The Trojan War: How Much of It Was Actually Real?

Your computer's security settings have a category called Trojan horse. That story is nearly three thousand years old, and the horse never appears in Homer's

Iliad. Not once. The version you actually picture was written centuries

later, by a Roman. But the hill is real. You can walk on it in north-west Turkey this afternoon. One layer down it is burnt black, with arrowheads in it and human bones nobody buried.

So. Does that mean the Trojan War really happened? Here is the strange part. That is not one question. Pull the story apart and you get about nine separate claims.

The horse. The thousand ships. The ten years. The gold. The heroes. They do not all get the same answer.

Some collapse the second you touch them. And one survives somewhere nobody was even looking, written down by clerks who had never heard of Homer, centuries

before he sang a note. That is the one I want to reach. I grew up being told this one was pure fiction. A poet's fantasy with gods in it. Finding out that it is not, or at least not all of it, quietly rearranged how I hear every other legend. So let us do this properly.

Piece by piece. Real, half real, or invented. And we keep score. So start with the piece we just broke.

The wooden horse. Enormous, hollow, left standing on the beach. Soldiers hidden inside. The Trojans drag it through their own gates and lose everything by morning. Everyone calls that the climax

of Homer's Iliad. But the Iliad covers a matter of weeks in the final year of the war, and it opens by asking a goddess to sing about one subject only. The rage of Achilles. That is the poem.

Not the war. And it ends with a funeral. Hector's funeral. No horse. No burning city. Not even the death of Achilles. So where does the horse come from? A few lines in the Odyssey.

The long cinematic version you actually picture is Virgil, a Roman writing in Latin roughly seven hundred years after Homer. The oldest surviving image

of it is scratched on a storage jar from around six hundred seventy BC. That is your evidence. A pot, and a Roman poet.

Nobody has ever dug up a giant wooden horse. Verdict.

Not Homer's. Not evidence. Bolted on afterwards. One down. And that was the easy one.

Next. The thousand ships. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships. Everybody knows the line.

Almost everybody thinks it is Homer. It is Christopher Marlowe, printed in London in sixteen oh four. That sentence is Elizabethan English. It is nearer in time to you than it is to Homer. Homer never gives a fleet total

at all. He gives a list, and adding up his own figures lands you around twelve hundred, a total generally read as poetry rather than a manifest. The ten-year siege? The poems say ten years.

The ground says nothing about ten years. And the famous date, eleven eighty-four

BC, is one scholar's back-calculation, made around two hundred twenty BC. The Greeks could not even agree among themselves, guessing across a century

and a half. One guess happened to stick. But hold on.

Because that ship list does something odd. The Greece it describes, which towns are big and which ones matter, fits the Bronze Age better than it fits Homer's own century. He is reciting a map that had been dead for four hundred years.

Something real is fossilised inside the poem. Score it half real. Now the man. Everyone knows who found Troy.

Heinrich Schliemann. That is not what happened. The man who worked out where Troy was is called Frank Calvert. He owned the eastern half of that hill and had been cutting trenches into it since eighteen sixty-three, seven years

before Schliemann turned up. Britannica says Calvert deserves the lion's share of the responsibility for siting Troy at Hisarlik.

Calvert had the right hill and no money. Schliemann had money.

And in his first archaeological book, Schliemann laid out Calvert's argument with Calvert's

name quietly removed. Schliemann was not an archaeologist. He was a businessman who retired at thirty-six to go looking for Homer.

If you saw our Odyssey episode, you know how that went.

He drove a trench straight down through the heart of the mound and smashed past the exact

layers that are today's leading candidates. Look at an excavation map of Troy now and there is a blank space near the centre with a label on it.

Palace removed by Schliemann. Then there is the gold he called the treasure of King

Priam. Real gold. Wrong city.

Roughly a thousand years too early for any Trojan War anyone can argue

for. Verdict on both. False, and false.

Which leaves the obvious question. What was actually down there?

Not a lost city in a jungle. A mound people kept knocking down and rebuilding on for more than three thousand years. Nine cities in one hill.

But here is the question almost nobody asks. Whose city was it?

In the story, the Trojans are basically Greeks with worse luck. They speak Greek. They pray to Greek gods. In reality, Troy

was not Greek. It was Anatolian. Its wall towers follow a Hittite plan. Its diplomatic world was the Hittite empire, inland to the

east. And the only piece of writing ever recovered from a prehistoric level at Troy is a tiny bronze seal, inscribed in Hittite hieroglyphs.

Not one word of Greek in the entire city. So why would anyone sail across a sea to fight over it?

Look at where it sits. At the mouth of the strait between the Aegean and the

Black Sea. Ancient ships often had to wait near Troy for a wind to carry them up the channel. Ships still queue in that strait today, for

the same geography. And in nineteen eighty-eight Manfred Korfmann found what everyone had missed. Troy was not just the citadel. A lower city stretched away to the south, making the site by his estimate ten to fifteen times bigger than the fortress everyone had been digging.

Not everyone believed him. Hold that thought. Verdict.

The war story is Greek. The city was not. Now the turn.

Everything so far has been the legend falling apart in your hands. This is where the ground pushes back. Because a city on that hill

really was destroyed. Twice. And the two destructions could

not be more different. Troy VI, the beautiful one with the walls, comes down around thirteen hundred BC. Walls tipped off true, heavy blocks thrown around. Most experts read that as an earthquake. The city was shaken down, not stormed. So they rebuilt.

Troy VIIa has the same walls and a completely different life inside them.

Big airy houses chopped into small rooms. Storage jars sunk into

the floors everywhere. New houses shoved flush against the inside of the defensive wall. Some gates blocked up. That is not a prosperous city. That is a city cramming people and food behind its walls, waiting for something.

