by Patrick Hunt
Although it has been much debated over the past few generations since he first excavated Troy, Heinrich Schliemann’s role in changing the perception of Troy from just a story to a real place cannot be overestimated. Son of a disgraced clergyman, Schliemann made several fortunes around the world before turning his attention to Troy at the dawn of archaeology as a discipline. Shrewd businessman, manipulative showman, poor diplomat, liar, thief and pioneering archaeologist are just a few descriptions of him—probably all true—in circulation as early as 1875 while he was trying to change public opinion about Troy. Because his methods were suspect at best and downright destructive at worst, the debate is understandable. In retrospect, because he had hardly anyone to blaze a trail before him using proper archaeological methods as now practiced, time may be gentler on Schliemann in years to come, perhaps validating his pioneering stature while preserving some of his unsavory reputation.
These debates around Schliemann, centering on his apparent willingness to manipulate truth rather than on his meticulous field notes, often overlook that he attempted to differentiate layers of the Trojan past. Also too easily forgotten is his focus on ceramic artifacts, however fragmentary or mundane in appearance, because he hoped these might yield useful dating information. These are two of the backbones of modern archaeology. Stratigraphy (a term borrowed from geology) is concerned with the occupation layers of a site, and ceramic typology with analytical categories of ceramic vessels and their variations for dating and other purposes. Some of the earliest field techniques for these research methods were begun at Troy under Schliemann directly or under his well-chosen disciple, Wilhelm Dorpfeld (whom Schliemann knew to be careful and precise in the field, unlike himself), and later Dorpfeld’s successor, Carl Blegen.
I was a graduate student at Athens in 1984 when I saw firsthand Schliemann’s careful note-taking as an early archaeologist. I was duly impressed that Schliemann was perhaps the first archaeological investigator who not only carefully drew his own ceramic pots and wrote detailed descriptions of them—often in the exact context of where they were found and dated along with other data—but also did so in several languages in a fine careful script. Although I would not emulate his early methods or his character, that moment in 1984, when I could peer at his actual field notebooks, soon catapulted me lifelong into professional archaeology.
Matching Homer’s epic poem to the landscape set precedents for other discoveries
Looking north from the top of the low scarred hill of Hisarlik above the plain in northern Turkey, the blue sea of the Dardanelles strait can rarely be seen, although seabirds still fly south over the trees here. The wind from the sea is often gusty, but the light summer breeze now is hardly enough to stir the blazing heat where cicadas drone incessantly, oblivious to the very different song recited by bards about this place for millennia. We now know this nondescript low hill above the plain was the site of fabled Troy, no longer just a myth but a historic place. Here is a small fraction of what Homer said about Troy in the Iliad (I.129-30; IV.30-34): If ever Zeus gives into our hands the strong-walled citadel of Troy to be plundered . . .
You are furious forever to bring down the strong-founded city of Ilion? If you could walk through the gates and through the towering ramparts . . .
Perhaps the most famous of all classical myths, Troy and the Trojan War were immortalized by Homer in the dawn of Greek literature. Actual Troy in the time of Homer (around 700 BC) would hardly be memorable in 1850, as its location had been forgotten. One might see mostly overgrown ruins on the hill with perhaps a few farmers’ huts built into remnant walls sticking out here and there above the olive trees that now dominated where the watchtowers of the ancient fortress had jutted. But Troy in song was already very recognizable, with gods and heroes interlocking in lives and loves that seemed larger than life. Remnants of the older songs can still be found preserved in Homer, who is himself a paradox and almost mythological. While he described a place and landmarks that can still be matched, we really do not know if a person named Homer actually existed or ever traveled to Troy, although he was said to be from Ionia—which would be western Turkey today, not far from Troy. Homer’s epic poem is all the more remarkable because he was also said to be blind. We might conclude that for his epic Iliad, Homer used far older sources with details he or someone else rewrote into marvelous poetry, along with some of the most enduring mythology ever imagined.
