Historicity of the Iliad
Encyclopedia
The extent of the historical basis of the Iliad has been a topic of scholarly debate in classical studies since the 19th century.
While the Age of Enlightenment
had rejected the story of the Trojan War
as fable, the discoveries made by Heinrich Schliemann
at Hisarlik
reopened the question in modern terms, and the subsequent excavation of Troy VIIa and the discovery of the toponym Wilusa
in Hittite correspondence
has made it plausible that the Trojan War cycle was at least remotely based on a historical conflict of the 12th century BC
, even if the poems of Homer
are removed from the event by more than four centuries of oral tradition.
, even as philosophical scepticism was undermining faith in divine intervention in human affairs. In the time of Strabo
topological disquisitions discussed the identity of sites mentioned by Homer
. There was no break when Greco-Roman culture was Christianised
: Eusebius of Caesarea
offered universal history
reduced to a timeline
, in which Troy
received the same historical weight as Abraham
, with whom Eusebius' Chronologia began, ranking the Argives and Mycenaeans among the kingdoms ranged in vertical columns, offering biblical history on the left (verso), and secular history of the kingdoms on the right (recto). Jerome
's Chronicon
followed Eusebius, and all the medieval chroniclers began with summaries of the universal history of Jerome.
With such authorities behind it, the historic nature of Troy and the events of the Trojan War
continued to be accepted at face value by post-Roman Europeans. Geoffrey of Monmouth
's pseudo-genealogy traced a Trojan origin for royal Briton descents in Historia Regum Britanniae
. Merovingian descent from a Trojan ancestor was embodied in a literary myth first set forth in Fredegar's chronicle (2.4, 3.2.9), to the effect that the Franks were of Trojan stock and took their name from King Francio, who had erected a new Troy on the banks of the Rhine. Even before the rational Age of Enlightenment
these "facts" underlying the medieval view of history were doubted by Blaise Pascal
: "Homer wrote a romance
, for nobody supposes that Troy and Agamemnon
existed any more than the apples of the Hesperides
. He had no intention to write history, but only to amuse us." After the Enlightenment the stories of Troy were devalued as fables by George Grote
.
The discoveries made by Heinrich Schliemann
at Hisarlik
reopened the question in modern terms, and recent discoveries have fueled more discussion across several disciplines. 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 by name. 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)ilios.
The bilingual toponymy
of Troy/Ilion is well established in the Homeric tradition. A name Wilios or Troia does not appear in any of the Greek written records from the Mycenean sites, however. 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.
has been very heated at times. Modern discourse has turned from questions of the historicity of the particular human events that transpire in the Iliad; Moses I. Finley
, in The World of Odysseus (1954), which sets out a coherent picture of the society reflected in the Iliad and the Odyssey, deflects the question as "beside the point that the narrative is a collection of fictions from beginning to end" Finley, for whom the Trojan War is "a timeless event floating in a timeless world", breaks down the question of historicity, aside from invented narrative details, into five essential elements: 1. Troy was destroyed by a war; 2. the destroyers were a coalition from mainland Greece; 3. the leader of the coalition was a king named Agamemnon; 4. Agamemnon's overlordship was recognized by the other chieftains; 5. Troy, too, headed a coalition of allies. Finley finds no evidence for any of these points.
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, and whether it reflects a retrospective memory of Dark Age Greece, as Finley concludes, or of Mycenaean Greece
, which is the dominant view of A Companion to Homer, A.J.B. Wace and F.H. Stebbings, eds. (New York/London: Macmillan 1962). The particular narrative of the Iliad is not an account of the war, but a tale of the psychology
, the wrath, vengeance and death of individual heroes, which assumes common knowledge of the Trojan War
to create a backdrop. No scholars now 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 extent of a demonstrable historicity
for Homer's Troy faces hurdles that are analogous to the historical basis for King Arthur
. With Plato
's Atlantis
the less comparable case is the extent to which myth has been manipulated or created, to illustrate philosophical generalizations. In all cases, an ancient body of culturally agreed-upon "facts" embodied in a crystallizing "classic" narrative version, 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 being subject to selection bias
.
s, most notably, until his death in 1986, Finley, maintain that none of the events in Homer's works are historical. Others accept that there may be a foundation of historical events in the Homeric narrative, but say that in the absence of independent evidence it is not possible to separate fact from myth.
Finley was in a minority when his World of Odysseus first appeared, in 1954. With the understanding that war was the normal state of affairs, Finley observed that a ten-year war was out of the question, indicating Nestor's recall of a cattle-raid in Elis as a norm, and identifying the scene in which Helen points out to Priam the Achaean leaders in the battlefield, as "an illustration of the way in which one traditional piece of the story was retained after the war had ballooned into ten years and the piece had become rationally incongruous."
Aside from narrative detail, Finley pointed out that, aside from some correlation of Homeric placenames and Mycenaean sites, and the fact that the heroes lived at home in palaces (oikoi
) unknown in Homer's day; far from a nostalgic recall of the Mycenaean age, Finley asserts that "the catalogue of his errors is very long".
