The extraordinary story of the archaeology of Homeric myth
Nearly a century and a half ago the British Museum declined Heinrich Schliemann’s offer to show finds from Troy. Now it is making amends with the UK’s first major Troy exhibition. To prepare readers for the winter blockbuster, Andrew Shapland and Lesley Fitton introduce the archaeology of a famous World Heritage Site
The ancient Greeks told a story of heroes who fought a war against the powerful city of Troy. After a ten-year siege, they built a wooden horse large enough to conceal armed warriors, and tricked the Trojans into pulling it into their city. It fell, and its people were killed, enslaved or forced to flee.
We know about the Trojan War because it was central to Greek thought and art, and narrated in the Iliad and the Odyssey, epic poems attributed to Homer. Inspired by the legend and its characters – beautiful Helen, swift Achilles and Odysseus, who devised the famous horse – travellers visited the Troad in modern Turkey, beside the Dardanelles, a narrow strait leading into the Black Sea that borders Europe and Asia. In the 19th century archaeologists claimed to identify the city itself.
The story of Troy, with its universal themes of violence and destruction, love, despair and hope, continues to speak to people across cultures and through time. The archaeology too fascinates, not least because it appears to offer the possibility of answering the question: did the Trojan War actually happen? Excavations, to which the name of Heinrich Schliemann (1822– 90) will forever be linked, revealed Troy to be a tell – a great mound of
settlement debris accumulated over generations – known as Hissarlik. Schliemann’s were the first large excavations there, but he was not the first to dig. The story begins in the mid-18th century.
Finding Troy
The Greek city of Ilion (Roman Ilium) was widely accepted by Classical writers as the site of Troy and the Trojan War. The city became a place of pilgrimage in the ancient world for this reason. But it was felt that no traces remained of the Troy of which Priam was king, because the story said that it was annihilated after the Greek victory – and naturally, in this pre-archaeology era, no one dug to seek the earlier remains beneath the Greek and Roman cities. Then the matter was hugely confused by the influential geographer Strabo, who wrote that the Ilion/Ilium of his own day was some distance away from the Troy of the Trojan War. After the end of antiquity, the location of Ilion/Ilium was also lost, but because of Strabo’s misinformation, even when it was relocated it was not recognised as the site of the Troy of the Trojan War. By this time, too, there was another contender.
Among the first travellers to study the Troad in detail was Robert Wood (1717–71), a British scholar and member of parliament, who visited in 1742 and 1750–51. His lead was followed by an extensive cartographic survey set up by the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier (1752–1817), French ambassador to the Sublime Porte, as the government of the Ottoman Empire was known. The Comte began in 1784, and was soon joined by Jean-Baptiste Chevalier (1752–1836), the Comte’s personal secretary. Chevalier came up with a theory, which he first described publicly in Edinburgh in 1791, that Troy was to be sought near the modern village of Bounarbashi.
Two years later, Franz Kauffer, an engineer also employed by ChoiseulGouffier, published a map that showed the mound of Hissarlik as an ancient site. In 1801, Edward Clarke (1769– 1822), an English cleric and traveller, used coins and inscriptions to identify this site as Ilion/Ilium. However, the Bounarbashi theory held sway, and it was accepted by William Gell (1777–1836), a celebrated English archaeologist, topographer and artist,
who w published his detailed account in
The T Topography of Troy (1804).
It was left to a distinguished Scottish j journalist, Charles Maclaren (1782– 1 1866), to revive the Ilium theory in a b book published in 1822. His conclusion a at first went relatively unnoticed. In 1 1847 he visited the Troad to see the s sites for himself, and finally in 1863, at t the age of 80, he published a revised v version of his work, confidently titled
T The Plain of Troy Described & the Identity o of the Ilium of Homer with the New Ilium o of Strabo Proved.
Meanwhile, the first excavation in t the Troad had been conducted in 1787, u under Choiseul-Gouffier’s orders, by Salomon S Gormezano at the so-called ““tumulus of Achilles” near Sigeion. The T Calverts, a land-owning English family f based in Turkey and involved in i the consular service, conducted significant s fieldwork, first at Hanay Tepe, T a mound at Thymbra (1853).
John Brunton, an engineer serving in the British Army Works Corps, ordered 150 men to excavate at “Ilium Novum” (New Troy, as opposed to Bounarbashi, which was “Ilium Vetus” or Old Troy), after the Crimean War ended in 1856 and without realising the site’s significance, “fearing they might [otherwise] get into mischief”.
