Anatoly V. Belyakov, PhD., Oleg A. Matveychev, PhD
Trojan Horse of Western History

To Lidia, Maria, Elizaveta, Svetlana, Gleb, Platon.

Be kind, develop your talents and love the truth!

Scientific readers: Victor V. Kondrashin, DSc, and Vladimir B. Kulikov, PhD.

Special thanks to Russian philanthropists Artem Suetin and Gennadiy Chernushkin, who helped to publish this book.

© Trojan Horse (rus. ed.) Piter Publishing House, LLC, 2014

© Translation A. Belyakov, O. Matveychev, 2015

© Design of English edition, Piter Publishing House, LLC, 2015

Alternative Introduction

We’ve decided not to write a traditional foreword, but to offer ten different answers to the question of what kind of book we have produced, instead.

Here they are:

1. This book is about the fact that the Trojans defeated the Greeks and not the other way around, as it is commonly believed.

2. This book is about the fact that the well-known Greek religion with its specific anthropomorphism was artificially created for some political reasons.

3. This book is about the fact that soft power, information warfare and falsification of history do not constitute innovations, but are the oldest essential features of the Western mind.

4. This book refutes the conventional wisdom that “history is written by the victors”. On the contrary, we have proven that the victors are the ones, who have managed to write history.

5. This book is about our postmodern world, where universals contradict one another, each of them entailing other universals as “my other”, and we have shown the horizons in terms of solving the problem of postmodernism.

6. This book tells the story of exciting journeys to both ancient Troy and to modern Troy.

7. This is a book that all will be able to comprehend, not only those educated in human sciences, because it is as bright, lively and entertaining as a mystery thriller.

8. This is a book of science, which opposes the fashionable sensational historical junk food that has recently appeared in bookstores under the anarchic banner of “Anything goes”.[1]

9. This book is about the struggle for historical truth and justice, immersing us in the world, because without truth we are orphans.

10. This book is about history unfolding like a musical piece, and by an audible note we can’t guess the previous note, and neither we can predict the next one or project the present into the past and the future. To hear the music of history one must have the historical ability to hear.

Chapter 1
Mega-mall to megaron. Pilgrimage to the land of Homer

It took us half an hour to get from Europe to Asia. This is the exact amount of time it takes for a car-ferry connecting the Gallipoli peninsula with the Anatolian coast to cross the Dardanelles. We got to our final destination in about an hour from the fishing town of Gelibolu. During this last part of our journey we were overtaken with a special feeling. The road to Troy! This phrase so full of solemnity put us into a poetic mood. We felt like echoing Homer’s Zeus:

For of all cities beneath sun and starry heaven wherein men that dwell upon the face of the earth have their abodes, of these sacred Ilios was most honoured of my heart.

Iliad. IV. 45–46.

The landscape outside the window, however, conflicted with the state of our mind. Scant vegetated low hills alternated with sunflower and small pine wood plantations. Only a thin blue band on the horizon reminded us that we were coming to the centre of what used to be a mighty marine state in ancient times. Behind a stunted cornfield, we turned to a rural road. In other five minutes we arrived in the village of Tevfikye. It was Ramazan, and Troy was opened for visitors only after 1 p.m. In a café near the souvenir shop we had the very Turkish tea in small glasses and stared at the Greek tourists, who arrived by a huge bus. Deciding not to wait for the opening, but to buy some wooden horses and fridge magnets instead, they finally got back on their bus and moved on to the places where Hellenes had won honor in battles.

Fig. 1. The Troad is the ancient name of the Biga Peninsula, where legendary Troy is located.

Pilgrimage to these lands is a very old tradition. Every such pilgrimage can become a plot of a book, and it often has been a key event in global history.

In 480 B.C., while marching against the Greeks, Persian King Xerxes stopped his troops on the Hellespont coast. Two boat bridges were built across the narrow strait. Suddenly a storm started, destroying the bridges kept together with papyrus ropes, after which the King commanded to lash defiant waters and behead the builders. Before a new ferry was built, Xerxes visited the legendary fortress. According to Herodotus, the King “ascended to the citadel of Priam, having desire to view it, and having viewed and inquired of all that was there, he sacrifices 1,000 oxen to Athena Ilias, while the Magi offered librations to the heroes”.[2] However, the generous hecatomb did not help Xerxes to break the Greek spirit down or to conquer Greece. Having suffered some crushing defeats from the Greeks, having ceded them some of his land and having reduced the country to famine with his military adventures, Xerxes was murdered in the bedroom of his own palace.

In 334 B.C. the flotilla of another great conqueror entered the waters of Hellespont. Having stopped his ship in the middle of the channel, Alexander the Great sacrificed an ox to Poseidon, the God of the Sea. Then he approached the Troad coast and threw a lance onto the dusty ground. For the young king, this was a sign as to the beginning of the conquest of Asia: the “lance conquered” lands were considered to be a gift from the Gods. He jumped off the ship and was the first to get ashore. Since Alexander believed Achilles to be his ancestor, he laid a wreath on the grave of his great grandparent. He took the shield and weapons from the Temple of Athena, and these items brought him luck on the battle field soon after that. The first battle with the Persians took place on the Granicus River near Troy. The army of 40 thousand Persian satraps was smashed with one attack, after which groups of Macedonians cut through the lands of Asian continent like a knife through butter…

Later, Alexander ordered to release Ilion from duties and to equip it with the necessary facilities, because it was his serious intent to find the capital of his global empire there. His early death ruined these plans, though. The great empire split into parts, and the Troad lands with a larger part of Thrace were passed to Alexander’s comrade Lysimachus. Lysimachus built high ramparts around the town, made people from adjacent villages settle there and named the town Alexandria.[3]

In 48 B.C. after the victory over Gnaeus Pompeius in the crucial battle at Pharsalia, Julius Caesar came to the Troad.

He is wandering about the ruins of famous Troy,
Looking for tracks of the great wall erected by Phoebe.
The depths of the dead forests and sponks are
Where the Assaracus palace was – and
The Divine’s temples can hardly stand on the ramshackle stones;
And all Pergamon is covered with thick blackthorn:
Even fragments died![4]

Just like Alexander, he believed to have descended from Aeneas and pondered moving the throne to the deserted Troy.

Moreover, having visited Troy, Constantine the Great had been considering founding a new capital there until 330, when he changed his mind and chose to establish Byzantium on the Bosporus, another channel, connecting the Black and the Mediterranean seas. The Troad seemed a more preferable site for the capital, as from there it would have been possible to control not only the narrow straits, but also the land roads of Asia Minor, facing all the Ecumene.[5] However, the sea was already far from Ilion, and the town lost the key element of its existence, which was the harbour. The Emperor gave the new city on the Bosporus a significant name of New Rome, as it was fated to become the centre of this thousand-year empire; however, while the Emperor was still alive, another city name was approved, Constantinople – ”the city of Constantine”.

In 354, Constantine’s nephew Flavius Claudius Julian made a pilgrimage to Ilion. Rejecting Christianity, which became the national religion of the Roman state in time of Emperor Constantine, Julian expected to find desecrated sanctuaries in Troy. He was surprised to discover that all the Pagan rites were still observed in the Hector’s tomb and in the Temple of Athena. Having become the sovereign emperor, he pursued the revival of Paganism and of the Hellenic spirit, due to which his contemporaries nicknamed him “Apostata”. However, Julian was bound to be the last Pagan Roman emperor.

