In Search of the Trojan War (26 page)

The standing of the people who had these tombs made is perhaps indicated by the cemetery found to the south at Müsgebi (fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC). Here in about fifty chamber tombs were found large numbers of stirrup jars, small and large bowls, drinking cups, a typical pilgrim flask, cups, spouted ewers – all made on the mainland of Greece – along with spindle whorls, necklaces, incense burners, bracelets, small pots for incense or unguents, and a collection of immaculate bronze blades – spearheads, curved blades, a dagger and hilt, and a short sword. These finds, which are now exhibited in Bodrum Museum, create an impression of a well-to-do expatriate class; such, we may assume, were also at least some of the Mycenaean element in Miletus, and they obviously included craftsmen and craftswomen.

While we may be rightly sceptical of calling Miletus a Mycenaean ‘colony’ as such, the evidence shows that, throughout the heyday of Mycenaean power on the mainland, this place was an important centre for Greek contact with Anatolia. From around 1300 BC Mycenaeans seem to have been an important element in its population. Their presence in a rich cemetery does not, however, prove that they were the rulers of Miletus. Nevertheless from around 1300 Miletus was administered by a
powerful authority which could erect a massive wall over 1000 yards in length; they imported Mycenaean pottery and made local copies; they had contact with other Anatolian Greek settlements, such as Iasos; they traded with Ugarit in Syria and perhaps Cyprus and Troy; at least one Hittite import has been found (a pilgrim flask). It also seems likely that this place was the origin of the slave women called
Milatiai
in the Linear B tablets, whom we find working in the flax industry on mainland estates. In view of Miletus’ size and the wealth of its tombs, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that this was the biggest and wealthiest centre of Mycenaean influence in Asia Minor, with a large population of mixed Minoan, Greek, Lycian and Anatolian origin. Whether it had direct political relation to any part of the Greek mainland cannot be answered from archaeological evidence alone. As we shall see in
Chapter 6
, it is the Hittite tablets which suggest that it did.

TROY AND MYCENAE

So there is now a significant and growing body of evidence to show that the Greeks of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC were involved in armed forays on the shores of Asia Minor. Indeed it is fair to say that we now have a plausible context for the tale told by Homer and the Greek epic. But was there any connection between Troy itself and the mainland of Greece? Here the archaeological record again provides us with clues.

First let us remember the Homeric tradition: the epic says there were
two
sacks of Troy in the Heroic Age, the first the sack of the city of Laomedon by Herakles, the second the expedition of Agamemnon against Priam. Carl Blegen’s dig in the 1930s established two destructions of Hisarlik in the Late Bronze Age: the beautifully walled city of Troy VI we now know fell in around 1300 BC, apparently to an earthquake;its successor, Troy VIIa, the city of shanties, it has recently been established was sacked in around 1200 BC, correcting Blegen’s dating. What did the excavator find to link Troy with Mycenae? Here we must
remember that Hisarlik is still the only site in north-west Anatolia which has been thoroughly excavated, so the emphasis we give the finds may be misleading, but the quantities of Mycenaean pottery were sufficiently large and of such quality as to suggest to Blegen
direct
relations between Troy and Mycenae.

Trojan imports from the Mycenaean world start in the sixteenth century BC (LH II A) and continue abundantly through the fourteenth century into the first half of the thirteenth (LH III B 1). They stop at the latest in
c
.1250 BC. Only one sherd is known from 1250–1200 (LH III B 2), though of course earlier pottery will still have been in use. The totals found by earlier excavators are uncertain, but Blegen estimated the surviving sherds from
c
.1400–1250 added up to about 700–800 pots, nearly three-quarters of all Mycenaean pottery imports to Troy. It should be remembered, though, that Mycenaean wares account for only 1 or 2 per cent of the entire pottery of Troy VI: it is a tiny proportion when set against the local wares, and presumably represents the import of luxury produce (perfumed oil?) or simply exotic pottery desired for its intrinsic snob value.

This pattern, strong influx from around 1400 to 1250, then a gap, with the re-establishment of contact in the twelfth century (LH III C), can be paralleled in the south-west, as at Miletus. We may fairly take this as a guide to our general picture of relations between Troy and Mycenae.

