Image Details

Photo at lower left, a detail from a 460 B.C. Greek krater, courtesy of the Art Archive/Archaeological Museum Spina Ferrara/Dagli Orti(A); photo at upper right, a detail from the King’s Gate at Hattusa/Bogazköy, Turkey, courtesy of the Ankara Archaeological Museum.

In the Late Bronze Age, Troy was a prosperous ally of the Hittites, according to Manfred Korfmann (upper left), director of excavations at Hisarlik, Turkey. Nonsense! says Frank Kolb (lower right), a historian at the University of Tübingen, in Germany; Hisarlik was just an insignificant backwater, not even a settlement. In “The New Trojan Wars,” journalist Rüdiger Heimlich describes the academic controversy that has taken all Germany by storm. And in “Greeks vs. Hittites,” Archaeology Odyssey editor Hershel Shanks consults another authority on Troy, German archaeologist Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier, the director of excavations at Miletus, on Turkey’s Aegean coast.