The Trojan War in Homer and History - Recorded Books

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Blegen soon became convinced that he was excavating a city that had been besieged and that the population from the Lower City and perhaps from the surrounding villages had flooded the wealthy upper citadel of the town in the face of an advancing enemy force. His suspicions were confirmed, he believed, by the discovery that Troy VIIa had been destroyed by humans—in a terrible battle about the year 1175 BCE. Blegen found skeletons, or portions of unburied bodies, in the streets within the citadel. He found arrowheads, of specifically Aegean manufacture. He found evidence of fire and of houses destroyed by burning. Clearly, it was Troy VIIa, not Troy VIh, that had been captured and put to the torch by the Mycenaeans, at least according to Blegen. As further proof, he could point to the next city, the city that was constructed directly upon the ashes and burnt debris of Troy VIIa. This had already been labeled Troy VIIb by Dörpfeld, but Blegen would probably rather have called it Troy VIII, because it was so different. It was not simply the second phase of the same city; now the town plan was completely altered, the architecture of the houses completely unlike what had come before, and the pottery was new and different. In the annals of archaeology, we frequently say “pots do not always equal people”—in other words, new types of pottery do not necessarily indicate the presence of newcomers—but in this case, it seemed that they did. The inhabitants of Troy VIIb were different; it was as if the previous occupants of Troy VIIa had completely vanished, or been killed. Blegen believed that they had—he thought that the Mycenaean warriors led by Agamemnon, who had burnt the city to the ground, had also killed or enslaved all of its inhabitants before returning to Mainland Greece and their homes after ten long years of war. On the face of it, it seemed that Blegen was correct, that both Schliemann and Dörpfeld had been incorrect, and that it was Troy VIIa that was Priam’s Troy. He had finally solved the mystery and identified the city of the Trojan War. However, we still have a problem, for Troy VIIa does not fit Homer’s description of a wealthy city—of a city with towering gates, high walls, broad streets, large houses, and a magnificent palace. The city that Blegen had excavated was a city under siege; it was a poor city, a reconstructed city, with its large houses subdivided by party walls and with storage jars buried underfoot. It wasn’t a city that would have taken ten years to capture and it certainly wasn’t a city worth writing an epic about. The only way in which Troy VIIa matches Homer’s story lies in the manner in which it was destroyed, for this city was certainly destroyed by humans in a deliberate act of war. And yet, how should we resolve this dilemma? Which city was Homer describing? Troy VIh or Troy VIIa? Both? Neither? Could Dörpfeld have been correct after all? But then who had destroyed Troy VIIa? Or could Homer have been writing about the magnificent city of Troy VI but the destruction of Troy VIIa and taking a poet’s liberty by telescoping events in order to create a grand and epic tale? Not everyone agreed with Blegen that Priam’s Troy was the city of VIIa, but it would be another half century before the next series of excavations at Hisarlik/Troy began. 47
LECTURE ELEVEN 1. Why would Blegen have preferred to label Troy VIIa as Troy VIi? 48 Questions 2. Why was Blegen sure that Troy VIIa was Priam’s Troy? Suggested Reading Wood, Michael. In Search of the Trojan War. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Other Books of Interest FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING Blegen, Carl W. Troy and the Trojans. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1995. Blegen, Carl W., J.L. Caskey, and Marion Rawson. Troy III: The Sixth Settlement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. ———. Troy IV: Settlements VIIa, VIIb, and VIII. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958. Page, Denys L. History and the Homeric Iliad. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. Journal Articles Nur, A., and Eric H. Cline. “Poseidon’s Horses: Plate Tectonics and Earthquake Storms in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean.” Journal of Archaeological Science, 27 (2000) 43–63. ———. “What Triggered the Collapse? Earthquake Storms.” Archaeology Odyssey, 4/5 (2001) 31–36, 62–63.
Page 1 and 2: ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE ILIAD: THE TROJ
Page 3 and 4: Archaeology and the Iliad: The Troj
Page 5 and 6: Photo courtesy of Eric H. Cline Abo
Page 7 and 8: LECTURE ONE Lecture 1: The Tale of
Page 9 and 10: LECTURE ONE during the time of Troy
Page 11 and 12: LECTURE TWO Lecture 2: The Mycenaea
Page 13 and 14: LECTURE TWO The majority of these p
Page 15 and 16: LECTURE THREE Lecture 3: The Hittit
Page 17 and 18: LECTURE THREE helped to reestablish
Page 19 and 20: LECTURE THREE Questions FOR GREATER
Page 21 and 22: LECTURE FOUR So the Sea Peoples, co
Page 23 and 24: LECTURE FOUR 1. Why do the Sea Peop
Page 25 and 26: LECTURE FIVE One of the most import
Page 27 and 28: LECTURE FIVE 1. What are the differ
Page 29 and 30: LECTURE SIX Instead, depictions and
Page 31 and 32: LECTURE SIX Questions 1. What is an
Page 33 and 34: LECTURE SEVEN This is extremely imp
Page 35 and 36: LECTURE SEVEN Questions 1. Why is t
Page 37 and 38: LECTURE EIGHT world that he had fou
Page 39 and 40: LECTURE EIGHT 1. What was Schlieman
Page 41 and 42: LECTURE NINE from the so-called “
Page 43 and 44: LECTURE TEN Lecture 10: Wilhelm Dö
Page 45 and 46: LECTURE TEN the crashing sound of t
Page 47: LECTURE ELEVEN Lecture 11: Carl Ble
Page 51 and 52: LECTURE TWELVE Korfmann and his tea
Page 53 and 54: LECTURE TWELVE 1. What could have h
Page 55 and 56: LECTURE THIRTEEN Troy also lay on t
Page 57 and 58: LECTURE FOURTEEN Lecture 14: Did th
Page 59 and 60: LECTURE FOURTEEN 1. What do we know
Page 61: COURSE MATERIALS Other Books of Int

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