What the poet believed he was singing about was the heroic past of his own Greek world, Finley concludes.
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 Hisarlık as Troy is, in this view, a late development, following the Greek colonisation of Asia Minor in the 8th century BC
.
It is also worth comparing the details of the Iliadic story to those of older Mesopotamian literature - most notably, the Epic of Gilgamesh
. Names, set scenes, and even major parts of the story, are strikingly similar. Most scholars believe that writing first came to Greek shores from the east, via traders, and these older poems were used to demonstrate the uses of the alphabet, thus heavily influencing early Greek literature.
Another view is that Homer was heir to an unbroken tradition of oral epic poetry reaching back some 500 years into Mycenaean times. In this view, the poem's core could reflect an historical campaign that took place at the eve of the decline of the Mycenaean civilization. Much legendary material would have been added during this time, but in this view it is meaningful to ask for archaeological and textual evidence corresponding to events referred to in the Iliad. Such an historical background gives a credible explanation for the geographical knowledge of Troy (which could, however, also have been obtained in Homer's time by visiting the traditional site of the city, which was in fact New Ilium, built at the base of the hill at Hisarlık) and otherwise unmotivated elements in the poem (in particular the detailed Catalogue of Ships
). Linguistically, a few verses of the Iliad suggest great antiquity, because they only fit the meter if projected back into Mycenaean Greek
, in part due to the classical loss of the digamma
; this trace of archaic language suggests a poetic tradition spanning the Greek Dark Ages
. On the other hand, there are well-known interpolations in the text we have. Even though Homer was Ionian
, the Iliad reflects the geography known to the Mycenaean Greeks, showing detailed knowledge of the mainland but not extending to the Ionian Islands
or Anatolia
, which suggests that the Iliad reproduces an account of events handed down by tradition, to which the author did not add his own geographical knowledge.
, with a city. This city was near Mount Ida in northwest Turkey
. Such a city did exist, at the mound of Hisarlık
. Homer describes that the location was very windy, which Hisarlık almost always is, and several other geographical features also match; so it appears, therefore, that Homer describes an actual place, although this fact does not in itself prove that his story is true.
Also, the Catalogue of Ships
mentions a great variety of cities, some of which, including Athens
, were inhabited both in the Bronze Age and in Homer's time, and some of which, such as Pylos
, were not rebuilt after the Bronze Age. This suggests that the names of no-longer-existing towns were remembered from an older time, because it is unlikely that Homer would have managed to name successfully a diverse list of important Bronze Age cities that were, in his time, only a few blocks of rubble on the surface, often without even names. Furthermore, the cities enumerated in the Catalogue are given in geographical clusters, this revealing a sound knowledge of Aegean topography. Some evidence is mixed, though: locating the Bronze Age palace of Sparta
, the traditional home of Menelaus
, under the modern city has been challenging.
tablets, some Homeric names appear, including Achilles
(which was also a common name in the classical period), noted on tablets from both Knossos
and Pylos
. The Achilles of the Linear B tablet is a shepherd, not a king or warrior, but the very fact that the name is an authentic Bronze Age name is significant. These names in the Homeric poems presumably remember, if not necessarily specific people, at least an older time when people's names were not the same as they were when the Homeric epics were written down. Some story elements from the tablets appear in the Iliad.
. Istanbul
, the city on the other side of the straits connecting the Aegean Sea
and the Black Sea
, has been the site of many confrontations for exactly the same reason. However, there is not a great deal of positive evidence at Hisarlık, the best candidate for Troy, of a destruction by war. The chronologically appropriate layers, Troy VIh and Troy VIIa, both appear to have been destroyed by fires, the former more likely because of an earthquake or natural disaster, but it is harder to identify what destroyed the latter. It is possible that Troy VIIa was destroyed in battle, but it is not certain.
as a possible primary source was the Swiss scholar Emil Forrer
in the 1920s and 1930s. In discussing an ethnic group called the Ahhiyawa in these texts, Forrer drew attention to the place names "Wilusa
" and "Taruisa", which he argued were the Hittite way of writing "(W)ilios" (Ilios) and "Troia" (Troy). He also noted the mention of a Wilusan king Alaksandu
, who had concluded a treaty with the Hittite king Muwatalli; the name of this king closely resembled Alexandros/Alexander, the alternative name of Paris
, the son of king Priam
. Other identifications Forrer offered included Priam with Piyama-Radu
, and Eteocles
, king of Orchomenos
, with one Tawagalawa. However despite his arguments, many scholars dismissed Forrer's identification of Wilusa-(W)ilios/Troia-Taruisa as either improbable or at least unprovable, since until recently the known Hittite texts provided no clear indication where the kingdom of Wilusa was located beyond somewhere in Western Anatolia.
