THE SEARCH FOR TROY
by Michael Wood

It is often said that the Greeks were the first people to deal with the events of the past in anything like a scientific manner, but it is clear that history has been far better preserved by the so-called barbarians than by the Greeks themselves .... Egyptians, Babylonians and Phoenicians by general admission have preserved the memorials of the most ancient and lasting traditions of mankind.

In the ancient world it was the almost uniform belief that the Trojan War was an historical event: the philosopher Anaxagoras was one of only a handful known to have doubted it, on the good grounds that there was no proof But then, as now, everyone knew there was no primary source for the war; equally they knew that it had happened! It is a paradox unique in historiography. When the 'Father of History', Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century BC, asked Egyptian priests whether the Greek story of the war was true, he was simply asking whether they had any alternative record of it, for there were no written sources before the epics of Homer were committed to writing, perhaps as late as the sixth century BC, hence there were no documentary sources at all available to the historians of the fifth century BC It is interesting to see then that those historians were prepared to give total credence to the basis of the tradition in Homer. Out of Homer Thucydides (cAOO BC) constructed a brilliant resume of 'prehistoric' Greece which remains one of the most balanced and plausible accounts of how the war might have come about, though we cannot be certain how much is his own intuition from observable remains ('archaeological' sites) and deductions from the Homeric tale, or how much he derived from sources we do not now have - most experts would rule out this last possibility. At any rate, Thucydides thought the story of Troy was true and the 'imperial' power of Mycenae a reality:

                We have no record of any action taken by Hellas as a whole before the Trojan War. Indeed, my view is that at this time
                the whole country   was not even called Hellas .... The best evidence for this can be found in Homer, who, though he was
                born much later than the time of the Trojan War, nowhere uses the name 'Hellenic' for the whole force.

Thucydides then considers increased knowledge of seafaring in the Aegean, 'capital reserves' coming into existence, and the gradual construction of walled cities with acquired wealth and a more settled life. All these facts he saw as prerequisites for a united expedition such as Homer describes:

Some on the strength of their new riches built walls for their cities, the weaker put up with being governed by the stronger, and those who won superior power by acquiring capital resources brought the smaller cities under their control. Hellas had already developed some way along these lines when the expedition to Troy took place. Agamemnon it seems must have been the most powerful of the rulers of his day: this was why he was able to raise the force against Troy ... at that time he had the strongest navy; thus in my opinion fear played a greater part than loyalty in raising the expedition against Troy. Mycenae certainly was a small place, and many of the towns of that period do not seem to us today to be particularly imposing: yet that is not good evidence for rejecting what the poets and what general tradition have to say about the size of the expedition ... we have no right therefore to judge cities by their appearances rather than by their actual power and there is no reason why we should not believe that the Trojan expedition was the greatest that ever took place.

Thus wrote Thucydides in the fifth century BC, that is, at as long a remove from the traditional date of the sack of Troy (of which more in a moment) as the signing of Magna Carta is from the present day. The lack of anything beyond the words of the poets and 'general tradition' is noteworthy; it should be said, though, that nothing in this interpretation has been rebutted by modern archaeology or textual criticism. It still remains a plausible model, despite the fact that many scholars today doubt the existence of the Mycenaean 'empire', the Trojan War, and even Troy itself: plausible, but as yet incapable of proof.

        How then did the ancients work out a chronology for their 'prehistoric' past? For instance, how did they date the Trojan War? In classical Greece detailed chronology went back to the first Olympiad in 776 Be. This date, we know, corresponds fairly closely to the adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks later in the eighth century, so, as we would expect, the adoption of a proper historical chronology came at about the time that written records start to exist. Hence George Grote's great History of Greece, written as late as the 1840S and 1850s, begins with the first Olympiad; what lay before was for him unusable, for archaeology had not yet opened a window into prehistory. As Grote recognised, however, the ancient Greeks had a vast mass of legends, stories, genealogies and so on relating to this preclassical world and which they thought referred to real events just as much as Homer did: these were the 'general traditions' Thucydides mentions, and they had clearly been preserved orally. They often included detailed chronological relations - everyone for instance 'knew' that the sack of Thebes took place before the Trojan War, that the Trojan War preceded the Dorian invasion of Greece, and so on. Even from before Herodotus' time historians had tried to construct a chronology for this and rationalise it as history, difficult as that was. Later on, Diodorus Siculus says how troublesome it was to write an account of 'prehistory' because he could not find a reliable collection of dates for the period before the Trojan War. Thucydides too limited himself to the broad conjecture that, before the time of the dominance of Mycenae, Cretans from Knossos had exerted a hegemony over the Aegean. As for the date of the war itself, most calculations varied between around 1250 BC in Herodotus and II35 BC in Ephorus; the earliest was 1334 BC in Doulis of Samos, the most influential the date arrived at by the librarian of Alexandria, Eratosthenes (1184- 1183 BC). Such dates - expressed as 'so long before the First Olympiad' - were usually computed from genealogies, with estimates of the length of generations, especially of the old Dorian royal families of Sparta. A remarkable example of how accurate such records could be survives in a little country church in Chios, where a family memorial stone names fourteen generations which take us back from the fifth century BC to the tenth century BC: it is thus possible, at least, that such material can be accurately preserved over centuries.