In Schliemann’s time in the mid nineteenth century, the prevailing opinion was that Troy was a fable. Frank Calvert was there at Hisarlik before Schliemann by almost twenty years, since 1852. It is entirely probable that Calvert inspired Schliemann’s excavations, as many now maintain, and equally that it was his idea that Hisarlik was Troy, not Schliemann’s. While it is difficult to know whether it was Schliemann or his colleague Frank Calvert who, around 1872, first compared the local northwestern Turkish landscape around Hisarlik to Homer’s description, it was sufficiently important to establish that Mount Ida should be visible from the site of Troy, as Homer related through verse. Schliemann, either on his own or with Calvert’s assistance, discovered firsthand that neither Bunarbashi at Bali Dagh Hill—the casual preference of a few historians who believed Homer could be accurate in landscape detail—or another site, at the village of Chiblak, clearly did not fit Homer in this respect. Other criteria where the topography was compared to the text included the plain where the Simois and Scamander rivers traversed, as well as visibility of the sea itself where ships would have been brought into harbor before later alluviation filled in much of the Bay of Besik. The hill of Hisarlik does fit these criteria, lying above the ancient watersheds of the Simois and Scamander streams and with Mount Ida just visible to the south, although the sea has greatly receded from full view. How much stock should be placed in poetry was a nagging question needing an answer, but the rediscovery of Troy provided a ready answer in the affirmative to all three landscape criteria. If Schliemann’s source for matching the topography with the text was Frank Calvert and not from his own observations, Schliemann may have robbed Calvert of the ultimate glory of connecting Hisarlik to Troy and announcing Troy’s rediscovery to the world. Ethical or not, Schliemann is rightly remembered as the larger-than-life controversial pioneer of archaeology far beyond Troy.
Both Schliemann and Calvert were anticipated, however, and possibly influenced by a Scottish geographer named Charles Maclaren in 1822, who maintained that “Issarlik” was the site of ancient Troy. Maclaren never visited the site for a firsthand confirmation as Calvert and Schliemann did, and his view was rejected by the scholarly community.
Following Schliemann’s announcement to the world in 1872 that he had found Troy, partly by taking Homer’s landscape account somewhat literally, a new tradition of matching ancient text to modern topography was greatly encouraged and it still persists to the present. Some more recent examples of archaeologists searching for ancient sites, cities and routes known from biblical texts include William Foxwell Albright, Yigael Yadin and Nelson Glueck, three of the most famous archaeologists of the twentieth century. Sites like Debir, Gibeon, Lachish and Masada in Israel were known from biblical texts and confirmed through cross-examining other ancient writings along with extensive site surveys, analyses and excavations. Even Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, who first excavated Ur in the 1920s, was inspired from the mention of the fabled biblical Ur. Other very recent examples in the Mediterranean world include looking for topographical matches of Hannibal’s alpine route from classical texts like those of Polybius and Livy. Many historians and archaeologists, including myself, have done this for years, crossing the Alps on foot with the ancient texts in hand to compare the modern landscape with the classical authors’ observations of the same landscape where possible.
Troy had many layers of civilization, stretching over thousands of years
We now know there were at least eight deep “layers” of culture at Troy, stretching back over four thousand years. Schliemann hopelessly muddled
many of them and destroyed much of the evidence in his Great Trench, plowing right through the heart of the site to its earliest period and nearly to bedrock, but even Schliemann could establish some distinctions based on depth of burial and types of artifacts.
At the top of the hill, near the nineteenth-century surface, was the classical layer (stratum, in archaeological terms) now called Stratum IX, mostly from the Roman period around 85 BC to around AD 500. This city was named Ilium (or Novum Ilium), after its ancient name. The name Troy is also an ancient name, used in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Yet long after its Bronze Age glory, perhaps Troy was not its most important classical name or the one by which the Greeks and others would have best known it. This Roman city had temples, theaters and other structures. Below this layer is Stratum VIII, dating from the Greek period, around 700 to 85 BC. (Apparently Alexander the Great visited Troy/Ilion around 332 BC.) This layer contains some older temples, theaters and buildings that were used as foundations for the newer ones.
