Such fragments of fortification walls and houses are the archaeological reality of the site of Troy. Onto them are projected visions of the literary Troy, the citadel attacked by the Achaeans in ancient Greek legend. It is easy to see that the fit is not neat. For over a century, attempts have been made to determine which habitation level at Hisarlik might have been Priam’s city, sacked by the Achaeans. The controversy continues to this very day. For those who believe in the historicity of the Trojan War there are two options.
First, Troy VIIa. The inhabitants of VIIa rebuilt the walls of VI. Most significantly, this settlement shows signs of enduring a siege. Like VI, its houses are preserved only on the edges of the citadel. But those houses are packed together, sharing walls, and contained an extraordinary quantity of pithoi, or clay storage vessels, often sunk into the house floors. This settlement was destroyed by fire. Some, but not many, human skeletal remains were found in the debris. For Blegen, such evidence indicated a town facing an invasion. Its inhabitants retreated from the surrounding countryside into the fortified citadel, built shelters hastily, and laid up food supplies. In the end the town was captured and burned.
The date of the end of Troy VIIa seems to fit: ca 1260 BC, according to Blegen, based on the datable Mycenaean pottery finds, a period when Mycenaean Greece (= the Achaean attackers) was at its most prosperous. But current opinion has veered back to the level favored by Dorpfeld: Troy VI. The destruction of Troy VI has been attributed to people or to earthquake; it is in fact not easy to distinguish the one agent from the other. Perhaps both worked together, as has been suggested: an earthquake crippled the city of Troy, allowing the besieging invaders easy access.
Blegen’s datings have been challenged, too. Such revisions depend on a different interpretation of the decoration on a particular handful of sherds. Some have even placed the end of VI in the mid-thirteenth and the end of VIIa in the early twelfth century BC. According to this scenario, the besieged VIIa would have been destroyed during the vast movement of marauding peoples that disrupted the eastern Mediterranean during the late thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC.
The Trojans left no written documents. The Mycenaeans, although they did write, left no testimony about such a conflict; and the Hittite records do not report it, at least not directly. Tantalizing, therefore, are possible Hittite mentions of relevant places and participants. Are “Ahhiyawa,” “Wilusa,” and “Aleksandus” to be equated with Achaea, Ilios, and Alexandros (Paris, the son of Priam)? And if so, can the snippets of information help us understand the nature of the war, and when it took place? These matters are highly controversial. The Aegean world lay outside the direct control of the Hittites. Although the Trojans and the Hittites both inhabited the same land mass, Anatolia, the central plateau where the Hittites reigned supreme, is physically and psychologically far removed from the coastal regions.
World History