On May 29, 1453, the Turkish Ottomans took Constantinople by storm, and Sultan Mehmet II made the city the capital of his state. Morea and Trapezus, the last vestiges of what used to be a great empire, fell under Turkish control in 1460 and 1461, accordingly. The Ottoman Empire was getting ready for further expansion; however, before sending his hordes to Christian Europe, Mehmet the Conqueror decided to visit Ilion. It happened in 1462. By then, the Troad had already been under Turkish rule for about a century.

Fig. 2. The Mehmet II memorial in Istanbul.

For half a millennium Turkish was spoken in the Troad. For new inhabitants of these lands Troy was a tourist attraction in the first place. As early as in the 16[[th]] and 17[[th]] centuries the enterprising Turks took Europeans, coming to the Eastern coast of the Dardanelles, to some randomly located ruins, claiming those to be remnants of the ancient Ilion. Nowadays, this tradition has been eagerly taken up by guides, who repeat ancient legends mixed up with the latest myths about the successful Heinrich Schliemann, King Priam’s treasures and the great victory of the Greek, allegedly confirmed by archaeological discoveries. The striking landmarks of the new tourist-oriented Troy include the false house of Schliemann in the village of Tevfikye and a large wooden horse built in 1975 for tourists to take pictures with. There are also fragments of antique buildings that the locals took away for their needs. Here or there you can see a bench made of a Doric column capital, or the fence supported with a piece of an ancient monument.

However, such a consumer attitude to ancient history is also typical for us, modern Europeans, used to being fed historical junk food from nice boxes.

Fig. 3. A bench made of Troy artifacts in the village of Tevfikye.

The consumer attitude to ancient history is typical for modern Europeans, used to being fed historical junk food from nice boxes.

If you asked a man from the street about his knowledge of the Trojan War, you would hear a quite confused story based on children books about the myths of ancient Greece, the song Cassandra by Vysotsky, a couple of films like the recent Hollywood Troy, or some clichés from block calendars about the heel of Achilles, the Trojan horse and the apple of discord. Even though these sources often contradict each other, the consumer’s mind still manages to put different facts together consistently.

So, the story goes that once upon a time there lived King Priam in the city of Troy. After his son Paris was born, the king heard a prophecy that Paris would bring the great empire to an end. Priam ordered to kill the baby, but the tender-hearted servants disobeyed him and left the boy on Mount Ida. A shepherd saved Paris and raised him, and taught him the basics of his trade. One day Paris, who was also called Alexander, was grazing, say, sheep in the mountain pasture, and there he saw three goddesses – Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. They asked the young shepherd to resolve their argument as to which of them was more beautiful. (An apple inscribed “for the fairest” was tossed in the midst of the feast, thus sparking a vanity-fueled dispute among the goddesses about who that apple was intended for). Hera promised Paris power over people, if he chose her; Athena promised him wisdom beyond other mortals had; Aphrodite promised him great love. After some consideration Paris selected Aphrodite, who showed him an image of the most beautiful woman in the water – his wife-to-be.

Then Paris went to Troy, where he was recognized as the King’s son. One day Priam and his sons Hector and Paris went to Lacedaemon, the capital of Sparta, to meet Menelaus, the king of that place, to conclude a new trade agreement. Having reached an agreement, the kings arranged a sumptuous feast, and it was then that Paris saw Helen. Helen was the wife of King Menelaus, but Paris realized that she was the very beauty he had seen in the water and couldn’t have left without her. The circumstances were the best for his solution. The following day, Menelaus left for Crete on business. As they say, while the cat is away, the mice will play. Charmed by handsome Paris, Helen sailed with him to Troy, where the lovers legitimated their marriage.

In any epoch abduction of one’s wife has been an inconceivable insult. In the Trojan era, it was casus belli. Upon returning to Sparta, Menelaus became furious. He summoned the kings of friendly states, and they decided to attack Troy with all their joint military power. They outfitted one thousand ships. Tens of thousands of soldiers in copper helmets with horse-hair crests believed they would engage in a blitzkrieg and reap some good reward. Among them were the heroes Achilles and Ajax, the artful Odysseus, the old wise Nestor, and they were led by the brother of Menelaus, the ferocious King Agamemnon. Though, weather conditions did not favour their campaign. There was no leading wind, and thus, Agamemnon ventured upon an awful deed of killing his daughter Iphigenia to favour the gods. Upon spilling her blood on the sacrificial stone, the wind changed, and the vast Greek fleet headed towards the Trojan coast.

Counting on an immediate victory was a mistake, though, as the Trojans avidly defended their city tooth and nail, refusing to surrender the abducted queen. The siege of this city continued for nine years, with no side able to gain the upper hand. However, in the tenth year Achilles and Agamemnon had a row, and that became the turning point in the course of this war. During one of the raids to a suburb of Troy Agamemnon captured the daughter of the priest Chryses. The grieving father asked the King to release his daughter taken hostage, and having been refused, he pleaded with Apollo to curse the Greek army with pestilence, which Apollo did. The terrible illness took down the Achaeans, and Achilles on behalf of the public demanded that their leader returned Chryseis to her father. Chryses gathered his darling, and Agamemnon received Achilles’ prisoner Briseis for compensation. Achilles felt hurt, got angry and refused to participate in battles. He asked Zeus to take revenge upon Agamemnon for this loss by allowing the Trojans to score military success. Zeus met his request, and the Trojans led by King Priam’s son Hector managed to make their way to the Greek vessels and to start a small fire there. Patroclus, the best and only friend of Achilles, engaged in battle with Hector and was killed. Broken hearted, Achilles put aside all his pointless and minor villainous acts and went for revenge. Having taken out thousands of Trojans on his way, he forced his way towards Hector, challenged him to fight and killed him in view of Priam, watching the combat from the fortress walls. Then he tied the opponent’s body to a chariot and dragged it three times around the fortress walls.

Fig. 4. Lucas Cranach the Elder. The Judgment of Paris (1528).

Fig. 5. Franz Matsch. Triumph of Achilles (1892).

At night, Priam quietly came to Achilles’ camp and begged the Champion to return his son’s body. Shocked by the old man’s courage and torn by guilt for his friend’s death, Achilles agreed to his request.

However, the death of the best warrior of Ilion didn’t profit the Greeks at all, especially since they also lost their best fighter very soon after that. Paris managed to shoot Achilles with an arrow in his only weak point, his heel. Then Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, devised an artful trick. He proposed to make a huge wooden horse to be gifted to the Trojans, and to put the best Greek soldiers inside it, and to take the fleet from view of the fortress defenders. After the Trojans awoke, they would see the horse and drag it inside the city, after which the soldiers of that special squad would leave the horse, kill all men, have their way with all women and burn everything they see.

And this trickery was managed. Despite protests of Cassandra, the sister of Paris, and admonition of the priest Laocoön saying “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!”, the Trojans dragged the monstrous thing into the city. To do that they even had to take a part of the fortress walls to pieces, as the Greek gift was so great. Everything was over that very day. Priam and Paris were killed, Helen was returned to Menelaus, and the city was wiped from the face of the Earth. Only few survived and, led by the Dardian King Aeneas, they left their native land in search for a new motherland, and, after many years of wandering and dangerous encounters, they ended up in Italy on the bank of the Tiber River.

This is the story told in fictional and documental films, articles in popular magazines, and even school textbooks – along with stories that every intelligent person should know, in particular, rumors about the gold of Troy (“that what’s-his name Schliemann”), and cunning Stalin having secretly removed the treasure from prostrated Berlin, plus stories of blind Homer with a lyre in his hands. However, the more intelligent audience tends to clarify the details of this picture basing on so-called scientific evidence.