The most precise ancient dating of the Trojan War is to be found on the Parian marble, a chronicle of notable events, imaginary or real, computed off the legendary genealogies of the kings of Athens coming down to the mid-third century Be. Carved on a great slab of marble from the island of Paros, it was bought in Smyrna by an English ambassador of Charles I to the Ottoman court, , who brought it to England where it became part of the Earl of Arundel's collection. The marble was damaged in the Civil War when the prehistoric portion was destroyed, but luckily it had been copied by the antiquarian John Selden; thus we know that it dated the origin of the cult at Eleusis to the early fourteenth century BC, the sack of Thebes to 1251, the foundation of Salamis in Cyprus to 1202, the first Greek settlements in Ionia to 1087, Homer's floruit as 907 - and the sack of Troy to 5 June 1209 BC! Unfortunately the intriguing precision of the month and day is an astronomical computation derived from a misunderstanding of a line in the Little Iliad - 'it was midnight and a bright moon was rising' - which was interpreted as meaning a full moon: the nearest one to midnight occurs on the last lunation before the summer solstice!

It will be immediately apparent from such material that the Jewish historian Josephus' remarks about Greek historiography, written in the first century AD and quoted on p. 26, were accurate: the classical Greeks had no good source for their prehistoric past. Oral tradition, especially in the shape of Homer, was all they had to rely on, because, as Josephus points out in his preface to the Jewish War, 'it was late, and with difficulty, that they came to the letters they now use.' In terms of 'archaeology' the Greeks also had little sense of the ancient past: 'as for the places they inhabit, ten thousand destructions have overtaken them and blotted out the memory of former deeds so that they were ever beginning a new way of living.' There were of course 'archaeological' digs in the ancient world; people were always finding remains, and knew the names of the cities which Homer says sent troops to Troy (remember Thucydides' remarks (p. 27) on the ruins of Mycenae in his day, which he had clearly visited). In such places many Mycenaean tombs were found in the seventh and eighth centuries BC, and were associated with Homer's heroic age, for offerings to the heroes were left in them, a practice which continued into classical times. But the way such finds were interpreted shows that the ancients had no concept of what we now call Bronze-Age history;· oral transmission was their only vehicle. In one sense, then, the problem of the historicity of the Trojan War is no different today from what it was for Thucydides: Homer and the myths tell the story; the places they name were and are still visible, some clearly once powerful, some clearly utterly insignificant; similarly other myths centre on what were demonstrably Bronze-Age places - Nemea, Iolkos, Thebes and so on. If the myths of Greece actually contain a kernel of real history from the Bronze Age, as Thucydides believed, how do we prove it? In the last 100 years the new science of archaeology has attempted to provide answers. But before we turn to this attempt, we need to understand why the tale of Troy should have captured the imagination of our culture, for archaeology itself has not escaped that seduction. The story was clearly already the great national myth in Thucydides' Greece, but that was nothing compared to what has happened to it in the two and a half millennia which followed him. To the afterlife of the myth I now turn.

Such was the potency of the myth that a whole parade of conquerors felt drawn to stand and gaze on the plain where Achilles and Hector had fought it out. By then a small Greek colony had been founded on the overgrown ruins on Hisarlik. This was where tradition said the Trojan War had taken place, and in that belief the colonists of around 700 BC called it Ilion.

Did the bards, who originally conceived the idea of recording in song the names and deeds of the heroes who took part in the 'Trojan War', actually know something about the leaders and forces of a real war, or did they concoct the great list of places from Mycenaean Greece? Did they invent heroes from the stock names, like Ajax, whose tower shield perhaps betrays him as a hero of an earlier stratum of epic? Or Achilles, with his sea goddess mother and his magical attributes? Also, if there was Mycenaean epic poetry, then the tale of Troy would not have been the first siege to be the subject of song. We find a siege portrayed on the sixteenth-century 'siege rhyton' (vase) found by Schliemann; an attack on a town was depicted on a wall-painting in the megaron at Mycenae; the story of the expedition against Thebes may already have been the subject of story and song, and a suitable model. Are there, in fact, any specific elements in the tale of Troy which suggest that the epic which has come down to us accurately remembered details and incidents of a real Bronze-Age event?

I take it that certain central facts in Homer's story must be correct if we are to accept even the basic likelihood of the tale of Troy . If we cannot yet prove that a city called Troy was sacked by Greeks, we can at least show that in other significant details Homeric tradition was right. For instance, Hittite and Egyptian evidence suggests that Homer was correct in the names he called the peoples: Achaians and Danaans, in the case of the Greeks, and Dardanians in the case of the Trojans. But was Troy actually called Troy?

