To Breach the Walls of Troy

1000 ships. 10 years. 1 hollow horse.

Luckily, I only had to wait in line for 10 minutes to breach the walls of Troy.

I grew up on myths. I remember reading a child-friendly version of The Iliad in the fourth grade. As a school project, I created a home video of the Twelve Labors of Heracles, including putting a tan, fuzzy blanket on my dog and making my brother run after her and “stab her” to simulate the killing of the Nemean Lion. By the time I was halfway through middle school, my favorite movies were Troy and Gladiator (and The Lord of the Rings). And, like everyone in my generation, I grew up on a steady stream of Rick Riordan books. Who didn’t want to be at Camp Half-Blood?

And so, for a girl completely entranced by the world of myth, whose deepest desire is to have the kind of fantastical adventure that can only be found in books, imagine my joy when I discovered that the city of Troy could possibly be a real place.

It feels like there might just be some magic in this world after all.

Of course, the first thing to know about the real city of Troy is that there is very little conclusively known.

Archeologists know that the area has been settled many times. The first Troy (Troia) was built in 3000 BC. Homer’s Troy (Troia IV) lasted from 1700 BC to 1250 BC, when the mythical 10-year Trojan war ended with the sacking of the city. We don’t know if such a war ever happened, but I choose to believe that some event inspired the myth. Five more settlements followed, each building on top of the ruins of the first. As archeologists excavate the site, they label the different eras of the city.

a hillside with stacked stone labeled with white plaques of Roman numerals

Naturally, a destroyed city was rebuilt in the same spot for many reasons. One, the original city was built here for a reason. Perhaps proximity to fresh water and the ocean, perhaps defensive capabilities. In the case of Troy, I suspect all three. Two, most often when a city is destroyed, not everything is destroyed. Some buildings remain, so it makes sense to build up around them rather than start anew. Three, you can reuse building materials and not have to transport them very far. Thus, it was a very logical decision to continually rebuild the city again and again on top of it’s ruins, but it has, unfortunately, erased much of the earlier cities and histories and leaves a great challenge for archeologists as they attempt to map the many iterations of Troy.

No man or woman born, coward or brave, can shun his destiny.
The Iliad

the bottom of a column on a hillside overlooking green plains with the sea in the distance

The Dardanelles are three miles away, but in the time of Troia IV, the fields below would have been water. Turkey has experienced silt build up all along the coast over the last two thousand years. Unfortunately, once deep bays have receded and a lot of ancient settlements have been covered.

haphazard square and circular altars made of stone and marble

This photo shows altars from several different Troys. The one in the back with the rectangular marble blocks is from the last Troy built by the Romans, while the closer ones are from earlier Troys.

a square structure of stacked stones within the hillside

It’s said that Alexander the Great stopped at Troy in 334 BC and took the armor of one of the Greek heroes from the Trojan War before going on to conquer the Persians.

I don’t know if Troia IV ended because of some great war. I don’t know if any of the characters truly existed. In fact, we don’t even know if Homer existed. But we do know that the first accounts of the “Iliad” arose about 200 years after the supposed “war,” and the epics weren’t written down for at least another 200 years. Therefore, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey could be based on an actual war, but perhaps not a Greek one.

What Archeologists Theorize

The Trojan War (if real) is theorized to have occurred at the end of the Bronze age, around 1200 BC, which is about the time that the fourth iteration of Troy fell. Archeologists have discovered that Troia IV did have formidable defenses, such as a thirty-foot wall with multiple reinforced watchtowers, worthy of withstanding a long war. The citadel also was strongly fortified. However, evidence suggests that the wall of Troia IV was primarily destroyed by an earthquake. Archeologists have also found fire damage and sling-stones in the wall to indicate fighting, however archeologists believe the earthquake caused the most damage.

Other evidence that shakes the foundations of the Iliad is that archeologists are pretty sure that the next iteration of Troia was rebuilt by the same people rather than by foreigners, as the Greeks would have been. I’m not sure why they theorize this–perhaps building techniques? Additionally, one of the Greek aggressors in the Iliad is Agamemnon, King of Mycenae. However, the Mycenae kingdom had collapsed by the end of the Bronze Age.

So, my theory is that the Iliad is either a) an embellished story of several combined wars, events, timelines, histories, peoples, and imagined characters woven into one story, or b) entirely fiction. And I’m not disappointed by either option. I am perfectly content for the events in the Iliad to merely be inspired by true stories, or be entirely made up. Because that’s what writers and story-tellers do. That’s what I do, and the Iliad was solid inspiration for a lot of my own work, so it’s doing it’s job, which was never history, but imagination of what could have been.