It appears that the main books of Homer narrate only a small part of the above-mentioned events. Only fifty days in the ten years of the siege of Troy were worthy of the bard’s notice. The Iliad starts with a description of Achilles’ anger about being deprived of his legal prey – Briseis. The poem ends with Patroclus’ funeral, followed by Hector’s funeral. To a large extent, despite many battle scenes, this poem is not about war but about a quarrel between the leaders of two powerful tribes – the Mycenaeans and Myrmidons – and about the fatal consequences of that quarrel for the union of Achaean states.

Despite many battle scenes, the Iliad poem is not about war but about a quarrel between the leaders of two powerful tribes – the Mycenaeans and Myrmidons – and about its fatal consequences for the union of Achaean states.

The Iliad tells us about the whining nature of invincible Achilles, who couldn’t hold back his tears while complaining about Agamemnon to his mother; about cowardly Paris, who like a hare ran away from Menelaus on the battle field; about Helen being peevish and shaming her husband for being afraid of laying down his life in an uneven confrontation with one of the best Greek soldiers:

Thou hast come back from the war; would thou hast perished there, vanquished by a valiant man that was my former lord.

Iliad. III. 428–429.

Homer told the story about the wooden horse in his another poem, the Odyssey. By the way, we can learn from it that the Trojans nearly fought, trying to decide,what to do with the horse.

Either to cleave the hollow timber with the pitiless bronze, or to drag it to the height and cast it down the rocks, or to let it stand as a great offering to propitiate the gods…

Odyssey. VIII. 507–510.

Apparently, the Trojans considered the horse to be not a gift to the city (why would that be, though?), but rather a sacrifice to Poseidon, that the Greeks left behind before departing from the battle field. Thus, they decided to drag their trophy (or a souvenir, to use the up-to-date language) in. Don’t tourists coming to Troy from Istanbul or Izmir do the same? What do the wooden horses that tourists let into their houses hold?

All other events of the Trojan War – from Helen’s abduction to the Exodus of Aeneas – are described in the surviving fragments and retellings of the so-called Cycladic poems, as well as in works of later writers such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Virgil, etc. From these additional sources we can learn that the fate of Iphigenia wasn’t too tragical: at the moment she was to be sacrificed, she was saved the goddess Artemis, who hid the girl in a cloud, took her to Tauris and made her a priestess. You can also learn that the wooden horse was made not by Odysseus, but by Epeius, and that there were three thousand men inside it. For instance, one can also learn that during the Trojan War there was only something like a holographic image of Helen in Troy, and that she herself stayed in Egypt and was faithful to her husband through all these years.[6]

Fig. 6. The souvenir shops in Tevfikia are full of Trojan horses.

By the way, not ten but twenty years passed since Helen had been abducted till the end of the Trojan War (the Greek troops were really delayed on their way to Ilion, but we’ll come back to this fact later). Helen herself recalls it, while mourning over Hector:

Fig. 7. The Iphigenia Rock in the Crimea (village of Castropol), where, according to legend, Agamemnon’s daughter was hidden.

For this is now the twentieth year from the time when I went from thence and am gone from my native land.

Iliad. XXIV. 765–766.

Thus, it appears that by the end of the war, Helen, “a person who set thousands of ships afloat”, was already quite an elderly lady then. And if Paris’ faithfulness is worth of delight in the light of the aforesaid, the patience of his compatriots is perplexing, on the contrary. Should they have suffered years of hardships for the sake of a fading foreign matron? For pity’s sake! Those Trojans were nearly saints!

Fig. 8. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Helen of Troy (1863).

This is how the legend of Troy is known to the most informed intellectuals, who are rather few! But those who went through the trouble of reading Homer’s poems in full and attentively, rather than looking them through are even fewer. “I’ve read the list of ships up to the middle,”[7] Osip Mandelshtam admitted. However, it should be noted that the relevant song “Beotia or the Catalogue of Ships” is a wonderful remedy for insomnia. The best known Russian translation of Homer’s Iliad is that of Nikolai Gnedich, the contemporary of Pushkin. Extremely beautiful, but heavy and archaic, this version has sent se veral generations of readers into sound sleep. Translations by Vikenty Veresaev and Pavel Shuisky are not as popular; they are more modern and better accord to the letter of the original, though, the spirit of the poem was lost. Therefore, maybe that is why these versions are not so popular.

For Homer’s contemporaries, the style of the Iliad and the Odyssey sounded as peculiar as the style of Gnedich is for us. It combines the dialectical features of the Aeolian language and that of the Ionic Greeks, who, by the 10th century B.C., began to colonize the Aegean Region and the North-Western part of the Anatolian coast, and the archaisms of rhapsodies of the Mycenaean epoch, poetic tradition of which reached Homer from the distant past. “That language was clear to listeners, who, since childhood, were used to the songs of Homeric bards – the creators and performers of Greek epos – although, in real life, nobody spoke that language. The unusual language emphasized the singularity of the events described and helped listeners to get transferred to the world of the heroic past, where people were in every respect considerably stronger and braver than people of that days. Even if an expression wasn’t clear to the public, this redoubled authority of the Homeric bards, who seemed to know things that simple people did not know of”.[8]

It is noteworthy that things in the West go as such: academic circles there still accept the old “classical” translations of Homer, although, for the purpose of public enlightenment, they issue cut versions of the Iliad and its brief narrations, or even comics. In due time, the novel by Alessandro Baricco An Iliad[9] became a box-office project. This Italian writer tries to interpret the classic poem in a new way, removing everything that had to do with Gods, fate and other empyreans from it, which a modern reader would be unable to understand.

Well, even in the book-concerned 19[[th]] century the Iliad was not considered to be entertaining reading. In 1884 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, maybe the greatest Homer specialist of that time wrote, “Now Homer is no longer a widely read poet… Even most philologists largely know him as poorly as Christers know the Holy Bible”.[10] We hope to refer to Mr. Wilamowitz again and again in our work. Now we simply state that most of the people living today, just like the generation of our grandparents, have not read Homer thoroughly and thoughtfully enough to ask the essential questions:

1. Did Troy really exist or was it only a myth, and is it useless to look for it on the perishable Earth?

2. Did the Trojan War really take place, or is it a poetic fabrication intended to make people think about the nature of force and weakness, bravery and cowardice, anger and generosity, about boredom of immortality and greatness of death?

3. Did the Greeks win that war, as Homer and the whole antique tradition insisted, or have we been for a few thousand years captivated by false ideas, unintentionally or intentionally formed for us by writers of the distant past?

4. And above all, what lessons can we learn from this story for our up-to-date life, and more specifically, what lessons can be derived for us, the Russians?

Now we are in Troy to try and answer these questions.

Chapter 2
The Adventurer Who Tripped Over Troy

Heinrich Schliemann is really worshipped in the Troy archaeological reserve. Portraits of this international adventurer are literally everywhere: in souvenir shops, on covers of guide books, in informational boards and even in the above-mentioned model of the archaeologist’s house, which workers of German television made to shoot a documental. Almost 150 years ago Schliemann showed the locals something that was not a gold vein but at the least made it possible for them to always have some “tea” and “fish” on their tables (“çay bardak”, “balyk tabak” – the Turkish language is quite associative for the Russians). Those who aren’t involved into excavation works restarting from time to time, take a job in the tourist industry: they rent rooms, sell fridge magnets and guide tourists. We’ve met two country boys in one of the dusty streets of Tevfikye. Having noticed visitors from afar, they put their sun-tanned arms out in hope for baksheesh, a habit formed over many generations. We give them a lira each. It can’t be helped. Youngsters…

Heinrich Schliemann himself played the leading role in formation of the Schliemann cult. A master of self-promotion, he invented quite a number of legends about himself, the majority of which are still living.