As we have seen, nothing has ever been found on the site of Hisarlik which indicates its name in the Bronze Age. Even if diplomatic tablets did exist there, they were destroyed long ago. Linear B could give us a Trojan woman (Toroja) but we cannot be certain. In a Hittite document of c. 1420 Be the western Anatolian state of Wilusa or (Wilusiya) appears next to a place called Taruisa, which - tantalisingly - appears only this once in the Hittite archive. If we could postulate an alternative form, Taruiya, for this name then we might have similar forms to Homer's Troia and Wilios in north-western Anatolia at the right time. However the present state of research into Hittite geography means that this seductive hypothesis cannot be pressed too far. The knotty problems surrounding the possible appearance of Greeks in Hittite sources are discussed in Chapter 6, but we can at least say that, as our evidence for Late-Bronze-Age geography grows, Homer has not yet been proved wrong and in some new instances we can corroborate his story. But it is to Hisarlik itself that we must go to have any hope of answering the question, did the story centre on Hisarlik- Troy from the Late Bronze Age: was Hisarlik always the focus of the Greek epic of Troy?

How long had Troy featured in the tale? In other words, was the story always about a city which stood near the Dardanelles in the region since called the' Troad? We need to ask this question, for it has often been claimed that the bards grafted the Trojan location on to an older model, for instance a poem about the Mycenaean sack of Thebes, or even an Achaian attack on Egypt such as that mentioned in the Odyssey. In a sense it does not matter what date we assign to Homer, whether the tale was composed in Ionia in 730 BC or was written down from a Chiot bard in around 550 BC Whichever date we choose, we are concerned with the period of the Aeolian Greek colony founded on Hisarlik in the eighth century BC We have seen evidence in the tale of the Lokrian maidens in Chapter I that this place was already associated with the tale of a Greek expedition to Troy before around 700. Even if we assume, as many do, that a bard called Homer actually visited the Aeolian colony of Ilion soon after its foundation in c.750 BC, we have to explain why obscure little Ilion became the centrepiece for the Greek national epic. It is a question which those who flatly deny the historicity of the Trojan War have found difficult to answer. What we cannot know for certain is whether, around 730 BC, architectural features of Bronze-Age Hisarlik (Troy VI-VII) were still visible. But if an epic tale which goes back to the end of the Bronze Age told of an attack on a real citadel of that time, should there not be surviving traces in Homer's description?

As we saw in Chapter I, the earliest travellers to the Troad were convinced that the poet had sung from personal observation - that he had actually been there. From Cyriac of Ancona to Alexander Kinglake visitors had seen, for instance, that it is indeed possible to see Samothrace from the top of Hisarlik, peeping over the heights of Imbros 50 miles away: 'So Homer appointed it, and it was,' as Kinglake said. There was certainly no disputing the general lie of the land - the islands, the Dardenelles, Mount Ida and so on - but other aspects of Homeric topography caused (and still cause) controversy; for instance the double spring of hot and cold water below the western wall- perhaps the most precise topographical feature that Homer mentions - could not be found and led as acute an investigator as Lechevalier astray, to the 'Forty Eyes' springs

Troy: the plain from the city, taken in 1893- The photograph gives a vivid impression of the steep height of the citadel. Much of the plain was marsh or shallow sea in the Bronze Age at Bunarbashi. Schliemann did in fact find remains of a spring, 200 yards from the west wall at Hisarlik, which had been blocked long ago by an earthquake, though it seems likely that the poet merged the Bunarbashi springs with the Hisarlik one for poetic effect. The problem is not so much Homer's 'accuracy' as a topographer, which is strictly a nonsensical idea, but the powerful effect his largely generic descriptions have had on everyone who reads him - but then that is what good poets do! On any reading of the evidence it would be expecting too much to expect all these epithets and details to cohere on the ground, but is it possible that, as Bronze-Age elements have certainly survived elsewhere in the poem, something has been preserved of Troy itself?

The general epithets Homer uses for Troy are of course not inapposite for the citadel on Hisarlik - 'well-built, beetling, steep, horse breeding', and so on but none is linguistically early; horse breeding, for instance, has attracted the attention of archaeologists because their finds of numerous horse bones suggest that horse breeding was a feature of the Bronze-Age Trojan plain (as it was later); but the phrase itself is not of Mycenaean date, though the memory is conceivably early. Well-built walls, strong towers and wide streets - which impressed Dorpfeld so much in Troy VI - are certainly applicable to LateBronze-Age Hisarlik more than to any other fortress in the Aegean, but they are applied to other places by Homer. 'Windy' is interesting; it is used of only one other place, Enispe, as we have already seen, and it is certainly applicable to Hisarlik, as anyone knows who has stood on it and felt the north wind which sweeps all year long round what was once a higher promontory. But such a description does not mean we have touched the Bronze Age. The description of Ilios as 'holy' is notable and raises a special linguistic problem: the word used comes from Aeolia, the north-western Aegean, and not Ionia, and may well be from an early linguistic stratum of the story, though probably not of the Mycenaean Age; nevertheless the finds of cult idols around the gates of Troy VI on Hisarlik, including six at the southern gate alone, could suggest that the place was remembered as having been uniquely sacred.

