The couple have left Sparta behind them. Helen seems tense – her chest is pulled in as if she holds her breath, her neck stoops. Aphrodite fusses maternally with the Spartan queen’s headdress while Eros touches Helen’s brow – ensuring it is love and love alone that she sees before her. Behind the pair hovers Peitho, the goddess of persuasion. Whatever doubts the fugitive lovers may have, Peitho will ensure that this mania (a Greek word originally meaning an erotic madness) seems the right, the only possible, course of action. Meanwhile Paris holds Helen by the wrist – a courteous gesture which would have sent out a clear message to contemporaries that this is neither rape nor kidnap. This symbolic physical contact was the clear signifier of a legitimate marriage ceremony.
There is a twist to this fine, uxorious piece of pottery. On the reverse, time has advanced ten years. Now Helen is not walking, but on the run, fleeing from her husband Menelaus who has come to Troy to bring her home, Paris is nowhere to be seen. The King of Sparta charges his wife, head down, his rage mimicked by the charging bull inscribed on his shield. The vase was discovered in 1879 during excavations of the cemetery of Suessula, a town just south-east of Capua in Italy; when uncovered it still contained the fatty ashes of a burnt sacrifice; the lower portion of the painting is in fact remarkably well preserved thanks to the emollience of the animal fat. Not simply a record of the legitimacy of Helen and Paris’ union, this valued item was left as a gift to the gods. For the dead, a morbid reminder of the intimate, inevitable relationship between eros and eris.
But we should allow that vase to remind us of something else. The Helen in the Boston Museum, even though she is aided and abetted by the powers of persuasion, lust and love, walks in step with Paris. This match is a gallant one, the passion mutual. Here is the Helen the Greeks knew – a woman complicit in her own abduction.
Although less popular than the raped Helen, this eloping dignitary frequents western art – particularly in secular medieval illustration. The patrons within the European ruling dynasties were fully aware that Helen was a queen – some even went so far as to trace their lineage back to the nobility of the Age of Heroes. The Trojan tale speaks of the life of the high-born and when commissioning fine works of art from their illuminators and scribes, aristocratic patrons were asking for a portrayal of ‘us’ not ‘them’.
In one such manuscript, originally produced in northern Italy and now housed in Madrid, Helen steps lightly down a gangplank, and trumpeters clarion her arrival.24 Her wimple preserves her modesty: this is a seemly queen. On another manuscript, a Flemish one made in 1470, Helen enters a city of gothic arches on a white palfrey replete with henin hat and floating veil.25 In the late 15th century, her ‘marriage’ to Paris was stitched into a Franco-Flemish tapestry.26 Paris’ left hand cradles Helen’s, his right holds, with a theatrical flourish, the ring. Around the pair is a swirl of silks and brocades – the fine stuff of Helen’s handmaids who, we hear in all literary sources from Homer onwards, came to Troy with the Spartan queen.27
The notion that Helen travelled to Troy with a number of her female attendants nourished all manner of lurid stories down the centuries.28 Authors have eagerly dwelt on the image of Helen entering Troy as a willing captive surrounded by the rustle of skirts and the flutter of Greek eyelashes, a gorgeous woman with equally beguiling ladies-in-waiting. While 17th-century travellers have been blamed for sparking the fashion for ‘orientalising’ – that is, fantasising about groups of women living closely together in the women’s quarters and royal harems of the east29 – this is a tradition which in fact begins much, much earlier.