General scholarly opinion about this identification changed with the discovery of a text join to the Manapa-Tarhunda letter, which located Wilusa beyond the Seha River near the Lazpa land. Modern scholars identify the Seha with the Classical Caicus River, which is the modern Bakırçay, and the Lazpa land is the more familiar isle of Lesbos. As Trevor Bryce observes, "This must considerably strengthen the possibility that the two were directly related, if not identical."
Despite this evidence, the surviving Hittite texts do not provide an independent account of the Trojan War. The Manapa-Tarhunda letter is about a member of the Hittite ruling family, Piyama-Radu, who gained control of the kingdom of Wilusa, and whose only serious opposition came from the author of this letter, Manapa-Tarhunda. King Muwatalli of the Hittites was the opponent of this king of Troy, and the result of Muwatalli's campaign is not recorded in the surviving texts. The Ahhiyawa, are generally identified with the Achaean Greeks, are mentioned in the Tawagalawa letter
as the neighbors of the kingdom of Wilusa, and who provided a refuge for the troublesome renegade Piyama-Radu.
Thus, the details recorded in the Homeric epics appear to be a mix of fact and fiction, and separating the two is likely to be the work of many future generations of archeologists, as it has been the work of many preceding ones.
and John V. Luce from Trinity College, Dublin
presented the results 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 Hissarlik (and other locations such as the Greek camp), the geological evidence, and descriptions of the topography
and accounts of the battle in the Iliad.
While the Age of Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
had rejected the story of the Trojan War
Trojan War
In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The war is among the most important events in Greek mythology and was narrated in many works of Greek literature, including the Iliad...
as fable, the discoveries made by Heinrich Schliemann
Heinrich Schliemann
Heinrich Schliemann was a German businessman and amateur archaeologist, and an advocate of the historical reality of places mentioned in the works of Homer. Schliemann was an archaeological excavator of Troy, along with the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns...
at Hisarlik
Hisarlik
Hisarlik , often spelled Hissarlik, is the modern name for the site of ancient Troy, also known as Ilion, and is located in what is now Turkey...
reopened the question in modern terms, and the subsequent excavation of Troy VIIa and the discovery of the toponym Wilusa
Wilusa
Wilusa was a city of the late Bronze Age Assuwa confederation of western Anatolia.It is known from six references in 13th century BC Hittite sources, including...
in Hittite correspondence
Hittite texts
The corpus of texts written in the Hittite language is indexed by the Catalogue des Textes Hittites...
has made it plausible that the Trojan War cycle was at least remotely based on a historical conflict of the 12th century BC
Bronze Age collapse
The Bronze Age collapse is a transition in southwestern Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age that some historians believe was violent, sudden and culturally disruptive...
, even if the poems of Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
are removed from the event by more than four centuries of oral tradition.
History
In antiquity, educated Greeks of the 5th century BC continued to accept the truth of human events depicted in the IliadIliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
, even as philosophical scepticism was undermining faith in divine intervention in human affairs. In the time of Strabo
Strabo
Strabo, also written Strabon was a Greek historian, geographer and philosopher.-Life:Strabo was born to an affluent family from Amaseia in Pontus , a city which he said was situated the approximate equivalent of 75 km from the Black Sea...
topological disquisitions discussed the identity of sites mentioned by Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
. There was no break when Greco-Roman culture was Christianised
Christianization
The historical phenomenon of Christianization is the conversion of individuals to Christianity or the conversion of entire peoples at once...
: Eusebius of Caesarea
Eusebius of Caesarea
Eusebius of Caesarea also called Eusebius Pamphili, was a Roman historian, exegete and Christian polemicist. He became the Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine about the year 314. Together with Pamphilus, he was a scholar of the Biblical canon...
offered universal history
Universal history
Universal history is basic to the Western tradition of historiography, especially the Abrahamic wellspring of that tradition. Simply stated, universal history is the presentation of the history of humankind as a whole, as a coherent unit.-Ancient authors:...
reduced to a timeline
Timeline
A timeline is a way of displaying a list of events in chronological order, sometimes described as a project artifact . It is typically a graphic design showing a long bar labeled with dates alongside itself and events labeled on points where they would have happened.-Uses of timelines:Timelines...
, in which Troy
Troy
Troy was a city, both factual and legendary, located in northwest Anatolia in what is now Turkey, southeast of the Dardanelles and beside Mount Ida...
received the same historical weight as Abraham
Abraham
Abraham , whose birth name was Abram, is the eponym of the Abrahamic religions, among which are Judaism, Christianity and Islam...
, with whom Eusebius' Chronologia began, ranking the Argives and Mycenaeans among the kingdoms ranged in vertical columns, offering biblical history on the left (verso), and secular history of the kingdoms on the right (recto). Jerome
Jerome
Saint Jerome was a Roman Christian priest, confessor, theologian and historian, and who became a Doctor of the Church. He was the son of Eusebius, of the city of Stridon, which was on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia...
's Chronicon
Chronicon (Jerome)
The Chronicle was a universal chronicle, one of Jerome's earliest attempts in the department of history...
followed Eusebius, and all the medieval chroniclers began with summaries of the universal history of Jerome.
