For centuries, people assumed that the Trojan War was completely fictional. The accounts of the war and its after-
Math, set down by the poet Homer in the Iliad (IL-ee-ad) and the Odyssey (AH-duh-see), are among the central works of Western literature; but nobody took Homer's work seriously as history. Again thanks to Schliemann, the world now knows that Troy was indeed real.
The poet Homer.
Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission.
Sometimes referred to as Ilium (IL-ee-uhm)—hence the name Iliad— Troy lay along the southern edge of a strait called the Hellespont (HEHL-ehs-pahnt). Hellespont, which in modern times is called the Dardanelles (dahr-duh-NELZ), forms part of a long passageway that separates Europe from Asia and joins the Aegean Sea in the west with the Black Sea in the east.
The Trojan War appears to have occurred in about 1200 b. c., but its cause was probably not as romantic as the one Homer gives—the kidnapping of the Spartan queen Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, by a prince of Troy. More likely it was for military and economic objectives: whoever controlled the Hellespont controlled the entire region, including the lucrative Black Sea trade.
According to Homer, the Trojan War lasted for ten years and resulted in victory for the Mycenaeans. Historians do not know whether this is so, but it is clear that Mycenaean civilization began to decline around the time of the war. Perhaps “winning” the Trojan War cost the Mycenaeans so much in terms of human lives and financial resources that they never recovered.
World History