Frank Calvert began excavating at Ilium Novum in 1863; he also dug at Bounarbashi at around the same time, identifying the site with ancient Gergis. That autumn he wrote to Charles Newton, keeper of the newly formed Greek & Roman Department at the British Museum, offering his services, his lands and finds from the site to the museum. The trustees asked for more information, and the matter was dropped. In 1868 he was visited by another explorer. Calvert encouraged him to excavate at Hissarlik, a message his visitor put into practice within two years. He was Heinrich Schliemann.
Controversial treasures
Schliemann became the hero in his own myth, an example of a great life shaped through hard work and perseverance. His success in business meant that by his late 30s he had acquired a great fortune, and he decided to travel, visiting Egypt, India, China and Japan. This trip, and the book he wrote about it, La Chine et le Japon au Temps Présent (1867), helped him join the literary and intellectual scene of Paris, and he attended lectures at the Sorbonne.
His next book, Ithaque, le Péloponnèse, Troie, Recherches Archéologiques (1869), was based on his own diaries, which were heavily indebted to John Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers and edited as if the archaeological research was his motivation for the journey, rather than mostly done on his return. Unusually, he was ready to hire local workers to excavate sites he visited, often without permission. At Ithaca he claimed to have uncovered Odysseus’s palace and the cremated remains of Odysseus, Penelope and their children. Then he moved on to Mycenae, before reaching the Troad and digging at Bounarbashi for a couple of days – presented as serious archaeological research in his book, but appearing as less intensive and more dilettante in the diaries.
It was at the end of this trip that Schliemann visited Frank Calvert, whom he describes in his diary as “the famous archaeologist, who shares my opinion that Homer’s Troy is none other than Hasserlik [sic]”. There can be little doubt, however, that Schliemann wrote backdated diary entries after meeting Calvert, to make it look as if he had independently identified Troy; his dig at Bounarbashi then became an attempt not to prove it was Troy, but that it was not.
He began excavating at Hissarlik in April 1870. At first, continuing until 1873, he largely supervised the excavations himself. He made his most famous discovery in the western part of the mound, in the area of what he called the Scaean Gate: a hoard of metal objects of varying types, which he inevitably named Priam’s Treasure. The discovery of the treasure became publicly known only after the end of the excavations, when Schliemann had returned to Athens. There he put it on display in his house, and as news of the sensational discovery spread, he announced it in the German press. Trying now to work out exactly what happened from Schliemann’s notebooks and publications has proved difficult, and controversy continues to surround his finds.
He gave his Trojan collection to his native Germany, and it was displayed in Berlin in 1881. During the Second World War, some of Priam’s Treasure, including the gold, along with other valuable artefacts from Troy, were moved to a heavily fortified tower in Berlin Zoo for safety. Only in the 1990s was it revealed that they had been
removed to Russia during the fall of Berlin, and divided between the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage in St Petersburg. They went back on display at the Pushkin in 1996, but their ownership remains contested. Even if Priam’s Treasure was all found together, as Schliemann claimed, it is unlikely ever to be fully reunited.
Schliemann vindicated
Schliemann rapidly published a report of his discoveries, accompanied by an expensive two-volume Atlas with photos of the finds and excavations. An English version of the German original, published by John Murray with engravings and lithographs rather than photographic plates, appeared as Troy & Its Remains in 1875. 75 Schliemann visited London, , where he was well received. His supporters included Charles Newton and the prime minister, William Gladstone, a noted Homer scholar. There was some scepticism about Schliemann’s attempts to associate his finds with the Iliad, but few disagreed that he had made an important archaeological discovery.
Legal problems with the Ottoman authorities forced Schliemann to look elsewhere, and in 1874 he returned to Mycenae. Typically, he began to excavate without the permission of the Greek government and was forced to stop after a week, but he overcame such difficulties and on November 28 1876, he telegrammed King George i of Greece to announce his discovery of the graves of Agamemnon and his followers. Once again, g , Schliemann had excavated a site with Homeric associations and made spectacular discoveries that were to have a lasting impact on both scholarship and the public imagination.
He was back in London in 1877, giving a triumphant lecture about Mycenae at the Society of Antiquaries, which was featured in the Illustrated London News. He oversaw John Murray’s publication of the excavations, again lavishly illustrated: he even persuaded a reluctant Gladstone to write the foreword, and Newton also made an important contribution. Pleased with his reception, he decided to exhibit his finds from Troy. After being turned down by the British Museum – it didn’t have the space – the South Kensington Museum (now the v&a) stepped in, though the British Museum had earlier in the year acquired other Trojan objects, belonging to Frank Calvert, at Sotheby’s.