Fig. 9. The false house of Schliemann in the village of Tevfikye was built by the Germans.

Most modern biographies of Schliemann are based on his autobiography, which was long ago acknowledged to be a rather doubtful source. For example, check the frequently republished biography of Schliemann, considered to be classical, written by the German historian Heinrich Alexan der Stoll.[11]

According to one of them, Heinrich Schliemann was born in a poor German family and became keen on Troy when he was eight, after he had got an illustrated History of the World by Georg Ludwig Jerrer for Christmas. The book contained a picture of Ilion aflame with its huge walls and gates, through which Aeneas fled with his father on his shoulders. Not wishing to believe that Troy was only a fairy tale told by Homer, the boy decided by any means to find the legendary city. It is commonly believed (and guides leading tourists in Troy insist on this very version) that Schliemann was the only man all over the Earth, who believed that the Trojan War had really taken place. Using geographic hints from Homer’s poems, he found and excavated Troy! Since that time, everything written by Homer started to be taken as the absolute historical truth.

The only one who believed… Well, if an outright lie can be called a wrench, let’s call it a wrench. But first of all, let us tell you about the kind of person that Schliemann was.

Heinrich Schliemann was raised in a troubled family (his father, a Protestant priest, was a libertine and an embezzler of state property), and he had to earn his living from the age of fourteen. For five long and boring years, he had been working as an errand boy in a grocer’s before he decided to change his life cardinally and applied for a job as a sea cadet on a schooner sailing to Venezuela. The vessel ran into a storm, and Schliemann told that he was among the few survivors. According to the newspapers, there were no victims in that shipwreck, though, but why would anyone bother spoiling such a wonderful story with some truth…

It was so much more interesting to imagine himself like Robinson Crusoe setting his foot on the Dutch land with a torn blanket over his shoulders. Anyway, having found a job in one of the trade houses of Amsterdam, Schliemann started studying languages. Schliemann’s gift for languages was an authentic medical fact. He mastered fifteen languages, including Russian, which, by the legend, he studied from pornographic poems by Barkov.

The “Schliemann’s” method of language studying is rather popular today; its essence is in the oral narration of text fragments in the foreign language. Step-by-step memory gets used to a new language, and receptivity to the new type speech increases. It is interesting that most adherents of this method have no idea of what Heinrich Schliemann did besides these studies.

Knowledge of Russian allowed Schliemann to come to Russia as a commercial representative. One year later, in 1847, he took out Russian citizenship. The newly-minted “Andrei Aristovitch” founded his own company and quickly grew rich supplying the indigo dye and Chilean saltpetre. He was into any business that promised profit. Of course, at the time of “gold fever”, Schliemann was in America, buying gold sand from gold diggers for a mere song and thus doubling his fortune. During the Crimean War, Schliemann was selling weapons to both sides, but he made a greater profit supplying cardboard-soled boots to the Russian army. Before abolition of serfdom in 1861, Schliemann bought up paper necessary for printing large posters with the manifest to resell it to the Russian government at an exorbitant price…

In 1864, having left his Russian wife Yekaterina Lyzhina and his three children in St. Petersburg, Schliemann set off for a journey around the world. He visited the ruins of Carthage in Tunis, remnants of Pompeii in Italy, ancient temples in India and Ceylon, the Great Wall of China and the Aztec ruins in Mexico. Shocked with everything he had seen, he signed up for to attend lectures on antique history and archaeology at Sorbonne. In 1868 Schliemann made his first excavation on the Greek island of Ithaca, which lasted for only two days. Having found a couple of shards in the ground, Schliemann, without a shadow of a doubt, passed them off as items that once belonged to King Odysseus himself.

After that the businessman visited Mycenae and the Asianic coast of the Dardanelles, where having missed the ship to Istanbul, he got acquainted with American consul Frank Calvert. Schliemann published the results of his journeys in his book Ithaca, Peloponnesus and Troy, for which he managed to obtain a doctoral degree from the so-so University of Rostock. The degree was conferred on him in absentia, as the competitor was visiting America to deal with issues of getting American citizenship and divorcing his Russian spouse.[12]

However, the scientific European community did not take his research seriously, and Schliemann decided to submit some foundational proof, having dug out an ancient city or, at least, something that could have possibly passed off as the traces of it…

Was Schliemann the first to search for the ancient Ilion in the North-Western Turkey, as it is often announced? No way. Even the laurels of the first explorer of Hisarlik are not rightfully his.

As it is set now, it was not difficult to find Troy; supposing that city was mighty enough to fight against the unified forces of the entire Greece, it should have controlled main trade ways, and, thus, it should have been in a prominent location. Moreover, “nature abhors a vacuum”, and if there is a city on a crossroad of trade routes, it will be restored after any defeat. So, today there must be a city engaged in the same business as Troy was in due time, monitoring routes and growing rich. It is not necessary to be as wise as Solomon to guess that this city is Constantinople-Istanbul, which is great due to the fact it controls the straits from the Black and Marble seas into the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas. There are two straits; Istanbul is located on the Bosporus, and its great predecessor apparently was on the Dardanelles. The geographic details in Homer’s poems point at them. At the same time, as Constantine the Great noted, being on the Hellespont is even more favourable, as not only the sea-gate but also the land-gate between Europe and Asia can be controlled. There was no better place for a city.

After it becomes clear, it is necessary to estimate and consider how far the sea had moved over three thousand years after the events described, and to look for some hills and fortress ruins at the entry to the Dardanelles, and to hear some legends from the locals…

The first scientific attempts to determine the precise position of Troy date back to the 18[[th]] century. In 1742 and 1750 the Englishman Robert Wood made two trips to the Troad and put his impressions in the book An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer. Despite he believed it was senseless to search for Troy, as it had been destroyed to the ground, Wood was the first person to suggest that the place where Troy had been changed for the worse since the ancient times. The harbour became silted, and the rivers changed their flow. His book was reissued 5 times in four languages and caused some public reaction of the scientific community.

In 1768, 1 year before Robert Wood’s book was issued, Baron Johann Hermann, a student of the glorified nationalist Johan Winckelmann, the founder of modern ideas about antique art, travelled around the Troad. After this journey he was the first to voice the hypothesis that ancient Troy must have been in the area of the Hisarlik Hill, located several kilometers away from the coast. The German cartographer Frantz Kauffer (1793), the mineralogist Edward Clark (1801), who later became a Cambridge University professor, and Charles McLaren (1822), the author of The Theses on the Topography of the Trojan War, also identified Hisarlik as the location of ancient Troy.

Jean-Baptiste Lechevalier, a French archaeologist, put forward another hypothesis. In 1785 he walked all the way from Hellespont to the Ida Mountain Range with the Iliad book in his road bag and using Wood’s book as a guide. Lechevalier was convinced that Homer described the geographic features of the peninsula rather accurately. The French scientist decided that the spot was close to the village of Bunarbashi (Pinarbashi) in the Scamander River Valley.

In 1864 the Austrian diplomat and traveler Johann Georg von Hahn decided to practically check the hypothesis of Lechevalier. Having started an excavation near Bunarbashi, von Hahn discovered the traces of some settlement. However, it became clear later that those remnants of ancient buildings dated back to a later period from 7[[th]] to 5th centuries B.C.

