Troy (Greek Τροία Troia (or CMC Τροίη) also Ἴλιον Ílion; Latin: Troia, Ilium) is a legendary city, scene of the Trojan War, part of which is described in Homer's Iliad, an epic poem in Ancient Greek, composed in the 9th or 8th century BC, but containing older material (Iliad means "epic of Ilion").
Troy (Turkish: Truva) is also the name of an archaeological site, the traditional location of Homeric Troy, in Asia Minor or Anatolia, close to the seacoast in what is now northwest Turkey, southwest of the Dardanelles under Mount Ida.
A new city of Ilium was founded on the site that many believed to be the location of the legendary Ilion in the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus. It flourished until the establishment of Constantinople, and declined gradually during Byzantine times. The Roman city of Celeia (now Celje in Slovenia) has been referred to by some writers as Troia secunda ("the second Troy").
In the 1870s the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated the area. Later excavations revealed several cities built in succession to one another. One of the earlier cities (Troy VIIa) is often identified with Homeric Troy. While such an identity is disputed, the site has been successfully identified with the city called Wilusa in Hittite texts; Ilion (which goes back to earlier Wilion with a Digamma) is thought to be the Greek rendition of that name.
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One generation before the Trojan War, Heracles captured Troy and killed Laomedon and his sons, except for young Priam. Priam later became king. During his reign, the Mycenaean Greeks invaded and captured Troy in the Trojan War (traditionally dated to 1193 BC-1183 BC). Both the Trojans and Mycenaean cultures were destroyed in the war. The Trojans Aeneas, Brutus, and Elymus escaped the destruction and became founders of Alba Longa (Rome), Britain, and the Elymi, a people of Sicily. The Maxyans were a west Libyan tribe who said that they were descended from the men of Troy, according to Herodotus. The Trojan ships transformed into naiads, who rejoiced to see the wreckage of Odysseus' ship.
Trojan rule in Asia Minor was replaced by the "sons of Herakles" dynasty in Sardis that ruled for 505 years until the time of Candaules. The Ionians, Cimmerians, Phrygians, Milesians of Sinope, and Lydians moved into Asia Minor. The Persians invaded in 546 BC.
Some famous Trojans are: Dardanus (founder of Troy), Laomedon, Ganymede, Priam, Paris, Hector, Teucer, Aesacus, Oenone, Telamon, Tithonus, Antigone, Memnon, Corythus, Aeneas, Brutus, and Elymus. Kapys, Boukolion, Aisakos, and Paris were Trojan princes who had naias wives. Some of the Trojan allies were the Hittites and the Amazons. The Aisepid nymphs were the naiads of the Trojan River Aisepos. Pegsis was the naiad of the River Grenikos near Troy. They loved troy.
A Trojan law mentioned by E.O. Gordon allowed queens as well as kings. This law was adopted by King Dunvallo Molmutius (from Brutus) in his code and is still in effect today in Britain.
Mount Ida ("Mount of the Goddess") in Asia Minor, is where Ganymede was abducted by Zeus, where Anchises was seduced by Aphrodite, where Aphrodite gave birth to Aeneas, where Paris lived as a shepherd, where the nymphs lived, where the "Judgement of Paris" took place, where the Greek gods watched the Trojan War, where Hera distracted Zeus with her seductions long enough to permit the taking of Troy, and where Aeneas and his followers rested and waited until the Greeks set out for Greece. The altar of Panomphaean (‘source of all oracles’) was dedicated to Jupiter the Thunderer (Tonatus) near Troy. Buthrotos (or Buthrotum) was a city in Epirus where Helenus, the Trojan Seer, built a replica of Troy. Aeneas landed there and Helenus foretold his future.Homeric Troy
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In the Iliad, the Achaeans set up their camp near the mouth of the river Scamander (modern Karamenderes), where they had beached their ships. The city of Troy itself stood on a hill, across the plain of Scamander, where the battles of the Trojan War took place. The site of the ancient city today is some 15 kilometers from the coast, but the ancient mouths of Scamander, some 3,000 years ago, were some 5 kilometers further inland, pouring into a bay that has since been filled with alluvial material.