To the pottery evidence we can add other imports from the Mycenaean world. Blegen found that the last phase of Troy VI (
c
.1400–1300 BC) brought in luxury items of Mycenaean origin: ivory boxes with the characteristic patterns, perhaps a gaming-board among them, carnelian and ivory beads, decorated ostrich eggs, electrum or silver pins, a Cretan lamp. Other finds suggest wider contacts: cylinder seals, which may be from the Hittite world, ‘white slip’ pottery from Cyprus (perhaps containing opium) – some of the decorated bowls like the Mycenaean ones, were appreciated as exotic products; tripod stone bowls may also
have come to Troy from Cyprus. We might note here that the shipwreck found off Cape Gelidonya (
see here
) was on the sea route from Cyprus to Troy, as well as to Greece: Cypriot pottery was found in the wreck as well as on Crete, Thera, Melos, Keos, Rhodes and Kos – some perhaps sailing stations on the way to Troy.

What did the Trojans give in return? The presence of many spindle whorls, reported by all the diggers on Hisarlik, has suggested that they may have specialised in wool, spun yarn and textiles. This is made all the more plausible if we remember that the neighbours of Ilium in classical times, towns like Scepsis, were known as sheep towns. The Trojans also exported their own pottery, for their local Grey Minyan ware has been found in Syria (at Ugarit, for example), in Cyprus and in Palestine. Fish has also been put forward as a source of Troy’s wealth, and this is even more likely now that we know of the existence of the great bay. In later times the seasonal migrations of mackerel and tunny through the Dardanelles brought fishing fleets from all over the Aegean, and this has even been put forward as a possible motive for the Trojan War: the molesting of a Mycenaean fishing fleet having led to a sort of Bronze-Age cod war! The archaeology of Hisarlik could support the idea; Schliemann found deep strata of fish-bones, which could include mackerel and tunny (Schliemann’s ‘shark bones’?).

A legendary element in Troy’s wealth may also have some basis in fact. Homer singles out Troy for its fine horses, and its citizens as horse breeders. The archaeologists found that Troy VI was distinguished by the presence of quantities of horse bones, and we can also point to horse breeding in the Troad in classical times (in fact there was an Ottoman Turkish stud farm near Troy as late as the First World War). The herds of wild horses still roaming the north-western part of Lesbos may be a distant link with the ‘horse culture’ of the Troy region in the Late Bronze Age. So, though we have only the Homeric epithets as direct testimony, it seems likely that horse breeding was one source of Troy’s fabled riches: curiously enough the sack of Laomedon’s Troy is attributed to a dispute over horses!

The most important question about the Trojans, however, we cannot yet answer. Who were they? Though the site of Hisarlik was inhabited from around 3600 BC, it is generally agreed that Troy VI was built by newcomers who brought with them, among other things, the horse. Blegen put their arrival at around 1900 BC, the same time that Greek speakers were thought to have entered Greece. In fact Blegen and others were tempted, because of the pottery, to think that originally the Greeks and Trojans were of the same stock. Characteristic of Troy VI was the Grey Minyan, which closely resembled that found in Middle-Bronze-Age Greece (it was named by Schliemann, who first found it at ‘Minyan’ Orchomenos). The common ceramic element led many Aegean archaeologists to believe that Troy VI and Greece were overrun by invaders of the same stock (offering the intriguing possibility that they might still have been able to understand each other in the thirteenth century BC). However these assumptions are questionable. Anatolian specialists have pointed out that this type of pottery is much more widely spread in western Anatolia than Blegen thought, and probably has its roots back in the third millennium BC in north-west Anatolia. Similarly mainland Grey Minyan can now be seen to have antecedents back in the Early Bronze Age, before 2000 BC, when an increasing number of experts now think that Greek speakers were already in Greece. The language and identity of the Trojans remains a mystery.