In one year Frank Calvert led a test excavation in Hisarlik. Two generations of his family had lived near the Troad already, and Calvert had perfect knowledge of the region. But the real revolution in his world-view happened after 1849, when he met the famous Russian scientist Pyotr Chikhachev. Chikhachev, better known in Russia as the pioneer of the Kuznetsk coal basin, had authored about 100 scientific works on geology and paleontology of Asia Minor, and the most detailed map of the Troad was based on his topographic studies. By accompanying Chikhachev on his expedition, Calvert gained invaluable experience and knowledge in the field of archaeology and geology, but, most importantly, he started to believe the Russian scientist’s statement that Troy should have been searched in the depths of Hisarlik, a part of which he acquired later.

Calvert came to believe that Troy should have been looked for in the depths of Hisarlik after the famous Russian geographer Pyotr Chikhachev, whose role in the discovery of this ancient city has still not been acknowledged by the descendants.

Chikhachev’s role in the discovery of Ilion remained unnoticed by the descendants, and all the victorious palms passed to Schliemann, who in turn claimed them for himself rather than Calvert. The man who identified the location of Troy was undeservedly forgotten, as, alas, is a frequent occasion in history. Today only the Altaic mountain range named after him and the commemorative plaque in Gatchina remind us of the merits of this scientist.

While making the digging in Hisarlik in 1865, Calvert came across traces of the Temple of Athena and of the city wall that built by Lysimachus. At that the diplomat’s financial opportunities exhausted. Calvert had hoped to continue the search after meeting the conceited millionaire Schliemann, who believed that the ruins of Troy were in the spot, where Lechevalier had identified them – in Bunarbashi. Later Calvert affirmed that in a letter to The Guardian newspaper: “When I first met Doctor [Schliemann] in August, 1868, the Hisarlik and the Troy location were new subjects for him”.[13] Schliemann denied everything and even launched a full-scale war in the press against Calvert, charging him with lying. There are no document dated before 1868 that would testify to Schliemann being engaged in the Trojan issue at all. According to the historian Andrei Strelkov, Schliemann simply “tripped over Troy” during one of his travels.[14] However, the businessman presented it all as if he had been looking for Troy for all his life and selected Hisarlik as the site to excavate the ancient city, basing on hints of Homer. To eliminate any mentioning Calvert in the history of the Troy’s discovery, Schliemann invented a story about the dream of his childhood and the illustrated book,[15] and introduced himself as a man truly possessed by Homer’s epos, and even gave the children born of his new Greek wife Sophia the names of Engastromenos,[16] Agamemnon and Andromacha.

Fig. 10. Karl Bryullov. Portrait of P. Chikhachev (1835).

Thus, was all of it happened later, and in August, 1868, Calvert saw the dear visitor in his house on the shore and convinced him to join the excavations assuring him, “All my land [on the Hisarlik Hill] is at your disposal”.[17] Having felt the scale of profit in case they succeeded, Schliemann agreed to take part in the project. As early as in December he started consulting with the highly experienced Calvert about organization of excavations, in particular – in regard to quantification of mattocks and shovels for the works. At the same time he negotiated with the Turkish government for a license for archaeological works.

At last, on October 11, 1871 having employed workers in the near villages, Heinrich Schliemann started soil works. Calvert tried to prevent his comrade from hasty decisions and advised him to carry out the sounding of cultural layers of more than 17 meters deep, at first. However, Schliemann, being sure that Homer’s Troy was the most ancient thing of everything possible, decided to dig down to the very continental plate.

Long trenches up to seventeen meters deep and wide ruthlessly cut up the Hisarlik Hill, until Schliemann managed to dig down to an ancient settlement, destroying everything of no interest to him and not shining under the sun. Schliemann announced that he had discovered the ruins of the city of Priam.

The merchant’s barbarous approach to excavations not only deprived future scientists of the most valuable archaeological information, but also resulted in destroying the traces of the old city he had discovered. Left to the mercy of fate in the aggressive environment, they began to crumble and get weathered, suffering from roots of trees and bushes.

They managed to halt the destruction process only in 1988, when expedition participants began to protect the walls of the ancient citadel by their own efforts, led by Professor of Tubingen University Manfred Korfmann.

The thickness of the cultural layer of seventeen meters, though accumulated for some thousands of years, seemed unbelievable until we learned about their origin. “Fires often occurred, as wood and straw were used for construction [during the Bronze century],” Professor Carl Blegen explained, who used to excavate Hisarlik Hill in 1932–1938. “When a house burned down, its roof would collapsed and its walls would scatter. […] Since there were no bulldozers or graders then, nobody tried to clear the site of the fire or to remove the waste. It was much easier to level the site, covering the not remaining fragments of a building with a thick layer of waste (which ensured the noticeable growth of the cultural layer), and then to build a new house on the same spot. In Troy, such things happened rather often, and every time the ground level rose by 80–100 centimeters. Steady growth of the cultural layers on the hill also occurred due to other factors. For example, floors in all dwellings but palaces and magnificent private residences were made of earth or compacted clay. People weren’t used to collect domestic and kitchen wastes at certain special sites then. So, all wastes, including bones, food waste and broken utensils were left on the floor of the dwelling or were immediately chucked away to the outside. Sooner or later, the floor appeared to be covered with animal bones and wastes so much that even hosts with strongest stomachs understood that something should have been done about it. Solving the issue was simple and rather efficient: waste from the floor was not cleaned out, but was covered with a thick layer of fresh clay, which was compacted after that. During the excavation, the archaeologists often discovered houses, where that process was repeated many times until the floor level appeared too high for normal living, and it would have become necessary to lift the roof and to rebuild the entrance”.[18]

Schliemann continued his excavations for three seasons, and finally, on May 31, 1873, he came across some real treasures at the surrounding wall near the southwest gate, at a depth of 8.5 meters. Here is how he described those events:

In excavating this wall further and coming closer and closer to the ancient building and to the North-West from the gate, I came upon a large copper article of the most remarkable form, which attracted my attention all the more as I thought I saw gold behind it.… In order to withdraw the treasure from the greed of my workmen, and to save it for archaeology… I immediately had “paidos” called.…This word is of unknown origin; it came into the Turkish language and is used instead of the Greek άνάπαυσις, meaning rest time. While the men were eating and resting, I cut out the Treasure with a large knife…. It took huge efforts and involved risk, as the fortress wall, under which I had to dig, could fall down on me any moment. However, the view of so many subjects, every one of which was of great value for archaeology, made me fearless, and I did not think about any hazards. It would, however, have been impossible for me to have removed the Treasure without the help of my dear wife, who stood by me ready to pack the things which I cut out in her shawl and to carry them away.[19]

In the niche discovered by Schliemann, a set of 8830 precious metal articles were found, including necklaces, diadems, rings, brooches and bracelets. Owing to Calvert’s brother Frederic, it was possible to take the treasure to Athens. Having placed it to a bank, the businessman told journalists

Fig. 11. Schliemann’s trench with traces from the early Bronze century.

that he had found neither more nor less than the treasures of the Trojan King Priam. This sensational news covered front pages of newspapers, and the photograph of Sophia Engastromenos in “Helen’s attire” was published everywhere. Schliemann provided pictures of these treasures in his book The Trojan Antiquities, issued in 1874 by the famous publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus.

The scientific community, which previously paid no attention to entertaining claims of the dilettante, launched a squall of criticism against him. Professional archaeologists were shocked with the barbarity by which Schliemann literally ripped the cultural layers of the ancient hill to pieces and destroyed many of the more recent constructions.