Besides the Iliad, there are references to Troy in the other major work attributed to Homer, the Odyssey, as well as in other ancient Greek writings. The Homeric legend of Troy was elaborated by the Roman poet Virgil in his work the Aeneid. The Greeks and Romans took for a fact the historicity of the Trojan War, and in the identity of Homeric Troy with the site in Anatolia. Alexander the Great, for example, visited the site in 334 BC and made sacrifices at the alleged tombs of the Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroclus.
Ancient Greek historians placed the Trojan War variously in the 12th, 13th or 14th century BC: Eratosthenes to 1184 BC, Herodotus to 1250 BC, Douris to 1334 BC.
In November 2001, geologists John C. Kraft from the University of Delaware and John V. Luce from Trinity College, Dublin presented the results (see , , & ) of investigations into the Geology of the region that had started in 1977. The geologists compared the present geology with the landscapes and coastal features described in the Iliad and other classical sources, notably Strabo's Geographia. Their conclusion was that there is regularly a consistency between the location of Troy as identified by Schliemann (and other locations such as the Greek camp), the geological evidence, and descriptions of the topology and accounts of the battle in the Iliad.
There is, however, a recent theory proposed by historian Iman Wilkins that proposes a new location of Troy in England. The theory is generally not accepted by classicists.
Professor Felipe Vinci has set forth another theory,, locating Troy in southern Finland and identifying all the besiegers and besieged around the Baltic Sea. His theory holds that the Trojan War happened many centuries earlier than generally believed, just before the Greeks were forced by a change in climate to migrate south to the Mediterranean.
Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, while accepting the traditional geography of the Trojan War, argued/dag/index.htm that the Greek Dark Ages never happened, and that the Trojan War was fought several centuries later than is now generally believed.
Partial human remains were found in houses and in the streets, and near the north-western ramparts a human skeleton with skull injuries and a broken jawbone. Three bronze arrowheads were found, two in the fort and one in the city. However, only small portions of the city have been excavated, and the finds are too scarce to clearly favour destruction by war over a natural disaster.
Troy VIIb1 (ca. 1120 BC) and Troy VIIb2 (ca. 1020 BC) appear to have been destroyed by fires.
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In August 2003 following a magnetic imaging survey of the fields below the fort, a deep ditch was located and excavated among the ruins of a later Greek and Roman city. Remains found in the ditch were dated to the late Bronze Age, the alleged time of Homeric Troy. It is claimed by Korfmann that the ditch may have once have marked the outer defences of a much larger city than had previously been suspected.
Possible evidence of a battle was also found in the form of arrowheads found in layers dated to the early 12th century BC.
Korfmann died on 11 August, 2005, and since the digging permit was tied to his person, it is uncertain how and when the excavations will continue.
The Hittite king Mursili II in ca. 1320 BC wrote a letter to the king of the Ahhiyawa, treating him as an equal and implying that Miletus (Millawanda) was controlled by the Ahhiyawa, and also referring to an earlier "Wilusa episode" involving hostility on the part of the Ahhiyawa. This people have been identified with the Homeric Greeks (Achaeans).
These identifications were rejected by many scholars as being improbable or at least unprovable. Trevor Bryce in 1998 championed them in his book The Kingdom of the Hittites, citing a recovered piece of the so-called Manapa-Tarhunda letter, which refers to the kingdom of Wilusa as beyond the land of the Seha (known in classical times as the Caicus) river, and near the land of Lazpa (the Isle of Lesbos).
Recent evidence adds weight to the theory that Wilusa is identical to archaeological Troy. Hittite texts mention a water tunnel at Wilusa, and a water tunnel excavated by Korfmann, previously thought to be Roman, has been dated to around 2600 BC.