The Souda was an ambitious and unparalleled encyclopaedia of the Byzantine world, amassed in the 10th century AD. The compilers were anonymous but assiduous – the Souda comprises 30,000 entries. One such concerns Astyanassa, a maidservant to Helen, or, more specifically, a therapaina, ‘a body servant who cared for [therapeuo] her mistress’s personal health and appearance’. Inspired by her unfeasibly lovely employer, the Souda claimed that Astyanassa was the first person ever to compose a sex manual. More precisely, she was ‘the first to discover the ways of lying in bed [katakliseis] for intercourse, and [she] wrote “on the Postures [skhēmatō] for Intercourse” ’. The manual was very popular, used so the Souda tells us by no less than Philaenis and Elephantine,30 the notorious harlots much berated by the Christian Fathers.31 Manuals like this were presumed to be based on personal experience.32
As you might expect, Helen’s advent within the Trojan citadel was imagined to be noxious as well as exciting – many authors played on the horror that the Spartan queen brought with her. The playwright Aeschylus spikes his picture of Helen tripping ‘lightly into Priam’s Troy’ by pointing out that she imports ‘death and destruction as her dowry’.33 On another Italian vase, made around 350 BC, Helen marries Paris once again, but instead of hiding a divinely beautiful face, her veil conceals a grotesque mask.34 In an illustrated 14th-century AD manuscript of Guido delle Colonne’s 13th-century AD account of the Trojan legend, Helen arrives at Troy, comfortably seated on a horse, and then marries Paris in the presence of priests. Standing to the left of the frame is Paris’ sister Cassandra, the prophetess who had been cursed by Apollo: although possessing the gift of true prophecy, she was never to be believed. Cassandra’s hair streams down her back, she rakes at her cheeks in despair, a harbinger of the terrors that are to come. And in a Neapolitan 14th-century manuscript now held by the British Library, Helen greets Paris, but extends her hand around his back towards one of the other Trojan princes clustered behind.35 Semper mutabile femina. This promiscuous queen has only just arrived at Troy and already she is keeping her options open.
Had Helen really walked into the citadel of Troy in the 13th century BC she would have been greeted by a wash of mongrel scents, drifting up from the magazines of the city. We know that at this time in the Eastern Mediterranean, frankincense, oil of iris, cumin, coriander and the sulphurous-smelling yellow mineral orpiment were unloaded in the ports and beach harbours of Bronze Age Turkey.
Aromatics were important commodities here – as they were in Mycenaean Greece. Those who came up smelling of roses had proved they could rise above the ordinary stinking world: Homer uses scent to denote standing: ‘Andromache pressed the child to her scented breast, Smiling through her tears.’36 Helen’s apartments in both Troy and Sparta earn the epithet ‘richly scented’, as do her robes. There is more than just poetic imagination at work here: only the rich of the Late Bronze Age could afford to smell good. The greatest rulers on the Greek mainland and in Anatolia alike scent-marked their territories.
An
other odour carried on the air around the city of Troy would have been that of horses. Homer describes Troy as ‘famed for its horses’ and the hero Hector as a ‘breaker of horses’. When the Hittites appear in the Bible they are the proponents of horse-power: ‘The Lord had caused the Arameans to hear the sound of chariots and horses and a great army, so that they said to one another, “Look, the king of Israel has hired the Hittite and Egyptian kings to attack us!”’37
During recent excavations at Troy, a complete horse skeleton has been found along with substantial numbers of dislocated horse-bones.38 Could this indeed have been an equestrian training and trading centre? In Anatolia, horse-handling was more advanced than it was on the Greek mainland, a feature of aristocratic life from at least 1600 BC. The Horse Book of Kikkuli, a Hittite text dating from 1360 BC, gives a detailed account of how to rear, break and train horses.39 Eastern-style equine tack has been found in a grave at Mycenae.40 East of the Bosphorus the horse’s potential as a tool of war was being exploited.
In an effort to approximate sights and sounds that would have surrounded our Bronze Age Helen and Paris, a team of experimental archaeologists and I embarked on an empirical investigation in 2004 in the shadow of Hisarlik. Chariots are well represented in Mycenaean and Hittite art.41 Drawing from visual and textual sources,42 and using the raw materials that would have been available to both Greeks and Trojans in the 13th century BC, the team created replica Anatolian and Mycenaean chariots, trained up pairs of horses from the local gypsy encampment and then put both together on the plains of Troy.43
In Greece the Late Bronze Age chariots appear relatively lightweight. The wheels have only four spokes and the frames – particularly of those bearing arms – remain uncovered by hides. Anatolian chariots are represented on an intricate stone relief recording the Battle of Kadesh of 1275 BC. These carriages are chunkier, and the wheels have six spokes. Standing proud in the middle of the Kadesh relief is Rameses, the ruler of Egypt, bow and arrow in hand, picking off lesser warriors as his swift chariot circles the battlefield. It is a sight that would also have been seen outside Late Bronze Age Troy.