With such authorities behind it, the historic nature of Troy and the events of the Trojan War
Trojan War
In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The war is among the most important events in Greek mythology and was narrated in many works of Greek literature, including the Iliad...
continued to be accepted at face value by post-Roman Europeans. Geoffrey of Monmouth
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Geoffrey of Monmouth was a cleric and one of the major figures in the development of British historiography and the popularity of tales of King Arthur...
's pseudo-genealogy traced a Trojan origin for royal Briton descents in Historia Regum Britanniae
Historia Regum Britanniae
The Historia Regum Britanniae is a pseudohistorical account of British history, written c. 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth. It chronicles the lives of the kings of the Britons in a chronological narrative spanning a time of two thousand years, beginning with the Trojans founding the British nation...
. Merovingian descent from a Trojan ancestor was embodied in a literary myth first set forth in Fredegar's chronicle (2.4, 3.2.9), to the effect that the Franks were of Trojan stock and took their name from King Francio, who had erected a new Troy on the banks of the Rhine. Even before the rational Age of Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
these "facts" underlying the medieval view of history were doubted by Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal , was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen...
: "Homer wrote a romance
Romance (genre)
As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...
, for nobody supposes that Troy and Agamemnon
Agamemnon
In Greek mythology, Agamemnon was the son of King Atreus and Queen Aerope of Mycenae, the brother of Menelaus, the husband of Clytemnestra, and the father of Electra and Orestes. Mythical legends make him the king of Mycenae or Argos, thought to be different names for the same area...
existed any more than the apples of the Hesperides
Hesperides
In Greek mythology, the Hesperides are nymphs who tend a blissful garden in a far western corner of the world, located near the Atlas mountains in North Africa at the edge of the encircling Oceanus, the world-ocean....
. He had no intention to write history, but only to amuse us." After the Enlightenment the stories of Troy were devalued as fables by George Grote
George Grote
George Grote was an English classical historian, best known in the field for a major work, the voluminous History of Greece, still read.-Early life:He was born at Clay Hill near Beckenham in Kent...
.
The discoveries made by Heinrich Schliemann
Heinrich Schliemann
Heinrich Schliemann was a German businessman and amateur archaeologist, and an advocate of the historical reality of places mentioned in the works of Homer. Schliemann was an archaeological excavator of Troy, along with the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns...
at Hisarlik
Hisarlik
Hisarlik , often spelled Hissarlik, is the modern name for the site of ancient Troy, also known as Ilion, and is located in what is now Turkey...
reopened the question in modern terms, and recent discoveries have fueled more discussion across several disciplines. The events described in Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
's Iliad
Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
, even if based on historical events that preceded its composition by some 450 years, will never be completely identifiable with historical
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
or archaeological
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
facts, even if there was a Bronze Age
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...
city on the site now called Troy
Troy
Troy was a city, both factual and legendary, located in northwest Anatolia in what is now Turkey, southeast of the Dardanelles and beside Mount Ida...
, 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 by name. This is probably due to the planification of the former hillfort
Hill fort
A hill fort is a type of earthworks used as a fortified refuge or defended settlement, located to exploit a rise in elevation for defensive advantage. They are typically European and of the Bronze and Iron Ages. Some were used in the post-Roman period...
during the construction of Hellenistic Ilium (Troy IX), destroying the parts that most likely contained the city archives. A single seal of a Luwian
Luwian language
Luwian is an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. Luwian is closely related to Hittite, and was among the languages spoken during the second and first millennia BC by population groups in central and western Anatolia and northern Syria...
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
Hittites
The Hittites were a Bronze Age people of Anatolia.They established a kingdom centered at Hattusa in north-central Anatolia c. the 18th century BC. The Hittite empire reached its height c...
makes it very likely that the site corresponds to the city of Wilusa
Wilusa
Wilusa was a city of the late Bronze Age Assuwa confederation of western Anatolia.It is known from six references in 13th century BC Hittite sources, including...
. But even if that is accepted, it is of course no positive proof of identity with Homeric (W)ilios.
The bilingual toponymy
Toponymy
Toponymy is the scientific study of place names , their origins, meanings, use and typology. The word "toponymy" is derived from the Greek words tópos and ónoma . Toponymy is itself a branch of onomastics, the study of names of all kinds...
of Troy/Ilion is well established in the Homeric tradition. A name Wilios or Troia does not appear in any of the Greek written records from the Mycenean sites, however. The Mycenaean Greeks of the 13th century BC
13th century BC
The 13th century BC was the period from 1300 to 1201 BC.-Events:*1300 BC: Cemetery H culture comes to an end.*1292 BC: End of the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt, start of the Nineteenth Dynasty....
had colonized the Greek mainland and Crete
Crete
Crete is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, and one of the thirteen administrative regions of Greece. It forms a significant part of the economy and cultural heritage of Greece while retaining its own local cultural traits...
