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Troia—Traum und Wirklichkeit

Homer’s “mighty-walled Troy” was probably the Late Bronze Age city (Troy VI) that was destroyed about 1200 B.C. The walls of this city are shown as they appear today (see next photo) and in the 1890s (shown here) during the excavations of Wilhelm Dörpfeld, a German architect who first served as Heinrich Schliemann’s assistant and later identified the nine basic strata of ancient Troy. According to archaeologist Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier, these walls, along with the remains of a lower city below the citadel and the finds from Troy VI, indicate that the site was a significant Late Bronze Age trading center. Niemeier also suggests that Troy was a vassal state of the Hittite Empire; texts from the Hittite capital of Hattusa refer to an ally of the Hittites in northwestern Anatolia called “Wilusa” (a word very similar to “Ilios,” one of the Greek names for Troy).