We know that by the 8th century BC, chariot warfare had all but disappeared. Chariots were still being exploited in battle by the Syrians, for example, but not by the Greeks or Anatolians. This is one instance when Homer is writing about his own Iron Age world, rather than that of the Bronze Age. In Homer we find chariots seldom used in actual combat but rather as taxis or chauffeur-driven cars, dropping off and picking up the great and the good between camp and battlefield.
Until recently Homer’s understanding of chariot-use was orthodox: it was thought that the Greeks did not employ chariots as weapons of war. But we now have textual evidence of an intimidating number of Mycenaean chariots on Anatolian soil. In around 1400 BC a Greek tribal leader called Attarssiya is recorded as operating on the western edges of Hittite territory with an army of infantry and one hundred chariots.44 To have had any kind of effective engagement with the Trojans, the Mycenaeans must have brought their chariots with them for tough service in battle: even though the Mycenaean vehicles were lighter than those from Anatolia our experiment showed them to be highly effective on the flat Scamander plain.
The 13th-century Hittite chariot had a crew of three: a driver, a fighter (archer or spearman) and a shield-bearer whose mission was to protect his colleagues.45 All the charioteers had to be firm-footed horse-whisperers. These were men who devoted no little time to the perfection of their art. With no collars or traces, with the horses’ hind-quarters swinging around wildly, staying upright in these lightweight carriages requires a high degree of concentration and aptitude. Managing to keep one’s balance as well as one’s hands free to use the pikes, arrows and sling-shots that allowed a fighter to kill and maim as he sped by is, as we discovered, quite a feat.
But a master charioteer would have been able to wreak much damage. As well as picking off rival heroes he could also have smashed through a huddle of infantry; the carnage would have been sickening. As the reconstructed chariot reeled around corners the leather would have groaned and creaked. The war-horses wore bells on their harnesses to provide an aural ‘baffle’ – essential in the maelstrom and cacophony of battle. Some of Homer’s most harrowing lines describe the howls of the heroes as they fought on Scamander Plain for Helen:
Screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath, fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood.46
The charioteers in 13th-century combat would not have been massed: this was engagement by the few to destroy and impress the many. Frescoes show the chariots with brightly decorated sides and covered in striking black-and-white rawhide. Those riding in them are immediately lifted above the ordinary on the battlefield: they are distinctive, memorable – fight well in one of these and an opportunity for immortal fame would swiftly present itself. We know from Hittite texts that those in Anatolia who manned chariots were typically not just drivers, but high-ranking agents of the state. Men of privilege, representatives of a vastly outnumbered ruling class who needed to make an immediate and lasting visual impact on those around them – both friend and foe.
At the end of our experiment with the replica chariots we were applauded only by the tomato and cotton-pickers as they too rattled to and fro in their own horse-drawn carts through the fields. Of course, ours were not deeds that would echo down the centuries, but we had edged a little closer to understanding the reality of military engagement outside the walls of the city. The Mycenaean chariot fared well as a mobile missile platform. Neat enough to allow for excellent manoeuvrability, it could still accommodate a driver and two soldiers who, supplied with bows and arrows or pikes, had great fire-power. The chariot-technology of the Greek mainland was clearly sufficiently advanced to meet whatever it was that a prince of Troy might choose to throw at the Mycenaean Greeks.47
And so, hearing the horses in their stalls, sniffing the air as she travelled into the fortress of Troy itself, what would our Bronze Age Helen have thought of her new home? As she stood on top of the citadel, whipped by winds then as now, her view of the lower town, of the packed little shanty homes, and the sandy bay stretching out to the Dardanelles, must have appeared very different from the Lakonian heartlands she had left behind. Here the swampy lagoon encourages disease – malarial mosquitoes and ague.48 Today, in the fields around Hisarlik, blazing sunflowers hang their heads towards the dusty earth. It is all quite different from the mossy, moist Eurotan plain and the twists and turns of Taygetan foothills.
