In Search of the Trojan War (34 page)

Was the life of VIIa so brief, though? This seems unlikely. Blegen’s earlier statement, ‘within a century’, seems nearer the mark. Two houses had two successive floor levels and one three; not mere relayings (as we still find in rural Anatolia) but strata totalling up to a metre in depth, accumulated over some time; this surely takes VIIa well back into the thirteenth century BC but lasting long enough to receive III C pottery; forty or fifty years seems a plausible low estimate. It would appear, then, that Blegen truncated the life of Troy VIIa;its shanties and storage jars were not laid in for
one event
; they were a condition of a whole time, not a short-lived emergency at all: they are the architectural
character of the whole phase of the settlement, and it is curious that this was not remarked on by critics at the time. In fact, the archaeology of Troy VIIa would fit very well with the disturbed period of
c
.1210–1180, the period of the invasions by the Sea Peoples, the upheavals in the ‘islands of the Great Green’ described in Egyptian texts; a time when all cities in Eastern Mediterranean lands were vulnerable to attack as central authorities were everywhere weakened. If we wish to pin down the brutal sack uncovered by Blegen to one particular event (and I should stress that there is no need to do this), it would be perverse to ignore the Sea Peoples’ raid of 1180, which we know destroyed places in western Anatolia, precisely in the area of Troy, when it ravaged Arzawa and Hittite country before heading south. Troy VIIa
may
have fallen to Sea Peoples – whoever they were – like many places in Anatolia and Syria.

We can see, then, that Blegen was carried away by his desire to find a Homeric synchronism. His date of 1270–1240 BC for the life of Troy VIIa is far too early. Troy VIIa fell in around 1180,
after
destructions on the mainland which in some cases ruined the great palaces forever. It would appear that Troy VIIa
cannot
be Homer’s Troy: Troy VIh
could be
. But if Troy VIh fell to an earthquake, does the Trojan War vanish? Is Schliemann’s dream on the point of dissipating forever? In fact I do not think that these new discoveries about the date of the fall of Troy VIIa necessarily rule out VIIa as the model of the Trojan War.

ANOTHER TROJAN WAR? ‘THE PEOPLES IN THEIR ISLANDS WERE ON THE MOVE’

Could not Troy VIIa have been sacked by Mycenaeans after all? Not by a great coalition under a Mycenaean high king, but by Mycenaean Vikings sending their corsairs through the Aegean world in the first half of the twelfth century during the time of upheavals of the Sea Peoples? The generic term ‘Sea Peoples’
should not deceive us into thinking that there was one organised movement. In a time of internecine upheaval and migrations we may well follow the Viking analogy: Mycenaean royal sons with their armed following, stateless kings, renegades and pirates may well have taken advantage of the general unrest to sack many cities in the Aegean world. Sackers of cities must still have sailed from Tiryns in the twelfth century. Is it conceivable that Troy VIIa fell to Sea Peoples who were in fact Mycenaeans? That the tale was sung in the declining years of the twelfth century BC back in the courts of Mycenae and Tiryns? This interpretation has no glorious Troy, no Mycenaean ‘empire’, but at least it has a siege in the archaeological record. The only alternative explanation takes us nearer the myth; that is to place the Trojan War in the period of the Mycenaean ‘empire’, at the time of the beautiful walls of Troy VI, just as the epic tradition asserts. But there the archaeological evidence says there is no siege. Can we reconcile these facts? Let us look again at the destruction of Troy VI. Here the archaeology tells us more than Blegen thought. The date may have been around 1275; there is no means of being more precise. The evidence of earthquake damage seems convincing, but only a small area of the city was examined by Blegen.

THE DESTRUCTION OF TROY VI BY EARTHQUAKE

Lying at the junction of the so-called African and Eurasian plates, the Aegean area is notoriously prone to earthquake. Troy itself is situated near the junction of one of the intermediate crust ‘blocks’ of this zone, and near the end of the major Anatolian fault; as a result there is a great deal of seismic activity: twenty-seven earthquakes are recorded in the area since 1912, some (1912, 1935, 1953, 1968) big ones at 6 or 7 on the Richter scale (‘… general panic. Poor masonry destroyed, good masonry damaged seriously. Foundations generally damaged. Buildings shifted off foundations’). This is the scale of earthquake proposed for Troy VI; they can be worse, of course – the maximum recorded is 8.9, when damage to man-made structures was total.
The period AD 1939–68 seems to have been particularly bad, and it would appear that major quakes come in rapid succession to be followed by a period of relative quiet which can last up to 150 years, punctuated only by minor ones every twenty years or so in the Troy region: but one of the scale of 6 or 7 can be expected on the Troad on average every 300 years. That said, the ‘region of Troy’ is large; an earthquake of this scale 60 miles away (as are most of those cited) will not have affected Troy; to do so the shock would have to be directly underneath the city.