And then, somewhere between about twelve twenty and eleven eighty BC, it burns. In places there is up to three feet of blackened debris. There are arrowheads.

There is military equipment. And there are human remains lying unburied, which matters, because the earlier destruction layers at Troy do not have them. Nobody came back for these ones. In twenty twenty-five the excavators

found a dense cache of sling stones packed into a small patch of ground outside the palace. Korfmann had made the argument years earlier.

Winners pick their sling bullets back up. A heap left where it fell suggests the people who threw them lost. So. A fortified city, on

exactly the hill the Greeks pointed at, at roughly the right time, sacked and burned with bodies left in the open. Verdict.

Real. Physically, undeniably real.

But the ground does not tell you who did it. There is nothing in the archaeological evidence to identify precisely who the attackers were. A fire with no name on it. So where does a name come from? Not from Greece. Greece had gone

dark. Between roughly twelve fifty and eleven fifty BC the whole eastern Mediterranean came apart. Mycenaean palaces burned. The Hittite empire fell. Writing systems vanished.

Greece produced no written records at all for something like four centuries. So whatever happened at Troy could travel only one way.

In songs, mouth to mouth in the dark, until the Greeks borrowed an alphabet from the Phoenicians. Scholars are not even certain Homer existed as one

person. The Greek evidence is a rumour of a rumour.

Which is why the best evidence for the Trojan War is not Greek at all. It is twenty-six clay tablets from the archives of the Hittite capital, Hattusa. Fifteenth to thirteenth centuries BC. Baked clay.

Bureaucracy. Treaties and letters, filed and forgotten. And they keep mentioning a people the Hittites called the Ahhiyawa.

Most scholars read Ahhiyawa as a Hittite spelling of Achaioi. The Achaeans. Which is exactly what Homer calls the Greeks.

The same tablets name a city out in the north-west. They call it Wilusa. And inside Homer's own verse there is a fossil. The rhythm of the lines

shows that Ilion, the Greek name for Troy, was once pronounced with a w on the front. Wilion. Wilusa. Wilion.

It is not proven. It is also not nothing. And then it gets stranger.

One Hittite treaty, from around twelve ninety-five to twelve seventy-two BC, records the great king Muwatalli making a formal agreement with the king of Wilusa.

And the king of Wilusa has a name. Alaksandu. Now.

Paris, the Trojan prince who takes Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta, and starts the whole war, carries a second name in the Iliad.

Alexandros. Be careful with that. Alaksandu is a king and Paris is only a prince, and nobody can explain why an Anatolian ruler carried a Greek-looking name. Scholars argue about it and have not settled it. But sit with the shape of the thing.

A Hittite scribe, centuries before Homer, writing out a dull treaty with a real king of a real city called Wilusa.

There is one more letter. In the middle of the thirteenth century BC, a Hittite great king, probably Hattusili the Third, writes to the king of the Ahhiyawa.

And in passing, he refers back to Wilusa as something the two of them had once gone to war over, and had since made peace about.

A war. Between the Hittites and, most likely, Mycenaean Greeks. Over, most likely, Troy. In an official letter.

The specialist J. D. Hawkins puts it plainly. Wilusa was a point of conflict between the Hittites and the Ahhiyawa.

Now be honest about the limits. That quarrel is between Hittites and Greeks, not Greeks and Trojans, and the text does not say whether it was a war, a raid, or a diplomatic row.

But nobody was making this fit. These tablets were written by clerks with no interest in Greek poetry, in a language no one could read for three thousand years, and they sat buried the entire time. Verdict.

The city is real. The names are real. A quarrel over it is on record. The war in the poem still is not. Now the case against, because you have earned it. Frank Kolb spent years

arguing the opposite. Troy VI, he wrote, was not a commercial city, and it is still a live argument, not a settled result.

And a fire is not a war. People went on living at Troy for something like two hundred and fifty years after that fire. If we had never inherited the Greek legend, nobody digging that black layer would have leapt straight to a foreign invasion.

So here is the honest scorecard. The horse, not Homer's.

The thousand ships, Elizabethan. The ten years and the famous date, literature. Schliemann finding Troy, no. Calvert did. Priam's treasure, wrong city by

a thousand years. Troy as a Greek town, no. A real fortified city on the right hill, yes. Burned violently at roughly the right time, yes. Named in foreign archives and quarrelled over by people the Hittites

called the Ahhiyawa, yes. Achilles, Hector, the gods, the duel, the horse. No evidence at all. Even Korfmann, the excavator

who most wanted Homer to be true, would only say it is more likely than not that there were armed conflicts around Troy, and that Homer's account rests on a memory of real events. More likely than not. That is the strongest honest claim

on the table. So in the end, believing or disbelieving in the Trojan War is an act of faith, whichever side you pick. That is what this one

did to me. It did not turn the legend into history. It taught me that made up and remembered badly are not the same thing, and that we are far too quick to file a story under fiction just because the version

that reached us has monsters in it. Which brings us back to the hill. It is still there. Under your feet the black layer is real. The arrowheads are real. The unburied bones are real. The horse is the only part that is not.

Which means the one piece of this story that reached your computer is the

only piece that was never there. People believed every word of it for most of three thousand years. Then we called it all a fairy tale. And we were only right about the good bits. Four hundred years of songs

in the dark, and the singers still knew which hill.

Subscribe and stay with me, because the next one is the hardest turn we have ever

taken. We are leaving the Aegean for West Africa, and the Mali Empire.

The richest human being in all of recorded history was a medieval West African

king. And the empire he inherited was founded, by

its own legend, by a prince who could not walk. That is next.