Many questions were also asked in relation to Schliemann’s story being more like a plot of an adventure novel. As it was learnt later from Sophia’s correspondence with her husband, she could not have participated in transportation of the treasure, as she was in Athens then.[20] Besides, the content of the treasure was also doubtful. For example, the golden bulb of 23 carats for drinks suspiciously resembled a sauceboat of the 19[[th]] century and, within the meaning of Schliemann’s letter sent to his Athenian agent on May 28, 1873, in which he asked to find a reliable jeweler, this claim was taken to verify that the “Priam treasures” were a fake. According to another version, the “treasure” could have been made of items previously acquired either in Istanbul markets or found at different times during excavations in Hisarlik.[21] One way or another, the treasures could not have belonged to legendary Priam, as they were found in the cultural layer being a thousand years older than Homer’s Troy.[22]

Fig. 12. Sophia Engastromenos in the “Great Diadem” from the “Priam treasure” (1874).

The treasures found by Schliemann could not have belonged to legendary Priam, as they were found in the cultural layer that was a thousand years older than Homer’s Troy.

The Sublime Porte read the newspapers, too, and having learned about Schliemann’s unprecedented smuggling, sued him for ten thousand francs. Silently grinning, the millionaire reimbursed the damage, added extra forty thousand and declared himself the absolute owner of the treasures. Later Schliemann made several attempts to place them in museums in London, Paris and Naples, but they refused to take the treasures for political and financial reasons.[23] In 1881, Schliemann eventually presented the “Priam treasures” to the city of Berlin, having received the title of the “honourable citizen of Berlin” in exchange, a title, that was previously conferred to Chancellor Otto von Bismark. The treasures remained there until Professor Wilhelm Unverzagt transferred the Trojan finds to the Soviet Command in 1945 according to contribution conditions. For a long time, the collection was considered to be lost, but it was actually stored in strict confidence in the Pushkin Museum of Moscow (259 items, including the “Priam treasures”) and in the State Hermitage (414 items made of copper, bronze and clay). It was only in 1993 that Yeltsin’s Government declared that the most valuable part of the Trojan treasures were being kept in Russia. On April 15[[th]], 1996, the trophies were exhibited in the Pushkin Museum for the first time.[24]

Having found the “Priam treasures”, Schliemann did not cease his exploratory activity and continued to dig out Mycenae, Orchomenos and Tiryns. He returned to working at the Hisarlik Hill for three times. While different people think differently about Schliemann’s activities, it is noteworthy that his adventures not only peaked scientific interest in the history of Troy, but also resulted in discovery of the previously unknown Aegean civilization. Schliemann never learned about it and died in certainty that all his finds were only related to the Trojan War era.

After Schliemann’s death, in 1893–1894, his friend and colleague Wilhelm Dörpfeld studied the stratigraphy of the archaeological layers of the Hisarlik Hill in more detail and determined that nine cities had replaced each other in sequence during the course of nearly 4.5 millennia in that spot. Accordingly, the periods of Troy’s existence were numbered from 1 to 9. In Dörpfeld’s opinion, Homer’s Ilion lied in the sixth layer (Troy 6), which Schliemann ruthlessly destroyed during his first excavations. Dörpfeld arrived at this conclusion even despite the fact that no traces of military operations were found in relation to destruction of Troy 6.

In 1932 Dörpfeld’s business was continued by the expedition of the Cincinnati University, headed by Carl Blegen, a renowned American archaeologist. Blegen corrected his predecessor and proved that Troy 6 (1800–1300 B.C.) had perished due to an extremely strong earthquake. Blegen divided the Troy 7 epoch into three periods and suggested that Homer’s Troy had existed in the 7а period (1300–1100 B.C.), with its apparent signs of a siege and damage.

The diagram proposed by Carl Blegen in relation to the sequence of existence and destruction of ancient settlements on the Hisarlik Hill became a classical one.

Troy 1 (3000–2500 B.C.) dates back to the pre-Greek culture, as ancient as most ancient civilizations, such as the Egyptian, Sumerian, Aegean and Indus ones. Inhabitants of Troy 1 had no gold, but lived in rather good houses, called megarons, they used metal tools and bred sheep and goats.

Fig. 13. According to Dörpfeld and Blegen, the Trojan settlement is a kind of a sandwich cake. (Image © Nika Tya-Sen.)

Troy 2 (2500–2200 B.C.) was a large city of the Minoan culture with walls of four meters thick, cobbled streets and gates. The basic activity of its inhabitants was agriculture: manual grinding mills were found in almost every house of this city. They used potter’s wheels to make utensils. Troy 2 traded fabrics, wool, ceramics and timber in the huge territory from Bulgaria and Thrace up to Central Anatolia and Syria, which promoted noticeable growth of its financial well-being, demonstrated by a great number of golden and silver items found in this cultural layer, including the “Priam treasure” found by Schliemann.

The city was destroyed by a sudden fire, and locals had no time to collect their precious utensils. However, according to Blegen, the catastrophe “did not cause any significant damage to the settlement’s cultural development. Given the retention of the former civilization and absence of obvious traces of foreign influence, the culture of Troy 2 was gradually and steadily developed until its successor Troy 3 picked up the baton”.[25]

Troy 3 (2200–2050 B.C.) and Troy 4 (2050–1900 B.C.) were established on the site of the capital that burnt-down. They were protected with walls and occupied a large area. Despite the rather primitive (even compared to Troy 2) culture in general, the population of these cities improved upon cooking methods and notably varied their diet.

Troy 5 (1900–1800 B.C.) was a city with a quite high culture level given the samples of fine ceramics and building art discovered. Compared to the previous periods, the manners and habits of the citizens changed a lot. “One of the innovations that was introduced in Troy 5 (which archaeologists regret strongly) was procedding to a new and more efficient way of house cleaning. Now they swept the floor and cleaned it from the rubbish accumulated during the day; therefore, nowadays archaeologists can only rarely find animal bones, various small items discarded and lost, as well as whole or broken ceramic vessels”.[26] Like the previous cities standing on Hisarlik Hill, Troy of that period was destroyed, although the cause for this remains unknown: there are no traces of a fire in the ruins of buildings, and nothing would confirm that the city was captured by enemies.

Fig. 14. The Southwest (Scaean) gate where Schliemann excavated the “Priam treasure” dates back to the Troy 2 period.

Troy 6 (1800–1300 B.C.) was a really great city with block walls of 5 meters thick and with four gates, with squares and palaces. Its population were people of foreign traditions, who apparently came there from another place and brought their own cultural legacy with them. They tamed horses, established a custom of cremation of the deceased, and perfected the art of weapons production. As early as in the beginning of the Troy 6 period, the range of pottery wares had been changed to something new. This city was leveled by an earthquake, as evidenced by specific cracks on walls of buildings.

According to the legend, Ilion was founded by Ilus, son of Tros. Then the power was overtaken by Ilion’s son Laomedon. During its times, Troy achieved might and established control over Asia Minor, Propontis (the Sea of Marmara) and the straits. Laomedon erected a “city on the top of the hill”, the walls of which were built by Poseidon, who ended up a slave to Zeus (by Zeus’ will) together with Apollo, ordered to pasture Zeus’ oxen. For their assiduous work, Laomedon promised to pay the gods, but changed his mind and, in the end, just expelled them from the country, threatening to cut their ears off (Ilus. XXI, 440–458). Then Poseidon sent a sea monster to Ilion to devour all the people. It was when Heracles came in and killed the monster, getting into the monster’s belly and hacking all its entrails. For this feat, Laomedon promised him magic horses but once again failed to keep his promise. Nothing to be done, Heracles had to destroy the city, to kill Laomedon and to shoot all his heirs to death by bow and arrow, and to give the king’s daughter Hesion[27] to his friend Telamon. At the same time, Hesion was allowed to release one of the captives. She chose her younger brother Podarces and paid for him with her headscarf. Since then, Podarces was called Priam, meaning “redeemed”.[28] Thus, the legend obviously referred to the times of Troy 6, and the earthquake that destroyed the city was interpreted as anger of Heracles.

