Can Archaeology Discover Homer’s Troy? - The BAS Library
Login
Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > Winter 1998

Can Archaeology Discover Homer’s Troy?

Following in the footsteps of Heinrich Schliemann, modern archaeologists give a surprising answer to the question, Who were the fabled Trojans?

By Birgit Brandau

King Agamemnon rose to his feet: “Friends, Zeus vowed to me long ago that I should never embark for home till I had brought the walls of Ilium crashing down.” 016 “Metal object, biconvex.” Thus wrote English archaeologist Donald Easton in his excavation diary in July 1995, dispassionately recording what every excavator at Troy had previously hoped for in vain. He had discovered the only known example of Bronze Age writing at Troy. It turned out to be a key indicator of the people who lived in the Troy that Homer wrote about. Archaeologists had long puzzled over […]

You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

1.

Schliemann’s assistant, Wilhelm Dörpfeld, a German architect, identified Troy’s nine basic strata—a scheme archaeologists continue to follow today. He completed his excavations in 1894. From 1932 to 1938, Carl Blegen, sponsored by the University of Cincinnati, used highly refined excavation methods to differentiate 46 separate construction phases (or sub-strata) at Troy. Blegen’s most famous finds were a large palace from Troy VI (the so-called Pillar House) and a Greek-Roman sanctuary. The current excavations, begun in 1988, are directed by Manfred Korfmann of Tübingen University.

2.

Luwian-speaking peoples came into Anatolia in the third millennium B.C., about the same time as the Hittites. They settled mainly in the south and west and founded several kingdoms—the most important being Kizzuwatna in the southeast (roughly equivalent to Cilicia in later years) and Arzawa in the west (the region surrounding Ephesus). The Luwians were at different times allies, rivals and vassals of the Hittites. Since their languages were about as closely related as modern Dutch and German, there was a good deal of cultural exchange between the two peoples, especially between Kizzuwatna and Hatti (as the Hittites called their territory in central Anatolia).