Meanwhile Calvert and others had argued that there were problems with Schliemann’s chronology for Troy, and it was pointed out that the putative contemporary Homeric remains from Mycenae were very different. Schliemann countered that the traditional date of the Trojan War of 1174bc must be wrong, as his finds at both Troy and Mycenae proved that it occurred at a much earlier date. His return to Troy from 1878 can be seen as a way of seeking to address such criticisms, and perhaps also to settle his own private doubts.
He had gathered around him a team of specialists. Rudolf Virchow (1821– 1902), a distinguished anthropologist
and archaeologist, joined him in 1879 and undertook a survey of the Trojan Plain. Émile Burnouf (1821–1907), director of the French School at Athens, also worked with him. Frank Calvert joined the team, to dig at Hanay Tepe with funding from Schliemann. This proved to be mutually beneficial, with Calvert contributing to Schliemann’s latest publication, Ilios: The City & Country of the Trojans (1880). The book did not mark a significant change in Schliemann’s opinions, and opened with a familiar autobiography of over 60 pages. But unlike earlier publications, which had the feel of expanded excavation diaries, the tone strived to be scientific.
Schliemann was notoriously shorttempered with his critics and found it hard to ignore one in particular. Ernst Bötticher (1842–1930) published several articles suggesting that Hissarlik was not a settlement but a vast cremation ground, a theory that can only be described as half-baked. After a site visit in 1889, Bötticher accepted that Hissarlik was indeed a settlement, but refused to apologise. So early the next year Schliemann decided to press home his victory by inviting international delegates to
Troy, who duly agreed on a supportive statement to be published in The Times. Having achieved this public endorsement, he died in Naples the day after Christmas, aged 68.
A long history
But if Hissarlik was Troy, the question remained: which Hissarlik? In 1880 Schliemann had recruited Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1853–1940), an architect, to be his assistant. Dörpfeld returned to excavate at Troy in 1893 and 1894, with the financial support first of Sophia Schliemann, Heinrich’s widow, and then of the German state. Dörpfeld identified a large circuit wall with impressive battlements, and he had no hesitation in pronouncing it the Troy of Homer’s poems. Given that the Mycenaean pottery associated with this sixth city meant that it was contemporary with the heavily defended sites in Greece at Mycenae and Tiryns, this was a more likely candidate for Homer’s Troy than Schliemann’s much smaller (and earlier) version. Both Calvert and Schliemann had missed the importance of this later wall, despite starting their excavations at the edge of the mound: Calvert had almost certainly found part of it, but no associated finds. Schliemann, too, appears to have dug through the wall of the sixth city and associated buildings.
Among those who had helped to establish the pottery sequence for mainland Greece was Carl Blegen (1887–1971). In 1932 he began excavations at Troy, organised by the University of Cincinnati and with
Dörpfeld’s blessing. The aimwas aim was to locate Troy within the chronological framework of the Aegean Bronze Age, and in doing so to understand more about the site’s development and wider relations.
The excavations ran until 1938. As Blegen noted, “From the start [they] were planned as a work of sober, serious research, and there was no compulsion to recover objects of startling or sensational character with high publicity value.” He deliberately left some areas unexcavated for future archaeologists, an opportunity grasped 50 years later by a joint project of the universities of Cincinnati and Tübingen (1988–2012). Manfred
Korfmann (Tübingen) was responsible for Bronze Age Troy, and Brian Rose (Cincinnati) focused on Greek and Roman times. Rose showed that Troy was already an important site at the time Homer composed the Iliad, around the eighth century bc. In turn, the Iliad reinforced Troy’s importance as a place of pilgrimage.
The oldest levels of Troy ( i–v) belong to the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, with Troy i–iii grouped together as the Trojan Maritime Culture (3000– 2200bc), with connections such as marble figurines across the Aegean; gold jewellery from Troy ii is paralleled on the nearby island of Lemnos. Troy was one of many fortified sites in a wider Aegean exchange network, distinguished then by its strategic position at the entrance to the Black Sea. In the following Trojan Anatolian Culture (Troy iv–v, 2200–1750bc), by contrast, changes in architecture and pottery point inland.
Troy vi and viia (1750–1180bc) span the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, the era of palaces and empires in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. Evidence for relations between Troy
and its neighbours comes in the form of Mycenaean pottery, which was also imitated locally, and Hittite texts. A wider collapse seen across the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age coincides with the apparently violent end of Troy viia.