, and were only beginning to make forays into Anatolia
Anatolia
Anatolia is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey...
, establishing a bridgehead in Miletus
Miletus
Miletus was an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia , near the mouth of the Maeander River in ancient Caria...
(Millawanda). Historical Wilusa was one of the Arzawa
Arzawa
Arzawa in the second half of the second millennium BC was the name of a region and a political entity in Western Anatolia, the core area of which was centered on the Hermos and Maeander river valleys, corresponding with the Late Bronze Age kingdoms of the...
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 Iliad
The modern dispute over the historicity of the IliadIliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
has been very heated at times. Modern discourse has turned from questions of the historicity of the particular human events that transpire in the Iliad; Moses I. Finley
Moses I. Finley
Sir Moses I. Finley CBE, FBA was an American and English classical scholar. His most notable work is The Ancient Economy , where he argued that status and civic ideology governed the economy in antiquity rather than rational economic motivations.-Early life and career:He was born in 1912 in New...
, in The World of Odysseus (1954), which sets out a coherent picture of the society reflected in the Iliad and the Odyssey, deflects the question as "beside the point that the narrative is a collection of fictions from beginning to end" Finley, for whom the Trojan War is "a timeless event floating in a timeless world", breaks down the question of historicity, aside from invented narrative details, into five essential elements: 1. Troy was destroyed by a war; 2. the destroyers were a coalition from mainland Greece; 3. the leader of the coalition was a king named Agamemnon; 4. Agamemnon's overlordship was recognized by the other chieftains; 5. Troy, too, headed a coalition of allies. Finley finds no evidence for any of these points.
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, and whether it reflects a retrospective memory of Dark Age Greece, as Finley concludes, or of Mycenaean Greece
Mycenaean Greece
Mycenaean Greece was a cultural period of Bronze Age Greece taking its name from the archaeological site of Mycenae in northeastern Argolis, in the Peloponnese of southern Greece. Athens, Pylos, Thebes, and Tiryns are also important Mycenaean sites...
, which is the dominant view of A Companion to Homer, A.J.B. Wace and F.H. Stebbings, eds. (New York/London: Macmillan 1962). The particular narrative of the Iliad is not an account of the war, but a tale of the psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, the wrath, vengeance and death of individual heroes, which assumes common knowledge of the Trojan War
Trojan War
In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The war is among the most important events in Greek mythology and was narrated in many works of Greek literature, including the Iliad...
to create a backdrop. No scholars now 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 extent of a demonstrable historicity
Historicity
Historicity may mean:*the quality of being part of recorded history, as opposed to prehistory*the quality of being part of history as opposed to being a historical myth or legend, for example:** Historicity of the Iliad**Historicity...
for Homer's Troy faces hurdles that are analogous to the historical basis for King Arthur
Historical basis for King Arthur
The historical basis of King Arthur is a source of considerable debate among historians. The first datable mention of King Arthur in a historical context comes from a Latin text of the 9th century - more than three centuries after his supposed floruit in 5th to early 6th century Sub-Roman Britain...
. With Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
's Atlantis
Atlantis
Atlantis is a legendary island first mentioned in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias, written about 360 BC....
the less comparable case is the extent to which myth has been manipulated or created, to illustrate philosophical generalizations. In all cases, an ancient body of culturally agreed-upon "facts" embodied in a crystallizing "classic" narrative version, is now seen by some to be true, by others to be mythology
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
or fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
. It may be possible to establish connections between either story and real places and events, but these always risk being subject to selection bias
Selection bias
Selection bias is a statistical bias in which there is an error in choosing the individuals or groups to take part in a scientific study. It is sometimes referred to as the selection effect. The term "selection bias" most often refers to the distortion of a statistical analysis, resulting from the...
.
The Iliad as essentially legendary
Some archaeologists and historianHistorian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
s, most notably, until his death in 1986, Finley, maintain that none of the events in Homer's works are historical. Others accept that there may be a foundation of historical events in the Homeric narrative, but say that in the absence of independent evidence it is not possible to separate fact from myth.
Finley was in a minority when his World of Odysseus first appeared, in 1954. With the understanding that war was the normal state of affairs, Finley observed that a ten-year war was out of the question, indicating Nestor's recall of a cattle-raid in Elis as a norm, and identifying the scene in which Helen points out to Priam the Achaean leaders in the battlefield, as "an illustration of the way in which one traditional piece of the story was retained after the war had ballooned into ten years and the piece had become rationally incongruous."
Aside from narrative detail, Finley pointed out that, aside from some correlation of Homeric placenames and Mycenaean sites, and the fact that the heroes lived at home in palaces (oikoi
Oikos
An oikos is the ancient Greek equivalent of a household, house, or family....
) unknown in Homer's day; far from a nostalgic recall of the Mycenaean age, Finley asserts that "the catalogue of his errors is very long".