Fig. 15. That’s what Troy 6 looks like to our contemporaries. (Image © Nika Tya-Sen.)

Who were the founders of Troy 6, so noticeably different from the cities of previous periods? Blegen was sure that they were Greeks; however, he could not know for sure how they departed for new lands. He wrote, “They did not manage to define whether they roamed from the North to the shore of the Aegean Sea, or sailed from the South of Russia across the they arrived in Greece by sea from the West or the East. There are no hints left by either ceramics, artefacts, or horse bones”.[29]

Fig. 16. The fortification wall and the East gate of Troy 6 (15th – 13th century B.C.).

Troy 7 referred to the period 1300–1100 B.C. The Trojan War is considered to have taken place during that period. There are some calculations based on different methods, but most of them put this era at between 1220 and 1180 B.C.

The ancient writers could only estimate the dates of the Trojan War, according to the approximate number of generations up to the first Olympic Games, epical tradition, etc. And they arrived at different results, ranging from the 14th to 12th centuries B.C. There were other methods, too, including the study of archaeological artefacts, epigraphy, etc.

The unique method was applied in 2008 by Marcelo Magnasco, Professor of Physics and Mathematics of the American Rockefeller University, and Constantino Baikouzis, astronomer from the Argentina’s La-Plata Observatory.[30] They took note that according to Homer when Odysseus was beating the grooms seeking to marry his wife Penelope,

…the sun has perished out of heaven and an evil mist hovers over all

Odyssey. XX. 356–357

and they decided that this text pertained to a solar eclipse. The dates of solar eclipses, both in the past and future, can be easily calculated. Having compared these dates with other astronomical data provided in the text, scientists concluded that King Odysseus returned to Ithaca on April 16th, 1178 B.C. According to Homer, Odysseus’ wandering after the Trojan War took about 10 years. Thus, according to Magnasco and Baikouzis, the Trojan War could have been limited with chronological frame of 1188 and 1198 B.C.

After the earthquake, the city was built up again. There were no traces of people in the ruins of Troy 6, and Blegen concluded that the population survived and immediately after the earthquake ended they returned to the city and started to restore their houses. In due course, the city became more populated, as the streets became more compact and the houses became smaller. However, traces of imported goods and wealth vanished. In general, Troy 7 was nothing of the majestic city “rich in gold” described by Homer.

The city that belonged to the first phase of Troy 7, deemed as 7а (1300–1260 B.C.), was destroyed by fire. The territory of the settlement was once again covered with loads of stones, mudbricks and various wastes, burnt-down and half-burnt-down. Fragments of human bodies found in this layer point indicated that citizens died through violence. Thus, according to Blegen, Troy 7a was destroyed due to the city having been captured and citizens dying. “The crowding of numerous small houses anywhere a free place could be found points to the fact that the fortress walls were protecting many more citizens than before. Numerous uncountable capacious vessels for food and water standing on floors of virtually every house and room indicate the need to store as much food and water as possible in case of emergency. What else could that emergency be than the enemy siege?”[31]

Upon analyzing the Mycenaean pottery discovered in the cultural layer of the burnt city and comparing it to the chronology of ceramics of Arne Furumark,[32] Blegen realized that most of these samples referred to type 3 B dated first half of the 13[[th]] century B.C. Samples classified as the earlier type 3A is sparsely encountered in this layer, and there are no items of the later type 3C. On this basis, Blegen concluded that Troy 7a had been destroyed in approximately 1260, two generations earlier than the Mycenaean civilization declined. “Most of large Mycenaean cities in continental Greece (perhaps, but the cities of Attica) were destroyed in the end of the era when Mycenaean pottery classified III B was produced… Approximately by 1200 B.C., might of Mycenae waved; large cities, the population of which was referred in the Catalogue of Ships as the core of Agamemnon’s troops marching against Troy, were in ruins, and the survivors faced an even more difficult struggle for survival. The period, when type 3C pottery was used every day was characterized by people’s impoverishment and culture level decline, and only memories of Mycenae’s former glory remained. The Mycenaean kings and princes couldn’t unite their forces and leave to capture other lands. That was only possible much before that, when the Mycenaean civilization was at the height of its political, economic and military power, when splendid emperor’s palaces hospitably met dear guests in their entire splendor. The fortress was seized and burnt before the mid-13[[th]] century B.C., which was when the type 3B Mycenaean pottery was only introduced in Troy 7a being prosperous yet, and the type 2A pottery was doling out the seat.

Fig. 17. Carl Blegen affirmed that Troy 7a had been seized and burnt in the mid-13th century B.C. and argued this on the basis of the prevalence of type 3B Mycenaean pottery in its cultural layer. (Image © Olga Aranova.)

Thus, Troy 7a must have been the mythological Troy, a fortress with its sad fate, whose seizure attracted attention and awoke imagination of its contemporaries – poets and narrators, whose stories about the heroes of that war passed by word of mouth from generation to generation. There is no doubt that some details of those stories were forgotten and omitted in due course, and that some other things were made up. This had been going on until these legends reached the ingenious poet, who collected all the different stories and wrote two epical poems that survive until our day”.[33]

Carl Blegen identified Troy 7a as Homer’s Ilion. Troy 7a came to its end being captured by the enemy after a continuous siege. However, there is no proof that it was captured by the Greeks.

The results of excavations of the next cultural layer, relating to the phase of Troy 7b (1260–1190 B.C.), indicate that many inhabitants of this burnt city had survived. Soon after the conquerors left, the citizens returned and built new houses right on the ruins and, and the city rose by approximately one meter as compared with the previous ground level. However, the city that used to be great failed to return to its former power. The population got poorer and left the city. At the same time, the fortress wall wasn’t damaged, as it had happened before. Blegen wrote, “It looks like everything happened quietly enough: having simply cast the citizens out of their houses, new tenants moved in”.[34] The tribe that settled there brought some coarse pottery along, made without a potter’s wheel, which became kind of a business card for Troy 7b. According to some explorers, that moulded pottery with bumps, just like some other primitive bronze utensils found in the same layer, were obviously related to similar goods found in depositions of the late Bronze Age in Hungary.

The next devastation to the city caused by fire completed the history of ancient Troy. For 4 centuries, the city remained empty – its inhabitants might have found a quieter place for living. New Troy – Troy 8 (700–85 B.C.) – already belonged to the Greek world entirely. It is known under the name of Ilion, though, many scientists specialized in antiquity have categorically rejected its connection with Homer’s Ilion.[35] This city was not as mighty, as it changed states several times. In 480 B.C., King Xerxes visited that very city, and Alexander the Great came there in 334 B.C. After his empire had collapsed, the city was overtaken by Lysimachus, who exercised his “special concern for the city,” according to Strabo.

Then Ilion became part of the Roman Empire, and bathhouses, temples and theatres were built there. However, in 85 B.C., due to conflicts with Rome, the city was again plundered and destroyed – this time at the hands of the troops of Roman vicar Gaius Flavius Fimbria, who captured the city during the war against Mitridate Eupatore.

Fig. 18. Division of Alexander's empire after the battle of Ips (301 B.C.) The Lysimachus empire is dashed.

Fig. 19. The Roman odeum of Troy 9 (from 85 B.C. till 500 A.D.).