It is a pity that Homer is not more precise about the relationship of the citadel to the sea, for remarkable new discoveries show that in the Bronze Age Hisarlik was actually a sea-girt headland. At the time of Troy II the ramp found by Schliemann went down to a narrow plain and the sea, a wide bay which was entered between two headlands. By the time of Troy VI the sea was probably a mile from the hill. Troy, then, was a major port at the mouth of the Dardanelles which, like Miletus and Ephesus, eventually silted up and lost its raison d' etre. This crucial discovery makes sense of the whole history of Troy-Hisarlik in a way impossible before (though the existence of the bay was assumed by ancient writers and by early modern writers such as Wood). Homer's topographical indications, however, do not in this case describe what he must have seen, though two phrases may reflect it, where he has the eddying Scamander coming down to the 'broad bay of the sea' and when he describes a ship turning aside from the main channel of the Hellespont to come 'within Ilios'. We cannot, it would seem, say that Homer's topography is more like the Late Bronze Age than his own time, though some geomorphologists who have studied the new evidence think that it might be.

The poetic diction surrounding Troy and Ilios is not, of course, restricted to noun-epithet phrases like 'windy Troy' and so on. It contains certain archaic features which are not closely datable, such as the strange preposition proti and the regular observance of the digamma (the 'W', which does not exist in later Greek) in Wilios, the original form of Ilios. The broad impression gained by linguistics from this kind of material is that the story and its phraseology have been gradually refined and reduced to achieve extraordinary flexibility and utility with a very small vocabulary - an important proof that the tale of Troy had been told many times before it reached the form it takes in the Iliad. But what linguists cannot say is whether those many tellings spanned one, ten or twenty generations of epic singers.

To summarise: it is thought that narrative poetry of some kind existed in the Mycenaean Age and that some fragments of it exist in Homer, but very few in number; a very large part of Homeric formulaic vocabulary is more recent. But of course fragments of the hypothetical Mycenaean saga may exist in the Homeric epic quite independently of vocabulary and diction. The most striking example is the famous boar's-tusk helmet, manifestly a Mycenaean object though there is nothing in the diction of Homer's description which is ancient in itself. This reminds us that archaic diction can drop out of a text transmitted in this way even when an accurate description remains. In this light let us finally look at three points in Homer's physical description of Troy which can be considered as going back to the Bronze Age and which a singer of Homer's day may perhaps not have known. In none is there any linguistic feature which must be old; in all there are rare authentic details which could derive from an actual siege description of Bronze-Age Hisarlik.

1. The 'batter' or 'angle' of the walls of Troy: 'three times Patroclus climbed up the angle of the lofty wall' (Iliad, XVI, 702). Is this a description of the characteristic feature of the architecture of TroyVI? Blegen notes in his report that there were sections where the blocks were not close-fitting which his workmen could easily scale in just this fashion. (Only the top courses of the walls of Troy VI were visible in the eighth century BC, 'so weathered that they' could hardly be recognised as the once splendid masonry', said Dorpfeld.)

2. 'The great tower of Ilios' (Iliad, VI, 386). This was a beautifully built tower flanking the main gate of Troy, and there is an implication that it could be a place of propitiation - Andromache goes there instead of to the temple of Athena. The south gate of Troy VI was certainly the main gate of the Late Bronze-Age city, the 'Scaean Gate' if any (now that we know the plain was a bay it makes perfect sense that the main gate faced inland, and there is no archaeological evidence for a major gate facing the bay). The south gate of Troy VI was flanked by a great tower of finely jointed limestone blocks; moreover it was built round a major altar, and outside it were six pedestals (for cult idols?) and a cult house for burnt sacrifices. All in all there seems a strong case for thinking that the 'great tower of Ilios' preserves a memory of Troy VI.

3. Perhaps the most precise memory of all is the stretch of wall that was epidromos 'by the fig tree where the city is openest to attack and where the wall may be mounted' (Iliad, VI, 434). This tradition of a weak wall, apparently on the west, received extraordinary archaeological confirmation when Dorpfeld, as we saw in Chapter 2, found that the circuit wall had been modernised except in one short stretch of inferior construction on the western side. Again, this suggests an authentic detail from Troy VI.

It seems fair to conclude that the tale of Troy antedates the Iliad by at least the length of time needed for Ionian oral singers to create the extensive and elaborate but refined and economised range of epithets and formulas for Ilios, Troy and the Trojans. There is good reason to think, as Martin Nilsson did in his classic study Homer and Mycenae (1933), that the expedition against Troy is the fundamental fact and central point of the myth and must go back to the Bronze Age. Non-Homeric, mainland, versions of the saga existed too, suggesting that the story antedated at least part of the migration period. These pointers carry the theme well before the Aeolian Greek settlement of the Troad and the refounding of Greek Ilion, whose earliest possible date is C.750 BC. Only the strange story of the Lokrian maidens (see p. 26) suggests any Greek connection with or interest in the Troad in the Dark Ages, and there seems no historical or archaeological peg to explain the creation of a tale of Troy between the end of the Bronze Age and the eighth century BC This is one of the arguments which in my opinion defeat the attempts of some scholars to deny any connection between the story and the site of Hisarlik. A deserted, ruined and overgrown site in a sparsely populated area of north-west Anatolia, with no visible links with Greece, surely cannot have been selected as the setting for the Greek national epic unless it had at some time in the past been the focus of warlike deeds memorable enough to have been celebrated in song. The simplest explanation is that the tale of Troy owed its central place in later epic tradition to the fact that it was the last such exploit before the disintegration of the Mycenaean world - bards in all cultures must have in their repertoire the most up-to-date songs as well as the traditional ones, and Troy was the last.