The earthquake history of Troy was detected at points by Schliemann. Blegen and his team were able to show that Troys III, IV and V all suffered major earthquake damage, and that in their opinion Troy VI, the most glorious of all, was very badly damaged. They assume that the mudbrick superstructure of the main wall was thrown down, and that the upper parts of all the excavated houses must have suffered likewise. As a result of this destruction, they implicitly suggest, economic problems were caused which determined the nature of the successor city Troy VIIa. Their major points are as follows.

The main wall of Troy VI was founded on a cushion of earth above the bedrock, presumably to protect it against earthquake. Tower VIh was, however, laid directly on the bedrock and here large cracks are visible today. The inner face of the great stretch of wall on the south, originally vertical, had been partially dislocated and slightly tilted towards the north. The shifting seemed to have been accompanied by a mass of stones falling from the wall’s superstructure, and this occurred before the successor settlement was founded. House VIG fell in the disaster: at its northern end the east wall collapsed. Masses of squared stones fell inward into the citadel from the upper part of tower VIh. The east wall of house VIE collapsed. Everywhere in the areas examined by the Americans a thick deposit of debris dating from the last phase of the sixth settlement was encountered, up to 4½ feet in depth.

Blegen was convinced that Dörpfeld had been wrong in thinking that the destruction of Troy VI was due to a hostile army. Let us for now accept the fact of the earthquake.
Earthquake experts distinguish between ‘total disasters’ and less catastrophic evidence of architectural and structural damage, and the major earthquake proposed by Blegen comes close to the ‘total disaster’ category. Nevertheless we should first ask ourselves whether Blegen’s conclusions about the economic and social consequences of such a destruction were entirely right. After all, the main city wall, as far as we can tell, still stood around its entire circuit. Even today, after the destruction wrought by classical builders, the walls and towers are an impressive sight and a major obstacle. The damage, then, was severe but not as catastrophic as has been claimed: a number of the great houses were ruined and the superstructure of the main circuit walls fell in places. There is, however, no sign that any of the main circuit wall was actually toppled. It still stands today and is intact (leaving aside later building damage) for almost all its surviving length; in some places there are cracks, and in one place the wall has shifted, but in essence the main wall was undamaged: nowhere did it open up or fall. Therefore it is not true to say, as has been alleged, that ‘nothing [was left] standing intact, not even the circle of great wall and towers’ (Denys Page). But consider what follows. This was a city at the height of its wealth and glory and architectural development, built by a race of great builders. Such disasters happen frequently in the Eastern Mediterranean; they had happened before at Troy. Usually the people pick themselves up, repair the damage, and build bigger and better than before. But why were the great houses of Troy VI never rebuilt? Why were dismal tenements and shanties built in the open streets between the once noble houses? Why were some of the houses themselves not merely left in ruins, but partitioned? There is no archaeological evidence that
any
of the Troy VI houses retained its original function after the earthquake. If we accept the premise that the great buildings of Troy VI were houses and temples for the royal clan and their immediate retainers, living around and below the palace, then a dramatic change has taken place. Why was it that the spacious mansions had been left in ruins or divided up; the ‘wide streets’ obstructed with small
houses, some only 15 feet by 12, or even less – in one no fewer than 22 pithoi sunk into the floor? The character of the whole settlement is now so radically different that we are justified in asking whether an earthquake was not the only thing to have happened to Troy VI. It looks very much as if the powerful rulers who lived in houses like the Pillar House (we cannot speak for the palace itself) were no longer there: and surely no earthquake could be powerful enough to kill all the royalty whose citadel this was? Either the Trojans had lost the will to rebuild, or the ruling clan who had directed the magnificent constructions of VIh no longer existed. It is difficult to be speculative with so much of the site destroyed. We know, after all, that the Trojans
were
able and had the will to reconstruct the street in the south entrance, laying a new drain. We know also that the defences were patched up with a new outwork for the south-east gate. But in many places the wreckage lay where it fell, and on the whole it seems likely that the great houses had ceased to have their original function – ceased to shelter a powerful royal race.