Deeper yet, Stratum VII beneath it was much earlier, part of it dating to the Late Bronze Age from around 1250 to 1100 BC. There was no significant occupation between VII and VIII, as the site was mostly abandoned for around five hundred years from the Greek Dark Ages until the Greek colonial expansion in Ionia and much of western Anatolia. Stratum VII also corresponds to the last destruction of Troy before the recolonization, and some believe it best matches Homer’s epic of a time at Troy that would lead to the conflicts between “Greeks” and “Trojans.” Stratum VI beneath it is subdivided into different time periods, but most scholars believe it is the best fit for the Age of Heroes of the Mycenaean Era from around 1700 to 1250 BC, as described by Homer, most likely at the same time when a “Trojan War” could have taken place and when other Mycenaean cities were also suffering cataclysmic destruction. Stratum VI is also the period of maximum size for the Late Bronze Age, the time when the great walls were built. A later culture of early Greeks called these walls “Cyclopean masonry” because the individual stones were massive and thought too large for humans to quarry and carry, which suggests technology had fallen into a doldrum by their time. Strata III through V beneath Stratum VI have waxing and waning periods of growth between around 2200 and 1700 BC.
Nearly at the deepest level of this long-occupied place, Stratum II beneath all these prior layers is dated from around 2400 BC to the end of the Early Bronze Age around 2200 BC. This is a much smaller town and is the purported period from which Schliemann dug his famous “Priam’s Treasure,” despite the fact that it is about a thousand years older than he thought. Stratum I goes back to the beginning of the Early Bronze Age around 3000 until around 2400 BC, and likely before 3000 BC into Neolithic times when the fortress was hardly more than a hilltop, perhaps surrounded with a wooden palisade around it close to the natural bedrock.
Although Schliemann gravely misinterpreted the data for understanding the many different cultural layers at Troy, there were no archaeological precedents for him to follow in Anatolia. His followers and successors, including Wilhelm Dorpfeld from 1890 onward, Carl Blegen in the 1930s, and Manfred Korfmann and others in the 1980s and 1990s, have calibrated and refined the study of Troy’s many layers, probing deeper than sixty feet. In this way, we can marvel at its long history, not continuously occupied but rebuilt many times because of its strategic placement on one of the most important trade routes between Europe and Asia, along the vital waterway that connected the Black Sea to the Mediterranean along the Dardanelles strait.
Schliemann, whatever his motives and methods, persuaded the world Troy had existed
In his multiple field campaigns at Troy, from 1870 through 1890, Schliemann did what no one else had done: he connected literature and landscape where no contemporary tradition existed, and then he eventually persuaded the scholarly world of his discovery.
The controversial Schliemann was attacked for his 1872 identification of Hisarlik with Troy—mostly because he challenged the prevailing opinion, circulating as scholarship—and justifiably for naming something he found and smuggled from Hisarlik in 1873 “Priam’s Treasure” without any proof of a connection to Priam from inscriptions. He drew the attention of the world to both Troy as a possible real place and to Homer as a recorder of such likely events as an earlier Trojan War in the Iliad. When his book Troy and Its Remains came out in London in 1874, his many critics accused him of everything from hyperactive imagination to adultery, theft and financial charlatanry. Many critics stooped to absurd comments such as: “If Troy never existed, how could he have found it?”
But Schliemann also had his defenders who agreed with him. While they did not necessarily admire him, they at least grudgingly rallied to his identification of Hisarlik with Troy. Some were notable scholars of the day, even if in a minority now proven right. These academic “allies” ultimately included Dr. Rudolf Virchow of Berlin; Charles Newton of the British Museum in London; another early archaeologist, the Orientalist and linguist Professor Friedrich Max Müller of Oxford—with whom Schliemann exchanged at least seventy letters—and Professor Archibald Henry Sayce, another Orientalist and Mesopotamian authority also at Oxford, among others.
Even Schliemann’s greatest modern detractor, David Traill, who has painstakingly “excavated” Schliemann’s life and problematic dealings, acknowledges that Schliemann’s notebooks are mostly “truthful and accurate” records of his Hisarlik finds. While laying bare the deceits of Schliemann, Traill concedes that “The excavations . . . of Schliemann rank among the most important in the history of archaeology.”
The Trojan War—if historical—was not because of a woman but over trade rights
Myth tells us one story, history another. We read from the myths and legends of the Greeks and Romans that the abduction of Helen by the Trojan prince Paris was the cause of the Trojan War. According to these legends, Troy’s destruction was brought about when Paris chose Aphrodite (Venus in the Roman myth) over Hera (Juno) and Athena (Minerva) in the famous beauty contest between the goddesses.
As different mythologers variously narrate, Zeus (Jupiter) had invited all the gods to a wedding between Peleus and Thetis because Thetis, a goddess, was pregnant with Zeus’s son. According to prophecies of the Delphic Oracle, this son would become greater than his father. Zeus couldn’t allow a son greater than himself, so he made sure she would marry a weak mortal king, Peleus, to get around the prophecy. It was a rigged contest because he gave the Apple of Discord (inscribed “to the fairest”) to Aphrodite rather than to either of them. Young Paris was riddled with arrows of desire by Eros (Cupid) and was not interested in a harmonious marriage blessed by Hera or conquering and ruling the world with Athena’s wisdom, whereas Aphrodite promised Paris the most beautiful woman in the world. The myth has Paris choosing Aphrodite and thus earning the undying hatred of Hera and Athena.
Aphrodite made good on her promise when Paris arrived in Sparta. Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, eloped with Paris and they both fled to Troy. The Greeks needed vengeance on Troy to defend her and to restore their national pride. This myth version of the cause of the Trojan War is a wonderful story but is unlikely and lacks any historical basis.
The famous William Gladstone, prime minister of Britain, was somewhat of a scholar, writing Homer and the Homeric Age between 1858 and 1876. There he suggested the Trojan War was actually a civil war. Either he was influenced and encouraged by Schliemann or Schliemann was influenced by Gladstone, as both cultivated each other’s opinions when Gladstone was prime minister in several different British governments.
In reality, history suggests a different story from the Homeric myth. All one has to do is look at a map to see that Troy is situated in northwestern Anatolia—Turkey today. This location is the bridge where Europe and Asia meet along the Dardanelles, the watery strait between the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean, especially the Aegean Sea.
Troy lay directly on the trade route between the East and West, and the currents and winds
converged in such a way as to bring water traffic into Troy’s harbor on the Bay of Besik whether the ships sought it or not. Troy either taxed the stalled merchandise or became an arbiter of trade. Both the people who traded in the East along the Black Sea and beyond and those in the West who sought Eastern luxuries could not avoid Troy, and they had to pay more in duty or tax to these Trojan middlemen who controlled the strait. Due to its unique strategic geographic position, Troy could act as a trade nexus, where goods from both directions would collect thanks to the wind and water currents. This is how Troy became an emporium for the meeting of West and East.
So if there was a Trojan War, it was most likely a trade war where others tried to conquer Troy in order to break its monopoly, in an attempt to reduce tariffs on whatever trade came through and eliminate the higher price tag added on by the Trojans. The warlike Mycenaean Greeks of the thirteenth century BC, then called the Achaeans, were more likely to confront Troy than their neighbors. The Hittites to the southeast of Troy in central Anatolia were also at some economic risk over the Trojan trade monopoly to the west, but no epic poem has survived narrating their struggles with the issue that the Greeks recorded, however poetically, in the Iliad. Thus the Trojan War—or many such battles combined in legend—was essentially a turf war.