The identifications of Wilusa with archaeological Troy and of the Achaeans with the Ahhiyawa remain controversial, but gained enough popularity during the 1990s to be considered a majority opinion.Homeric Ilion and historical Wilusa
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The events described in Homer's Iliad, even if based on historical events that preceded its composition by some 450 years, will never be completely identifiable with historical or archaeological facts, even if there was a Bronze Age city on the site now called Troy, and even if that city was destroyed by fire or war at about the same time as the time postulated for the Trojan War.
No text or artifact has been found on site itself which clearly identifies the Bronze Age site. This is probably due to the planification of the former hillfort during the construction of Hellenistic Ilium (Troy IX), destroying the parts that most likely contained the city archives. A single seal of a Luwian scribe has been found in one of the houses, proving the presence of written correspondence in the city, but not a single text. Our emerging understanding of the geography of the Hittite Empire makes it very likely that the site corresponds to the city of Wilusa. But even if that is accepted, it is of course no positive proof of identity with Homeric (W)ilion.
A name Wilion or Troia does not appear in any of the Greek written records from the Mycenean sites. The Mycenaean Greeks of the 13th century BC had colonized the Greek mainland and Crete, and were only beginning to make forays into Anatolia, establishing a bridgehead in Miletus (Millawanda). Historical Wilusa was one of the Arzawa lands, in loose alliance with the Hittite Empire, and written reference to the city is therefore to be expected in Hittite correspondence rather than in Mycenaean palace archives.Status of the
IliadThe dispute over the historicity of the Iliad was very heated at times. The more we know about Bronze Age history, the clearer it becomes that it is not a yes-or-no question but one of educated assessment of how much historical knowledge is present in Homer. The story of the Iliad is not an account of the war, but a tale of the psychology, the wrath, vengence and death of individual heroes that assumes common knowledge of the Trojan War to create a backdrop. No scholars assume that the individual events in the tale (many of which centrally involve divine intervention) are historical fact; on the other hand, no scholars claim that the scenery is entirely devoid of memories of Mycenaean times: it is rather a subjective question of whether the factual content is rather more or rather less than one would have expected. The ostensible historicity of Homer's Troy faces the same hurdles as with Plato's Atlantis. In both cases, an ancient writer's story is now seen by some to be true, by others to be mythology or fiction. It may be possible to establish connections between either story and real places and events, but these always risk to be subject to Selection bias.The
Iliad as essentially legendarySome archaeologists and historians maintain that none of the events in Homer are historical. Others accept that there may be a foundation of historical events in the Homeric stories, but say that in the absence of independent evidence it is not possible to separate fact from myth in the stories.
In recent years scholars have suggested that the Homeric stories represented a synthesis of many old Greek stories of various Bronze Age sieges and expeditions, fused together in the Greek memory during the "dark ages" which followed the fall of the Mycenean civilization. In this view, no historical city of Troy existed anywhere: the name derives from a people called the Troies, who probably lived in central Greece. The identification of the hill at Hissarlik as Troy is, in this view, a late development, following the Greek colonisation of Asia Minor in the 8th century BC.
A large number of tourists visit the site each year, mostly coming from Istanbul by bus or by ferry via Çanakkale. The visitor sees a highly commercialised site, with a large wooden horse built as a playground for children, then shops and a museum. The archaeological site itself is, as a recent writer said, "a ruin of a ruin," because the site has been frequently excavated, and because Schliemann's archaeological methods were very destructive: in his conviction that the city of Priam would be found in the earliest layers, he demolished many interesting structures from later eras, including all of the house walls from Troy II. For many years also the site was unguarded and was thoroughly looted.
Such was the fame of the Trojan story in Roman and medieval times that it was built upon to provide a starting point for various legends of national origin. The most famous is undoubtedly that promulgated by Virgil in the Aeneid, tracing the ancestry of the founders of Rome, and more specifically the Julio-Claudian dynasty, to the Trojan prince Aeneas. Similarly Geoffrey of Monmouth traces the legendary kings of Britain to a supposed descendant of Aeneas called Brutus.