The pottery evidence allows us to make a general estimate of the date of the fall of Troy VI. The fall was followed by an almost complete cessation of imports to VIla: only one sherd of thirteenth-century Mycenaean pottery can be safely attributed to the latter city (the site was so badly disturbed that Blegen felt other examples could be upcasts from Troy VI). If we tentatively suggest a date around 1260, it would fit in very well with the chronology of the Hittite letters. This would be the reign of Hattusilis III, during which Hittite relations with the kingdom of Ahhiyawa became notably hostile. At this time, too, we can say from Linear B tablets preserved at Pylos (C.1220 BC?) that the Greeks were making predatory forays towards the north-east Aegean, be it to the island of Lemnos (attacked by Agamemnon's army, according to Homer) or to the mainland in Aswija, an area south of the Troad where Homer has Achilles campaigning. The fall of Troy could then come into the lifetime of Alaksandus of Wilusa, whom we have seen reason to think could have some connection with Alexandros of (W)ilios. In any case, we can point to the likelihood that in Hattusilis' time the Greeks (Ahhiyawa) and the Hittites came to blows over 'the matter of Wilusa' . While admitting the difficulties surrounding the Wilusa question, these are noteworthy coincidences and they suggest that a memory, however dim, of these events underlies the tradition preserved by Homer. As we saw in Chapter 4, Greek epic was so very specific about where Troy was; the tradition had apparently already taken shape by the eighth century BC, incorporating elements which go back to the Bronze Age. If we can add to these facts the possibility that the great city of Troy VI was sacked and deliberately devastated, then we have gone some way towards upholding the basic accuracy of the tradition, namely that Troy did indeed stand on Hisarlik, that Troy VI was the city of Homer, and that, as Homer told, Bronze-Age Greeks attacked and sacked it. A plausible guess would be around 1260, at the time of Hattusilis' crisis in the west (page 181).

So we can at least feel certain about the Troy to which the tradition in Homer ultimately refers. The Troy celebrated in epic poetry - perhaps even before the end of the Mycenaean age - was Troy VI, in the last great phase of its life from c.I375 to c.I250. As we saw in the chapter on Homer, though some epithets applied to the city in the Iliad are merely stock descriptions, a number are so specific they must refer to the site on Hisarlik; the cumulative effect of the epithets strongly suggests that late Troy VI must be the 'Homeric' city. Now that we know the date of the fall of Troy VIla is too late for the Trojan War, this is made all the more certain. These last phases, culminating in Troy VIh, were the heyday of the city architecturally, economically and in terms of trade and contacts: this was the time when Mycenaean contacts with Troy were at their most intense (to judge by the pottery imports). This, then, was the city which the Greeks knew at the height of the Mycenaean empire.

What would a Bronze-Age traveller - or a bard - have seen if he had visited Troy towards the middle of the thirteenth century Be? It is time for us to put together the evidence found by Schliemann (albeit unwittingly), by Dorpfeld and Blegen, to which we can add further lost details of Troy VI demolished by Schliemann but recoverable from his notebooks. We will journey there as we did to Mycenae (p. 147) with an eye for what it looked like in its heyday, but this time we will approach it from a distance along one of its trade routes, reminding ourselves that archaeology has shown that Troy-Hisarlik was an important place irrespective of its role in Greek legend, and that its life to some extent depended on its contacts with the outside world, Anatolia in the first place, the Aegean, and even farther afield.

Our imagined journey is by sea, in a Bronze-Age Greek merchantman sailing with a cargo of copper ingots from Cyprus; perhaps there is some unworked ivory traded in Enkomi and a few crates of the Cypriot pottery favoured by the Trojans with its distinctive ladder patterns or cross-hatched lozenges. In'the pots is opium, cumin and coriander. Ours is coasting traffic, clinging to the shore 'like a child to its mother's knee' as Alexander Kinglake put it, an ancient network of routes from island to island and promontory to promontory, tiny ports of call on the few coastal margins where Bronze-Age man had scratched out a living. It is the trade observed in later centuries by the Anglo-Saxon Saewulf, by the Spaniard Clavijo, by Edward Clarke; they all stopped in the same safe havens, traded the same goods and cooked the same food in the galley - in the case of our thirteenth-century-BC boat, fish kebabs on skewers grilling over a fire on ballast stones in the boat's belly: such detail the archaeologist can confirm (see p. 21 I).