The largest-scale building project occurred in Troy viii (900–85bc, embracing the era of Classical Greece), when the top of the mound was levelled to form a precinct for a Temple to Athena. This probably removed the Late Bronze Age buildings here, and with them any evidence for written administration, but still left 14m of occupation levels intact when Calvert and Schliemann began to excavate.
The Cincinnati-Tübingen team surveyed the entire site using various geophysical techniques that revealed that the layout of the Roman city of Ilium spread south of the mound of Hissarlik. An area where Brunton had found mosaic floors in 1856 could now be understood in the context of a late Roman city. Roman emperors had supported building projects at Troy, partly to celebrate Aeneas’ role in Rome’s foundation. Rose suggests that the site was finally abandoned in the early seventh century ad, with limited reoccupation in the 13th century, after which it was turned over to farmland. Its mythical associations were forgotten.
Was there a Trojan War?
Debate over Troy raged for a century after Schliemann had gathered experts at Hissarlik to defend his theories, including over the question whether Hissarlik was really the site described by Homer. And if most archaeologists today are convinced that Hissarlik is Troy, the question of whether any support for the Trojan War has been found there is far more contentious. Archaeological evidence is rarely easy to reconcile with history, let alone myth.
The Trojan War became a historical event when the Greek historian Herodotus wrote that it had occurred 800 years before his own time, that is around 1250bc. In the middle ages the Fall of Troy was regarded as a significant event in human history, and it became widely accepted it had occurred in 1183 or 1184bc. Despite Schliemann’s best efforts, there is only one Bronze Age object with a readable inscription from Troy. This is a bronze disc, just over 2cm across, found by the German team in 1995. It is a seal, inscribed on both sides in a hieroglyphic script used in Bronze Age Anatolia, which has been partially deciphered as the names of a scribe and a woman, probably his wife. Elsewhere, however, the search for scripts has proved more fruitful. Since excavations began at Boğazköy in central Anatolia in 1906, over 14,000 cuneiform tablets have been found. Two texts appear to have particular relevance to the question of the Trojan War: the Alaksandu Treaty and the Tawagalawa Letter.
The treaty was made between King Muwatalli ii (ruled c 1295–1272bc) and a a ruler called Alaksandu A of Wilusa. W It was long lo argued that Alaksandu A could be Paris’s P alternative name n in the Iliad
(Alexandros (A or Alexander), A and Wilusa W the Hittite form f of the Greek Ilios. I The problem, however, h was that this t identification of Wilusa W could not be independently in proved.
A breakthrough came in 1998 when a distinguished Hittitologist, David Hawkins, published a decipherment of a hieroglyphic inscription carved on the rock face of a pass near Izmir in Turkey called the Karabel relief. Hawkins realised it described a boundary between two territories. Once the mapping was done, the only possible location that remained for Wilusa was the Troad – and the only known site there, large enough to have been its administrative centre in the Bronze Age, is Hissarlik. Wilusa and Ilios are thus one and the same.
The Tawagalawa Letter shows that, at least at some periods, the Hittite Empire and Mycenaean Greece were in conflict. Troy viia ended with signs of burning and remains of spears and arrowheads. For Blegen this was evidence for the Trojan War, but others have disagreed. He dated the end of Troy viia to around 1240bc, which would have fitted the HittiteAhhiyawa conflict, but archaeologists now place this as late as 1180bc.
This was a time of widespread destruction across the Aegean and wider eastern Mediterranean, sometimes blamed on marauding “Sea Peoples” in contemporary sources. Crucially, this was also the time that the Mycenaean palaces on the mainland were destroyed, making it difficult to argue that Mycenaeans sacked Troy.
The textual evidence offers a useful background, but archaeology offers no clues about the attackers’ identity: it can neither confirm nor deny that the destruction was indeed the event that came to be described as the Trojan War. Schliemann’s belief in the veracity of Homer, however, has been vindicated. The epic tale relates to the world of the Bronze Age Aegean, and a long history of contact and conflict in which the great city of Troy did indeed play a central role.
The bp exhibition Troy: Myth & Reality is at the British Museum until March 8 2020, with a catalogue of the same name published by Thames & Hudson in collaboration with the British Museum. Andrew Shapland is Sir Arthur Evans curator of Bronze Age & Classical Greece at the Ashmolean Museum, and Lesley Fitton is co-curator of the exhibition and former keeper, Department of Greece & Rome at the British Museum