His arms bear a resemblance to the armour of his time, quite unlike the Mycenaean, although he persistently casts them in antiquated bronze, not iron. His gods had temples, and the Mycenaeans built none, whereas the latter constructed great vaulted tombs in which to bury their chieftains and the poet cremates his. A neat little touch is provided by the battle chariotChariotThe chariot is a type of horse carriage used in both peace and war as the chief vehicle of many ancient peoples. Ox carts, proto-chariots, were built by the Proto-Indo-Europeans and also built in Mesopotamia as early as 3000 BC. The original horse chariot was a fast, light, open, two wheeled...
s. Homer had heard of them, but he did not really visualize what one did with chariots in a war. So his heroes normally drove from their tents a mile or less away, carefully dismounted, and then proceeded to battle on foot."
What the poet believed he was singing about was the heroic past of his own Greek world, Finley concludes.
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
Greek Dark Ages
The Greek Dark Age or Ages also known as Geometric or Homeric Age are terms which have regularly been used to refer to the period of Greek history from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean Palatial civilization around 1200 BC, to the first signs of the Greek city-states in the 9th...
" 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 Hisarlık as Troy is, in this view, a late development, following the Greek colonisation of Asia Minor in the 8th century BC
8th century BC
The 8th century BC started the first day of 800 BC and ended the last day of 701 BC.-Overview:The 8th century BC was a period of great changes in civilizations. In Egypt, the 23rd and 24th dynasties led to rule from Nubia in the 25th Dynasty...
.
It is also worth comparing the details of the Iliadic story to those of older Mesopotamian literature - most notably, the Epic of Gilgamesh
Epic of Gilgamesh
Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from Mesopotamia and is among the earliest known works of literature. Scholars believe that it originated as a series of Sumerian legends and poems about the protagonist of the story, Gilgamesh king of Uruk, which were fashioned into a longer Akkadian epic much...
. Names, set scenes, and even major parts of the story, are strikingly similar. Most scholars believe that writing first came to Greek shores from the east, via traders, and these older poems were used to demonstrate the uses of the alphabet, thus heavily influencing early Greek literature.
The Iliad as essentially historical
Catalogue of Ships
The Catalogue of Ships is a passage in Book 2 of Homer's Iliad , which lists the contingents of the Achaean army that sailed to Troy...
). Linguistically, a few verses of the Iliad suggest great antiquity, because they only fit the meter if projected back into Mycenaean Greek
Mycenaean language
Mycenaean Greek is the most ancient attested form of the Greek language, spoken on the Greek mainland, Crete and Cyprus in the 16th to 12th centuries BC, before the hypothesised Dorian invasion which was often cited as the terminus post quem for the coming of the Greek language to Greece...
, in part due to the classical loss of the digamma
Digamma
Digamma is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet which originally stood for the sound /w/ and later remained in use only as a numeral symbol for the number "6"...
; this trace of archaic language suggests a poetic tradition spanning the Greek Dark Ages
Greek Dark Ages
The Greek Dark Age or Ages also known as Geometric or Homeric Age are terms which have regularly been used to refer to the period of Greek history from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean Palatial civilization around 1200 BC, to the first signs of the Greek city-states in the 9th...
. On the other hand, there are well-known interpolations in the text we have. Even though Homer was Ionian
Ionians
The Ionians were one of the four major tribes into which the Classical Greeks considered the population of Hellenes to have been divided...
, the Iliad reflects the geography known to the Mycenaean Greeks, showing detailed knowledge of the mainland but not extending to the Ionian Islands
Ionian Islands
The Ionian Islands are a group of islands in Greece. They are traditionally called the Heptanese, i.e...
or Anatolia
Anatolia
Anatolia is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey...
, which suggests that the Iliad reproduces an account of events handed down by tradition, to which the author did not add his own geographical knowledge.
The Iliad as partly historical
As mentioned above, though, it is most likely that the Homeric tradition contains elements of historical fact and elements of fiction interwoven. Homer describes a location, presumably in the Bronze AgeBronze Age
The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...
, with a city. This city was near Mount Ida in northwest Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
. Such a city did exist, at the mound of Hisarlık
Troy
Troy was a city, both factual and legendary, located in northwest Anatolia in what is now Turkey, southeast of the Dardanelles and beside Mount Ida...
. Homer describes that the location was very windy, which Hisarlık almost always is, and several other geographical features also match; so it appears, therefore, that Homer describes an actual place, although this fact does not in itself prove that his story is true.
Homeric evidence
Catalogue of Ships
The Catalogue of Ships is a passage in Book 2 of Homer's Iliad , which lists the contingents of the Achaean army that sailed to Troy...
mentions a great variety of cities, some of which, including Athens
Athens
Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...
, were inhabited both in the Bronze Age and in Homer's time, and some of which, such as Pylos
Pylos
Pylos , historically known under its Italian name Navarino, is a town and a former municipality in Messenia, Peloponnese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Pylos-Nestoras, of which it is the seat and a municipal unit. It was the capital of the former...