Inevitably such a conclusion can only be speculative, for earthquake experts agree that it is
possible
for a severe earthquake to kill all the people in a city if it occurs at an inopportune moment (in the night, say, when people are sleeping, or at prayer time, as has happened in the modern Near East). But had Troy VI been attacked and sacked as it lay in its greatest weakness, crippled by an earthquake? If it had, then we would have an explanation for the extraordinary transformation in Trojan society after the earthquake. If there was no such attack, then there remains no archaeological evidence for the Trojan War, and if we wished to cling on to any belief in the epic tradition at all, we would have to conclude that the Greeks attacked but failed to take Troy, as many have suspected from Lechevalier onwards.

But did the excavators of Hisarlik find any evidence to point to a Mycenaean attack on Troy VI? Combing the accounts of Blegen, Dörpfeld and Schliemann (who of course had no idea that his Sixth or ‘Lydian’ City was contemporary with Mycenae) it is possible to find some support for such an idea.

First there is good evidence that Troy VI was thoroughly burned. Blegen brushed over this in his final report, but Dörpfeld’s account leaves no doubt: ‘The citadel was completely destroyed by enemy action,’ he wrote in 1902. ‘We distinguished
traces of a great fire in many places
.’ (My italics.) He adds that the toppling of the
upper
parts of the walls and gates was hardly explicable either by fire alone, or even earthquake. Now Blegen dismissed this burning in his report, though he noted thick black carbonised debris throughout the deep ‘earthquake’ layer, but in an interview published in 1963 he affirmed that ‘Troy VI had been burned – no doubt about that.’ People had been killed too: in the street, west of the Pillar house, Blegen found a human skull.

More interesting than these vague hints is the presence of large numbers of Mycenaean weapons in the last phase of Troy VI. In the light of Blegen’s emphasis on one ‘Aegean’ arrowhead in his version of the fall of Troy VIIa, it is worth listing the veritable arsenal found in Troy VI, some definitely assignable to the ‘earthquake’ layer. Blegen found a stemmed arrowhead from VIh which he thought Mycenaean on the basis of others he had discovered at Prosymna, near Mycenae; Schliemann found an identical one in his Sixth City. A barbed arrowhead found by Blegen between house VIG and the main wall was similar to others found by Schliemann and Dörpfeld; again Blegen could offer a mainland parallel from his own dig at Prosymna. Blegen also found a riveted Mycenaean knife with a flanged haft. In the Sixth City again – but we do not know how late – Schliemann found a Mycenaean lancehead with a hollowed socket; he remarked on the Homeric parallel, and mentions that he had found many like this at Mycenae (Dörpfeld found another example in Troy VI). Also in the Sixth City, Schliemann unearthed four double-headed bronze axes ‘perfectly identical’ to axes he had found at Mycenae; Dörpfeld found another of these, along with masses of terracotta slingshots, three bronze sickle-shaped blades, knives and celts, all with good mainland parallels. Now, most of these cannot be securely dated to the last phase of
Troy VI – not all are certainly Greek, though they look like it – but we may well ask whether they all came as a result of peaceful trading.

Apart from the clear evidence of burning, these finds do not amount to very much, of course, but they bring us to a last question which has not occurred to any commentator since Blegen announced his discoveries.
Was
Troy VI destroyed by earthquake? The evidence has seemed so rock-solid that it has been depended upon. But is it possible that the damage to Troy VI was, after all, the work of men, as Dörpfeld had thought when he uncovered the city in 1893? For Dörpfeld ‘traces of a great fire were distinguished in many places’, but the toppling of the superstructures of the walls and towers, he felt, ‘could not be wholly explained either by a conflagration alone
or by an earthquake
’. (My italics.) The fire was unarguable: not indeed ‘so universal or so striking to the eye as in Troy II, but only because the building material of Troy VI was not so combustible’. Blegen, we know, agreed: there was ‘no doubt’ about the burning of the city, even if he did not say so in his reports. Was it conceivable, then, that Troy VI had been deliberately demolished, ‘slighted’ after a siege? There are near contemporary parallels for this in the siege warfare of the Assyrians, who are known to have dismantled and devastated cities with which they had engaged in particularly bitter sieges. It is fascinating that Blegen seriously considered this idea. In
Troy, III
, 1953, he wrote: