Figure 1.--Many ruins dating to different periods have been found at Troy. Here the walls of troy are being scaled by two modern Greek boys. These are believed to be the actual foundation of the Trojan War-era walls that prevented the Greeks from taking the city for more than a decade. The actual walls would have towered over the foundation.

Troy is believed to have been a flourishing trafing center during the Bronze Age. It was stragegically located on the Dardanelles. This mean tha any Greek or other merchant vessel from the Aegean Sea heading for the Black Sea had to pass by Troy and could be attacked. Many ships may have used Troy to trade for Black sea prodyucts rather than making the long dangerous trip into the Black Sea. Al this would have helped make Troy rich. The classical Greeks and Romans had not doubt that Troy was an actual historical city. After the fall of Rome, scholars in the West came to view Troy in largely mythological terms. Only after archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann's discoveies (1870s) did scholars begin to see Troy as an actual historical city. This and other archeological work has located Troy. It is in Hisarlık (western Anatolia), close to the seacoast in what is now Çanakkale province in northwest Turkey, southwest of the Dardanelles on the slopes of Mount Ida. It is now a few miles from the sea, but this is not uncommon with ancient sea ports where sea access has become silted over. Archelogical work found not only Homeric Troy, but many different levels of occupation dating back to aout 3000 BC. This of course set off a lively academic debate as to which level was Homeric Troy. It is now believed to be Troy VIIa which has been dated to 1300-1190 BC.While the ruins of Troy have been found, virtully nothing is known about the people and culture of Troy. The best clues are linuistic relationships. Some scholars believe that the Tojans spoke Luwian (Luvian) which is one of the extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language group. Luwian is closely related to Hittite, the language of the Hittite Empire. Luwianand was among the languages spoken by the people in Arzawa located west of the core Hittite area in southeast Anatolia. Scholars claim to have found diplomatic references to Troy in Egyptian and Hittite texts, but they are not universally recognized. Note that despite the cultural differences, there appears to have been no real difference between the the Greeks and Trojans technologically. They used the same military equipment.

Created: 7:09 PM 2/11/2009
Last updated: 7:09 PM 2/11/2009