, were not rebuilt after the Bronze Age. This suggests that the names of no-longer-existing towns were remembered from an older time, because it is unlikely that Homer would have managed to name successfully a diverse list of important Bronze Age cities that were, in his time, only a few blocks of rubble on the surface, often without even names. Furthermore, the cities enumerated in the Catalogue are given in geographical clusters, this revealing a sound knowledge of Aegean topography. Some evidence is mixed, though: locating the Bronze Age palace of Sparta
Sparta
Sparta or Lacedaemon, was a prominent city-state in ancient Greece, situated on the banks of the River Eurotas in Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese. It emerged as a political entity around the 10th century BC, when the invading Dorians subjugated the local, non-Dorian population. From c...
, the traditional home of Menelaus
Menelaus
Menelaus may refer to;*Menelaus, one of the two most known Atrides, a king of Sparta and son of Atreus and Aerope*Menelaus on the Moon, named after Menelaus of Alexandria.*Menelaus , brother of Ptolemy I Soter...
, under the modern city has been challenging.
Mycenaean evidence
Likewise, in the Linear BLinear B
Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Greek. It pre-dated the Greek alphabet by several centuries and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean civilization...
tablets, some Homeric names appear, including Achilles
Achilles
In Greek mythology, Achilles was a Greek hero of the Trojan War, the central character and the greatest warrior of Homer's Iliad.Plato named Achilles the handsomest of the heroes assembled against Troy....
(which was also a common name in the classical period), noted on tablets from both Knossos
Knossos
Knossos , also known as Labyrinth, or Knossos Palace, is the largest Bronze Age archaeological site on Crete and probably the ceremonial and political centre of the Minoan civilization and culture. The palace appears as a maze of workrooms, living spaces, and store rooms close to a central square...
and Pylos
Pylos
Pylos , historically known under its Italian name Navarino, is a town and a former municipality in Messenia, Peloponnese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Pylos-Nestoras, of which it is the seat and a municipal unit. It was the capital of the former...
. The Achilles of the Linear B tablet is a shepherd, not a king or warrior, but the very fact that the name is an authentic Bronze Age name is significant. These names in the Homeric poems presumably remember, if not necessarily specific people, at least an older time when people's names were not the same as they were when the Homeric epics were written down. Some story elements from the tablets appear in the Iliad.
Local evidence
It is very likely, then, that Homer records some information of a factual nature, things that refer to something in real life, even if it is not clear that they record history. But what of the war itself? There is nothing inherently unlikely about a large battle or even a war over the city of Troy. That general area has always been extremely valuable and hotly contested, since it is at the mouth of the DardanellesDardanelles
The Dardanelles , formerly known as the Hellespont, is a narrow strait in northwestern Turkey connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara. It is one of the Turkish Straits, along with its counterpart the Bosphorus. It is located at approximately...
. Istanbul
Istanbul
Istanbul , historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople , is the largest city of Turkey. Istanbul metropolitan province had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey's population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe after London and...
, the city on the other side of the straits connecting the Aegean Sea
Aegean Sea
The Aegean Sea[p] is an elongated embayment of the Mediterranean Sea located between the southern Balkan and Anatolian peninsulas, i.e., between the mainlands of Greece and Turkey. In the north, it is connected to the Marmara Sea and Black Sea by the Dardanelles and Bosporus...
and the Black Sea
Black Sea
The Black Sea is bounded by Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus and is ultimately connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas and various straits. The Bosphorus strait connects it to the Sea of Marmara, and the strait of the Dardanelles connects that sea to the Aegean...
, has been the site of many confrontations for exactly the same reason. However, there is not a great deal of positive evidence at Hisarlık, the best candidate for Troy, of a destruction by war. The chronologically appropriate layers, Troy VIh and Troy VIIa, both appear to have been destroyed by fires, the former more likely because of an earthquake or natural disaster, but it is harder to identify what destroyed the latter. It is possible that Troy VIIa was destroyed in battle, but it is not certain.
Hittite evidence
The first person to point to the Hittite textsHittite texts
The corpus of texts written in the Hittite language is indexed by the Catalogue des Textes Hittites...
as a possible primary source was the Swiss scholar Emil Forrer
Emil Forrer
Emil Orcitirix Gustav Forrer was a Swiss Assyriologist and Hittitologist....
in the 1920s and 1930s. In discussing an ethnic group called the Ahhiyawa in these texts, Forrer drew attention to the place names "Wilusa
Wilusa
Wilusa was a city of the late Bronze Age Assuwa confederation of western Anatolia.It is known from six references in 13th century BC Hittite sources, including...
" and "Taruisa", which he argued were the Hittite way of writing "(W)ilios" (Ilios) and "Troia" (Troy). He also noted the mention of a Wilusan king Alaksandu
Alaksandu
Alaksandu was a king of Wilusa who sealed a treaty with Muwatalli II ca. 1280 BC. This treaty implies that Alaksandu had previously secured a treaty with Muwatalli's father, Mursili II, as well....