The journey from Cyprus to Troy would have taken two months or more no different from the eighth century AD when the Anglo-Saxon Willibald was at sea from 30 November until the following Easter (724-5), or, for that matter, the nineteenth century, when Alexander Kinglake spent forty days at sea between Smyrna and Cyprus in 1834. Only the arrival of steam and the tdegraph altered the timeless realities of Aegean shipping. Our boat would have put into all of the stopping-places in the islands and the .coast opposite: Rhodes, Kos and Miletus with their Mycenaean settlements, Cnidus and Zephyrus, Iasos on its peninsula with its cobbled streets and fisheries. Though thinly populated, the islands were naturally rich and by no means presented the barren aspect they do today - as late as the fifteenth century AD travelers speak of their extraordinary fertility.

From Miletus the Bronze-Age captain would have had to round Samos through the rough al.d windy straits opposite Icaria - exactly as Kinglake, Clarke and other travellers to Troy did in the nineteenth century. Then you steered along Chios, that most fertile and productive of all the islands off Asia Minor where, as anyone who has sailed it will know, the passage is sweetened by the wind-borne scent of orchards and olive groves. From Chios, according to the Pylos tablets, Asian slaves were shipped back to work in the mainland palaces, and by 'Chios' the Bronze-Age scribes doubtless meant the fine natural harbour of Emborio on the southern tip of the island, where a Mycenaean settlement stood on a steep promontory over a sheltered bay with magnificent views across to the hills of Asia Minor. (The name of the island, Ki-si-wi-ja in the Linear B tablets, it has been suggested, is the Phoenician word for mastic, the resinous gum of the lentisk tree which was highly sought after in the ancient world.)

After Chios another important port of call was Thermi in Lesbos. Lesbos has always been an intermediary between the Aegean and Asia Minor, so close to the shores of the Troad. It shared the culture of Troy VI and was sacked at the same time, around 1250 - by Achilles according to Homer, by Pijamaradus according to the Hittite Foreign Office! The port lay halfway along the eastern side of the island, well fortified with a double wall behind which were packed narrow houses and str~ets paved with beach pebbles. Thermi was one of the biggest towns in the Aegean; its people worked copper, wove textiles and made their local red and grey pottery; they fished with bone fish-hooks, and, so far as the archaeologist can tell, they liked oysters and sea-urchins: one more city of the Bronze Age whose end was fiery. In the centre of the island in classical times was a shrine to the Bronze-Age god Smintheus, a powerful inflicter and averter of plague. His perhaps were the idols sent to the ailing Mursilis II; to him, according to Homer, the Greeks at Troy prayed for relief (Iliad, 1,456). Smintheus was also later worshipped in Tenedos and the Troad, where he had a temple at Hamaxitus, and it may have been for him that the custom began among sailors of making food offerings into the sea off Cape Lekton where his temple ~tood, a custom which survived into modern times - transferred to an Islamic saint.

Approaching Troy and the mouth to the Dardanelles the Bronze-Age sailor's feelings were no doubt the same as Edward Clarke's in 1801: 'No spectacle could be more grand than this corner of the Aegean Sea ... Tenedos upon the west, and those small Isles which form a group opposed to the Sigean Promontory. Nothing, excepting the oars of our boat, ruffled the still surface of the water: no other sound was heard. The distant Islands of the Aegean appeared as if placed upon the surface of a vast mirror ... (ahead) the mountainous Island of Imbros, backed by the loftier snow-clad summits of Samothrace .... ' (Travels.) It is often difficult to sail against the wind into the Dardanelles - this was why Lord Byron spent so long kicking his heels in 1810, in company with a score of other vessels (p. 41), but in the Bronze Age the bay of Troy must have been a magnet for seafarers, who had a safe haven once they had turned 'inside Ilios'. The mouth of the bay between the headlands was about I t miles across. Inside, in front of Troy, it opened out to about 3 miles of shallow sea, fringed by the alluvial flats of the rivers, salt marshes, lagoons and wind-blown sanddunes.

The city stood on a ridge sticking westwards into the bay; below it was perhaps a mile of alluvial plain stretching to the sea-shore, much of it marshy in winter but otherwise dry; in this respect it must have resembled the plain of Argos, well watered and green in the spring, russet brown in high summer except around the marshes: ideal horse-raising country. There would have been no real harbour, just a trading shore where boats tied up to stakes or stone anchors on a sandy beach. Among the small local craft we might imagine fishing-boats, especially at the time of the seasonal migrations of mackerel and tunny which come through the Dardanelles each autumn; perhaps like the Turks after them the Trojans had wooden watchtowers on the straits to alert them for the harvest, and its slaughter in the offshore nets. The bay must also have been especially rich in shellfish, oysters and sea-urchins.

At any one time there would have been only a handful of boats in the bay, though from the archaeology we might be permitted to imagine the odd seagoing Greek 'tramp' from Tiryns or Asine with a cargo of pottery- stirrup jars full of perfumed oil, alabastros cups and bowls for use in Trojan noble houses. But this was a small trade to judge by the local wares. Troy had been, and remained, an Anatolian city. Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, the Mycenaean captains had a few things to offer the Trojan royal supervisor - carnelian beads, ivory boxes, an ivory gaming-board with counters, pins of electrum or silver, even perhaps a decorated ostrich egg: such were the luxury products of the Age of Bronze!

The Trojan king presumably had his own ships, not only.to protect his shores from the perennial raiders and pirates, but to raid in his turn, to seize slaves and loot, and also to sell some of his own products which went wider afield. He perhaps exported bales of wool, spun yarn and made-up textiles, for, like Knossos, Troy was a sheep town with (we may guess) 'state-run' cottage factories in the outlying villages which sent their renders in to the palace stores. The Trojan local grey pottery found its way in small quantities to Cyprus and even to Syria and Palestine, though 'export' is doubtless too grand a word for the process which took it there. Lastly, as we have seen, horse breeding may have been a major element in the Trojan economy, not only foals but fully grown warhorses being 'exported; we may then imagine horses grazing on the lower plain and corrals for breaking and training nearer the town.

From the sea it was a short walk to the city across a mile of alluvial plain. Troy stood on the northern edge of a plateau which fell away precipitously on the north to the marshy valley of the river Dumrek Su (classical Simois). Whether there was an outer town around the citadel on Hisarlik is still not known. Blegen found traces of houses on the south and west and located a cremation cemetery for Troy VI 500 yards south of the city walls on the southern slope of the plateau. But test pits sunk by Schliemann and Blegen on the plateau revealed no Bronze-Age remains. Perhaps the later building of New Ilium destroyed any trace, and it is at least possible that Troy VI had a sizeable outer town, comparable in area with, say, Eutresis (500 yards square enclosed by the outer walls, the built-up centre 200 by 150, similar to the citadel of Troy VI). If this was so, then the place will have looked far more like a regional capital than would appear today from its ruins. The royal citadel on Hisarlik stood on the western eminence of the plateau and rose in three concentric terraces, the uppermost about 130 feet above sea-level, the lowest about 100 feet. It enclosed an area of 200 yards by 120 - comparable with the 'capital' sites in Greece - within which water-supply was ensured by a deep well in the eastern bastion (though there was a spring outside the walls to the south-west). The great walls of Troy VI had twice been remodeled, the final phase with its towers the product of three or four generations of rulers after 1400. The landward approach was, naturally, the heaviest defended, where the roads from the interior and the western Anatolian states led to the city: here were the tallest walls and the most massive gates and towers.

The visitor to Late-Bronze-Age Troy would have arrived at the south gate past the houses which lay outside the fortress. This gate was the main entrance to Troy and from it a paved street ascended the terraces of the city to the entrance of the king's palace. To the left of the gate was a great square tower of limestone blocks standing about 50 feet high and projecting 10 yards out from the gate. In this tower was one of the principal altars of the city and in front of it was a line of six stone pedestals on which stood the images of the Trojan gods to greet the visitor. On the right-hand side of the gate stood a long house where burnt sacrifices were performed; here we might imagine the Trojans making offerings before they went on journeys or campaigns, and likewise strangers sacrificing before they entered the city. These cult areas outside the gate and its great tower perhaps help account for the later Greek traditions of 'holy Ilios'. To the right of the gate as we look at it Dorpfeld thought there had been two great flagstaffs peeping over the wall. Troy had three main gates, on the south, east and west, all perhaps fronted by idols, and a postern gate by the great eastern bastion. The technique of the masonry distinguished Troy from citadels of the Aegean world, and from Hittite work. The closely fitted limestone blocks, with their characteristic batter going up the first 12 or 15 feet, surmounted by a vertical stone superstructure; the vertical offsets worked out of limestone blocks of many shapes and sizes with the jointing alternated from one course to the next and the cutting of the offsets finished on the wall: all this seems to reflect a native north-west Anatolian style of work which goes back many centuries on Hisarlik, and is later found at the nearby Phrygian site of Gordion.

Of these great walls enough survives today on the south side to gain an impression - particularly at the projecting tower on the south-east, so finely jointed though no mortar is used, and above all at the eastern bastion, 60 feet wide and still standing nearly 30 feet high, once perhaps a watchtower which dominated the plain of the Simois and the eastern approach along the plateau. From this bastion a 200-yard stretch of wall ran along the northern crest of the hill, a 'splendid wall of large hewn limestone blocks', as Schliemann put it; already badly damaged by classical builders this was demolished by Schliemann between 1871 and 1873. Just how massively this was constructed was discovered by Carl Blegen when he examined the north-western corner in the 1930s. Here the wall took a sharp turn round the hill, descending 8 yards in a mere 15, and here Blegen found stepped foundations, which had been sunk no less than 23 feet below the Troy VI ground-level to provide support for a bastion which must have been well over 60 feet high: the visitor can still see the bottom courses of this structure which must have been dug out by the builders of Ilium Novum.

Such were the walls of Troy, which were certainly 'well built', 'finely towered' and 'lofty-gated' as later Greek tradition had it. Only on the western side was a small segment of the older circuit still not replaced. This archaic wall, which can still be seen today, was only half as thick as the new wall and far less strongly constructed, made of smaller, rougher stones and not as deeply founded. Here the city's defenses were weakest and easiest to attack.

Inside Troy all the roads seem to have led up to the western summit of the little hill where we may assume the palace stood. On the terraces below the palace were about twenty-five large houses or mansions in which the immediate retainers and kinsmen of the royal family must have lived, with perhaps separate houses f(lr kings' brothers and sons. The biggest were quite impressive large two-storeyed buildings nearly 30 yards long, resembling the megara at Tiryns and Mycenae though entered by side-doors. One of them, the so-called Pillar House near the south gate, was 28 yards long and 13 wide with a main hall and kitchen area, its roof supported by large central columns of stone, one of which survives today; presumably the upper storey was wood-framed with mud brick and plaster, with windows, or possibly a clerestory roof (a style of architecture still to be seen in north-west Anatolia). Interestingly enough, Blegen thought that this building was converted into an arsenal or a barracks in the last phase of Troy VI, for a hoard of slingshots was found inside, along with evidence that large quantities of food had been consumed there; and, as we have seen, in the street to the west, Blegen also found - 'inexplicably' - a human skull.

What of the palace itself? The conventional view since Dorpfeld has been that no trace survived of the top of Hisarlik, sheared off when the civic centre of Roman Ilium was built. But modern research has shown that the left summit of the hill was stilI partly preserved when Schliemann began his dig in 1870, for there he came upon the footings of the archaic temple visited by Alexander the Great with parts of Troy VI buildings close to it. Conceivably, then, the Greek colonists who founded Ilion in C.730 BC built their temple over the ruins of ' Priam's palace'. Furthermore, 10 yards or so to the south-east, almost in the centre of Hisarlik at a height of 120 feet, in investigating an 'island' left by Schliemann and Dorpfeld, Carl Blegen found a shabby s-yard stretch of wall with another running parallel to it: these IlJ.y directly under the footings of a Roman colonnade of shops. This fragment oflate Troy VI stood immediately to the west of where we would expect the palace entrance to have been, at the top of the road which curves up from the south gate. Tiny remnant as it is, this may be our only surviving fragment of the palace of Bronze-Age Troy.

Of the appearance of the palace we know nothing, but it must have resembled the characteristic megara of Troy VI (a style going right back to the great buildings of Troy II - there is remarkable architectural continuity on HisarIik). Like Pylos it must have been surrounded by staterooms and domestic accommodation. There presumably, like all bronze age rulers, the king of Troy had magazines and workshops, stores of hundreds of jars of oil, grain, figs, wine. Perhaps a, as at Pylos, there was a chariot workshop with craftsmen and stores of axles and wheels; there must have been a smithy whee bronze weapons were made, in styles influenced by both. Potters there must have been in numbers, making the masses of local wares and local imitations of Greek pots; presumably their kilns lay outside the citadel. As befitted a textile town there were workshops inside the walls, where thousands of spindle whorls were found by all three diggers of Hisarlik; it is not unreasonable to imagine a royal store of cloth and wool with made-up cloaks like those at Pylos: ordinary ones, 'cloaks (or followers', royal garments and 'cloaks suitable for guest gifts'. If we wish to push our speculations a little further, on analogy with the Hittite and Linear B tablets we might assume that the king of Troy employed a goldsmith in addition to his bronzesmiths. He may have had a craftsman to make the fine sword pommels of alabaster or white marble which were evidently prized in Late-Bronze-Age Troy.

He must have had dyers to colour his linen and wool: this job, like the spinning and weaving, and the grinding of grain, would have been done by women. In addition to his potters he must have had a fuller, a cutler, unguent boilers, bakers, huntsmen, woodcutters, priests to tend his shrine, a soothsayer - even perhaps a physician (such as the i-ja-te in Linear B). Like the kings of Mycenae he may have had a singer of tales who could tell of the deeds of his ancestors; he will certainly have had royal messengers and heralds, and may even have employed a scribe who could write in Hittite on tablets of clay or wood. All these ideas are plausible, but we simply cannot prove them. Looking at the surviving houses we may guess that the total population of Troy VI can hardly have exceeded 1000 within the walls; how many more lived in the lower town and plain we do not know, but 5000 would seem roughly right. However, archaeology could suggest that a still wider area shared the culture of Troy VI - including, for instance, settlements on Gallipoli; Thermi on Lesbos clearly also had links. So we may yet find that Troy VI was a greater power in the north-east Aegean than has been supposed. On his own, however, the king of Troy could could hardly have raised an armed force of more than a few hundred heavily armed warriors. If he could call upon his Arzawan neighbours for help in a crisis - or even the Great King of Hatti himself - we do not know it. So much of the history of Hisarlik remains a mystery, though it is exciting to think how much new discoveries could change this situation: especially if (as must surely happen) an archive is discovered of one of Troy's western Asiatic neighbours.

Troy-Hisarlik, then, was an Anatolian culture in contact with the Aegean world. Troy VI and Troy VIla were just two of the settlements which were destroyed in Anatolia and the Aegean at the end of the Bronze Age. If we wish to link their destructions to the later Greek traditions about 'Troy', we should not forget that they also have a context in the wider historiographical problems posed by the destruction of cities in Mediterranean lands in the Late Bronze Age. In one sense there were many Troys and many Trojan wars.