In the stories, Helen has turned her back on Greece. To try to under-stand the life such a woman would have enjoyed in the Trojan citadel in the Late Bronze Age, we too have to turn away from the West and from the Mycenaeans and instead set our sights on the evidence of the East.
26
THE GOLDEN HOUSES OF THE EAST
Armies of allies crowd the mighty city of Priam, true, but they speak a thousand different tongues, fighters gathered here from all ends of the realm.
HOMER, Iliad1
THE STORY OF HELEN AND PARIS, Achilles and Hector, Agamemnon and Priam draws in visitors to the site of Troy from across the globe. While the impoverished archaeology there gives no quickfix impression of the hubbub of the Bronze Age city, the influx of tourists is curiously appropriate. Here there are many nationalities of men and women of all ages from all walks of life – just as it would have been three and half thousand years ago. Materials from Assyria, Babylon, Mycenaean Greece and Cyprus have been excavated at Troy – brought by traders whose quarters would have been in the town. Diplomatic texts show us correspondence between heads of state regularly passed in and out of Trojan gates: here there were chancelleries and scribes, diplomats and envoys. In the 13th century BC, this centrifugal power-base would have been a colourful, jangling place.
Because we have no extant written records from within Troy itself – Schliemann’s wilful destruction of the central belly of the site may well have put pa
id to any chances of discovering a Trojan archive – we have to derive a detailed picture of Bronze Age life from other, contemporary sources. Troy was a vassal state of the Hittites. Socially, politically and culturally there are striking similarities between a kingdom such as Troy and the other great settlements within the Hittite empire.2 To try to understand the impact upon a foreign visitor, or captive, such as our Bronze Age Helen, of the culture of the Near East we must turn to the eloquent evidence excavated from the Hittite capital, Hattusa.
Because the Hittites kept meticulous written records of their affairs on tablets which are still emerging from the earth – more than three thousand fragments were excavated at Sapinuwa, north-east of Hattusa in 1990 – we have a strong taste of the characters any visiting aristocrat from the Greek mainland would have encountered.3 Here there were priests, priestesses and temple assistants, medical advisers, barbers, doormen, grooms, bureaucrats, scribes, sword swallowers, acrobats (there are wonderful rock carvings of ‘ladder-men’ who compete to see who can balance on a free-standing ladder for the greatest length of time),4 bagpipe, castanet and cymbal players, dancers and a phalanx of general domestic staff. In the 13th century BC – when the Hittite civilisation was at its most ebullient – the citadels would have heaved with people.
Once again, as within Mycenaean society, women are conspicuous by their presence. Criss-crossing the broad streets paved with their wide, heavy flagstones, there would have been large numbers of concubines – the naptartu – women imported to join a harem of official bed-partners. The Hittites also have a name for a ‘secondary wife’, the E-ŠER-TU (or esertu). These were consorts often imported to strengthen links with other countries and brought to the royal bed to create a dynasty of little princes and princesses.5 Anatolian royal families needed official offspring to use as diplomats, or marriage fodder and as clan representatives within the kingdom or in the wider world. Priam was famous for having fifty sons, and texts from the Late Bronze Age show that Anatolian potentates did indeed seed huge families. Controlling the movement and marriages of women in the palace was the Tawananna (sovereign queen).6 This is the dynastic and social environment within which our Bronze Age Helen would have been enveloped, whether as a captive, a ‘secondary wife’ or a premier consort.
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