, who had concluded a treaty with the Hittite king Muwatalli; the name of this king closely resembled Alexandros/Alexander, the alternative name of Paris
Paris (mythology)
Paris , the son of Priam, king of Troy, appears in a number of Greek legends. Probably the best-known was his elopement with Helen, queen of Sparta, this being one of the immediate causes of the Trojan War...
, the son of king Priam
Priam
Priam was the king of Troy during the Trojan War and youngest son of Laomedon. Modern scholars derive his name from the Luwian compound Priimuua, which means "exceptionally courageous".- Marriage and issue :...
. Other identifications Forrer offered included Priam with Piyama-Radu
Piyama-Radu
Piyamaradu was a warlike aristocratic personage whose name figures prominently in the Hittite archives of the middle and late 13th century BC in western Anatolia. His history is of particular interest because it appears to intertwine with that of the Trojan War...
, and Eteocles
Eteocles
In Greek mythology, Eteocles was a king of Thebes, the son of Oedipus and either Jocasta or Euryganeia. The name is from earlier *Etewoklewes , meaning "truly glorious". Tawaglawas is thought to be the Hittite rendition of the name. Oedipus killed his father Laius and married his mother without...
, king of Orchomenos
Orchomenos
Orchomenus , the setting for many early Greek myths, is a municipality and a rich archaeological site in Boeotia, Greece, that was inhabited from the Neolithic through the Hellenistic periods. , the population was 10,732...
, with one Tawagalawa. However despite his arguments, many scholars dismissed Forrer's identification of Wilusa-(W)ilios/Troia-Taruisa as either improbable or at least unprovable, since until recently the known Hittite texts provided no clear indication where the kingdom of Wilusa was located beyond somewhere in Western Anatolia.
General scholarly opinion about this identification changed with the discovery of a text join to the Manapa-Tarhunda letter, which located Wilusa beyond the Seha River near the Lazpa land. Modern scholars identify the Seha with the Classical Caicus River, which is the modern Bakırçay, and the Lazpa land is the more familiar isle of Lesbos. As Trevor Bryce observes, "This must considerably strengthen the possibility that the two were directly related, if not identical."
Despite this evidence, the surviving Hittite texts do not provide an independent account of the Trojan War. The Manapa-Tarhunda letter is about a member of the Hittite ruling family, Piyama-Radu, who gained control of the kingdom of Wilusa, and whose only serious opposition came from the author of this letter, Manapa-Tarhunda. King Muwatalli of the Hittites was the opponent of this king of Troy, and the result of Muwatalli's campaign is not recorded in the surviving texts. The Ahhiyawa, are generally identified with the Achaean Greeks, are mentioned in the Tawagalawa letter
Tawagalawa letter
The Tawagalawa letter was written by a Hittite king to a king of Ahhiyawa around 1250 BC. This letter, of which only the third tablet has been preserved, concerns the activities of an adventurer Piyama-Radu against the Hittites, and requests his extradition to Hatti under assurances of safe conduct...
as the neighbors of the kingdom of Wilusa, and who provided a refuge for the troublesome renegade Piyama-Radu.
Artefactual evidence
On the other hand, there are parts of Homer's story that appear not to match a Bronze Age war over the site of Hisarlık. The armor that he describes is most likely more from his era than from the Bronze Age, although it is somewhat mixed. Ajax's tower shield makes sense in the context of the shields depicted in Bronze Age artwork, which are very tall and either rectangular or shaped somewhat like a curved hourglass. However, most of the other shields are described as circular, which is an anachronism, as far as modern scholars can tell. The body armor is similarly mixed.Thus, the details recorded in the Homeric epics appear to be a mix of fact and fiction, and separating the two is likely to be the work of many future generations of archeologists, as it has been the work of many preceding ones.
Geological evidence
In November 2001, geologists John C. Kraft from the University of DelawareUniversity of Delaware
The university is organized into seven colleges:* College of Agriculture and Natural Resources* College of Arts and Sciences* Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics* College of Earth, Ocean and Environment* College of Education and Human Development...
and John V. Luce from Trinity College, Dublin
Trinity College, Dublin
Trinity College, Dublin , formally known as the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, was founded in 1592 by letters patent from Queen Elizabeth I as the "mother of a university", Extracts from Letters Patent of Elizabeth I, 1592: "...we...found and...
presented the results of investigations into the geology
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...
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
Strabo
Strabo, also written Strabon was a Greek historian, geographer and philosopher.-Life:Strabo was born to an affluent family from Amaseia in Pontus , a city which he said was situated the approximate equivalent of 75 km from the Black Sea...
's Geographia. Their conclusion was that there is regularly a consistency between the location of Troy as Hissarlik (and other locations such as the Greek camp), the geological evidence, and descriptions of the topography
Topography
Topography is the study of Earth's surface shape and features or those ofplanets, moons, and asteroids...
and accounts of the battle in the Iliad.