O MATTER HOW MANY BAD THINGS WOMEN SUEEER,
Nothing can take away their appetite for trouble,” marveled Pausanias. “The Amazons of Themiscyra fell to Heracles and the fighting force the Amazons sent against Athens was wiped out—and yet the Amazons still went to Troy and fought there against the whole of Greece.”1
The myth of Penthesilea and her duel with Achilles in the Trojan War is very old, as ancient as the myth of Hippolyte and Heracles.2 (The Athenians, as we saw, had inserted their own epic battle with the Amazons into this chronology, locating it in mythic time before the Trojan War.) The origins of the Trojan War myth, famously recounted by the Greek epic poet Homer, remain cloudy, but the clues are fascinating to contemplate. The legend of Amazon warriors arriving to help King Priam defend the walled city of Troy against invaders from Greece: could this have been based on ancient memories of wars with the Hittites?
The Hittites were a chariot-driving warrior society that dominated Anatolia in the Bronze Age. Troy, in northwestern Anatolia, was a great Bronze Age city from about 3000 to 950 BC, and archaeology shows that it was associated with the Hittite Kingdom. The still-imposing remains of the citadel of Troy and the great Hittite capital, Hattusa in central Anatolia, would have been even more impressive in antiquity.3 Troy and the Hittites were contemporary with Bronze Age Mycenae, a major city in southern Greece. The idea of Hittite-Trojan War connections was first proposed in the early twentieth century. The Trojan War epics were written in Greek, but scholars agree that the names of the Trojan king Priam and several of his relatives were not originally Greek. Some believe that they derive from Luwian, the language related to Hittite that was probably spoken by the Trojans. The complex ruins of Troy reveal waves of different peoples, great wealth, and destructions by fire and warfare. Most scholars today agree that the legendary Trojan War was based on historical small-scale conflicts between the Mycenaean Greeks and the Hittite Kingdom and its outposts around the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC.4
World History