THE TROJAN WAR: THE VIEW FROM BRONZE AGE MYCENAE

We may safely assume that the Greeks and Trojans knew each other and traded directly. That a Greek king might have coveted Troy’s wealth seems not unlikely. If we want an imaginary contemporary scenario based on the archaeological evidence, it is easy enough to paint. Let us imagine a king of Mycenae in the mid-thirteenth century BC. He has troubles at home, perhaps. There are as always jealous kinsmen, rivals within the royal house, chafing underlings. The factories in the Argolid are on half
production. The defence budget is massive and rising – bronze, like oil today, never gets cheaper, and if there were economic problems it may have become more difficult to obtain (particularly with the growing threat of piracy in the Aegean). The king needs a foreign war. He needs loot and slaves to keep the army loyal. He needs raw materials and precious metals. We do not have to imagine one great ‘imperial’ expedition. We may conjecture a number of armed forays into the north-eastern Aegean extending over many years. Troy can hardly have been the only objective, rather it was merely one of many places attacked and sacked for treasure and slaves. The Linear B tablets give us a context for the seizing of slaves in Asia Minor – over thirty places mentioned in this connection remain unidentified. Homer, too, preserves a tradition that many other places in the north-east Aegean were attacked, including Lesbos, where interestingly enough the main Bronze-Age town, Thermi, was destroyed
c
.1300 BC, apparently by armed attack.

The Homeric story, then, fits very well with what we know of Mycenaean relations with the coast of Asia Minor. The attack on Troy would have been one of a series of aggressive forays in those parts. Its memory might have been preserved because it was one of the last successful expeditions of this kind, the dynasty at Mycenae being rent by internal feuds soon afterwards (there is a destruction level at Mycenae datable to
c
.1230 BC). Our story is plausible, but no more.

Indeed, that is about as far as we can go at the present with the archaeological and literary evidence. To take it any further, we would need contemporary testimony, first-hand documentary sources: an almost impossible expectation, one might have thought, for the Late Bronze Age Aegean. But astonishingly, it now looks as if such material does in fact exist.

SIX

A FORGOTTEN EMPIRE: THE HITTITES AND THE GREEKS

Cut out the mythical elements in the tale and you are left as a kernel with the expedition of a powerful King of Mycenae against this town in the Scamander plain near the Hellespont. This kernel must be historical, but it is unlikely that we shall be able to reconstruct the actual course of events when we lack contemporary historical records
.

EDUARD MEYER,
Geschichte des Altertums
(1928)

IN THIS NEXT STAGE
of our search we come to a very different kind of evidence from that available to us in the previous five chapters. Remarkable discoveries in central Turkey have led to the decipherment of the Hittite language and have revealed the hitherto unsuspected existence of a great empire which stretched from the Aegean to the Euphrates valley at precisely the time when tradition places the Trojan War. In the Hittite archives, for the first time in our quest, we have ‘real’ historical texts to interpret: diplomatic letters, treaties, annals and royal autobiographies in which the characters of the kings and queens of the Hittites come to life in a most vivid way. Most exciting of all is the claim that Troy and the Trojan War are to be found in these files of the ‘Hittite Foreign Office’; indeed it is even possible on the face of it that we have surviving letters written to Agamemnon himself, and a treaty with the real Alexander of Ilios, who in the legend was Paris, the son of Priam, who abducted Helen and brought about the sack of the city of Troy.

The emergence of the Hittites from almost complete obscurity has been one of the great achievements of archaeology and philology of the last 100 years. That achievement has not
received its full acknowledgement in the English-speaking world, probably because the main work has been done in German, and the Hittite language was deciphered by Germans and a Czech. Nevertheless the achievement has been nothing less than the rediscovery of one of the great Bronze-Age civilisations, and with it the earliest Indo-European language so far known, the Hittite branch of the tree from which Celtic, Germanic, Sanskrit – and Greek – grew.

Though the classical Greeks seem to have been quite unaware of the existence of a Hittite empire in Asia Minor in the Heroic Age, the Hittites were not entirely lost. In the Old Testament they are frequently referred to, though with no real hint of their importance. Only in two places is there any suggestion that the Hittites are other than merely another of the tribes encountered by the Israelites in Palestine. Solomon takes Hittite wives and buys costly Egyptian horses as gifts for the Hittite king (2 Chronicles 1:17); elsewhere we read of how the king of the Israelites can bring against his enemies the kings of the Hittites and the kings of the Egyptians (2 Kings 7:6–7). In fact, these biblical accounts touched on an empire which had stretched to the Aegean, and which had been destroyed soon after 1200 BC, several hundred years before these parts of the Bible were written.