When Fimbria began boasting that he captured the city on the 11th day, whereas Agamemnon did it only in the 10th year with great difficulties and having a fleet of 1,000 vessels, and the whole Greece aiding him in the campaign, one citizen of Ilion remarked, “True, but we did not have such a defender as Hector”.[36]

Troy 9, dated 85 B.C. – 500 A.D., was restored by Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who routed Fimbria. Then it was dynamically developed in times of Julius Caesar and Octavianus Augustus. By 400 the city appeared to be deserted, and all geostrategic advantages were gained by Constantinople. In due course, Troy turned into a hill that Heinrich Schliemann would dug up into historical oblivion 1500 years later.

Chapter 3
The War for Troy, 20[[th]] century

A tour around the Trojan archaeological reserve starts at the Eastern gate, relating to the period of Troy 7. It seems not to be a coincidence: upon entering the area of the great city, you immediately feel its mighty walls and involuntarily identify yourself with its defenders. The path, marked with coloured ribbons (anything can happen to tourists!), goes near the Northern bastion with a wonderful sight-seeing platform, along the Athena temple discovered in 1865 by Franc Calvert, an ancient citadel of mudbrick and megaron houses built a thousand years before the Trojan War, and the Schliemann’s trench looking like a bad wound on the body of the elderly hill…

If you do not take pictures of every stone or stay at the information stands for too long, you can walk along the tourist path in 10–15 minutes. The mighty fortress is only 200 meters in diameter.

200 multiplied by 200 is 4 hectares, which approximately matches the ground space of five football fields or one modern not-too-large megamall. How was it possible to accommodate 50,000 defenders of Troy here, as Homer had written? Let’s assume that most of them had stayed outside the bastion. In the early 1990s, Helmut Becker and Jorg Fassbinder, employees of Manfred Korfmann, made a discovery by means of magnetic survey: in the 13[[th]] and 12[[th]] centuries B.C., the Trojan citadel was surrounded by a big downtown protected with two outer circles of walls, and a ditch, cut off in the rock half a kilometer away from the fortress. Thus, territory of Troy extended about five times further and was as large as the Moscow Kremlin. Nevertheless, there were 50,000 people, who had to sleep a bit more comfortably than in standing position and to maintain cattle, battle horses and chariots! In such area, it was only economically justified, as Margaret Thatcher would say, for no more than 5 thousand people to live there. Korfmann said 7,000 would have fit it. Let it be, but surely no more than that!

Fig. 20. Megarons of the 23rd century B.C. are protected from bad weather with a canvas roof and ribbons are to guard against too curious tourists.

However, the figures provided by Homer have long been considered as poetic exaggerations – 29 empires in the Achaean coalition, 1186 ships filled with soldiers (from 50 to 120 people on every ship, more than a hundred thousand in total!), and 10 years of siege…

But many questions still have no definite answers, in particular, because of the damage done by Schliemann. Who were the Trojans? What was their nationality? What language did they speak? Why did most of them have Greek names? Who did the Trojans pray to, and why did some Greek gods help them? If the Greeks really captured Ilion, why didn’t they use the victory advantage and capture the country or even leave their vicar there? Was there the great Trojan War real, or was it just a poetic image of many independent military campaigns, forays and sieges that took place during dozens or even hundreds of years?

These questions were asked especially often since the legend about the Trojan War seemed to have been completely confirmed by finds made by Schliemann, Dörpfeld and Blegen.

Doubts about historicity of the Trojan War revived, when the legend about it seemed to have been completely confirmed by finds made by Schliemann, Dörpfeld and Blegen.

A kind of Renaissance of views of the late 18[[th]] and early 19[[th]] centuries happened, when doubts about the historical reality of both the Trojan War and Troy itself were very popular.

While Ancient thinkers considered Homer to be not only the most skilful poet but also the greatest scientist, and his poems to be a source of the truest historical and geographical information (according to Strabo, “Homer surpassed all people of the ancient and new time, not only due to the high dignity of his poetry, but… knowledge of the conditions of public life”[37]), the science of the Modern Age completely subverted his authority. Not only was the information about the events described in the Iliad and the Odyssey considered to be unreliable, but the very existence of Homer was put into question. Scientists’ skepticism reached the point that for some time believing that there was some considerable culture in Aegis before the 1st millennium B.C. was considered madness.[38] According to their judgments, all these “rich in gold Mycenae”, “blossoming Corinthes” and “magnificently arranged Troy”, inviting envy by their riches even amongst Greeks of the classic era, were only imaginary cities populated with fiction characters – the descendants and relatives of the Olympic gods, such as Agamemnon, Achilles, Diomidius and Priam. At the same time, there have always been scientists, who trusted in Homer’s word and were ready to defend their point of view.

At the turn of the 18[[th]] and 19th centuries the harshest arguments about Homer took place. The ones being in doubt were Englishmen John McLaurin, who published Treatise in evidence that Troy was not captured by the Greeks (1788), and Jacob Bryant, who published Treatise concerning the Trojan War and expedition of the Greeks as it was described by Homer, demonstrating that such expedition had not ever been held, and that such a city of Phrygia hadn’t existed (1796). The latter violently polemized about historicity of Troy with archaeologist Lechevalier, the very person who first located Ilion in the Bunatbashi area. “Cabinet critics heatedly argued about trifles – location of the Greek ships and even the probable number of children born by camp whores”.[39]

At the very height of the scholarly battles, the great romantic Byron visited the plane at the Hellespont coast. The atmosphere of these places made him believe that Homer’s poems were true. 11 years later he wrote in his diary, “I stood upon the plain daily, for more than a month, in 1810; and if anything diminished my pleasure, it was that the blackguard Bryant had impugned its veracity (the Trojan war)… I venerated the grand original as the truth of history (in the material facts) and of place. Otherwise, it would have given me no delight. Who will persuade me, when O reclined upon a mighty tomb, that it did not contain a hero? – its very magnitude proved this. Men should not labour over the ignoble and petty dead – and why should not the dead be Homer’s dead?”[40]

Despite such poetic arguments by Byron, the belief that the Trojan War was only the fiction of the blind Homer remained popular among scientists for another half a century until Schliemann’s excavations assured the scientific community of the historical value of great cities described in the Iliad, such as Troy, Mycenae, Tirynthos and Orchomenus. At first sight, some finds of the amateur archaeologist accurately corresponded to the items described by Homer. For instance, the blade of a bronze dagger found in Mycenae depicted the famous tower shield; in the Iliad, such item belonged to Ajax.

Fig. 21. Hellespont in the Canakkale District.

Other items found were the remains of a helmet made of wild boar fangs, depicted in the 10[[th]] rhapsody of the poem, and so on. All these seemed to be sound proof that the Trojan War had been real. And Homer himself already seemed to be at least a younger contemporary of his heroes or even an immediate witness of the events he described. “Data provided by Homer gradually became kind of “a guidebook” for those studying the Aegean culture of the Mycenae epoch”.[41]

However, Schliemann’s romantic epoch ended up quite quickly. Already in the late 19[[th]] century, serious studies were performed, demonstrating that the material culture and everyday life of the Homer’s heroes did not correspond to the cultural environment of the Mycenae civilization and should have been associated with a later period.[42] Having armed his characters with iron weapons and darts known in the Bronze Age, Homer ignored all typical signs of the Mycenae culture, mentioning neither cobbled roads with bridges, nor water lines and water drains in the palaces, nor the fresco paintings. Even written language that already existed before the 12[[th]] century B.C. and was demonstrated in clay plates found by Arthur Evans at the beginning of the 20[[th]] century during the Knossus excavations on Cyprus, wasn’t mentioned by Homer. Thus, it appeared that when the Iliad and the Odyssey were written, the Mycenae civilization had been already forgotten. Thus, trustworthiness of Homer’s stories were once again put in doubt.

Harvard philologists Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who in late 1920s and early 1930s studied style of Homer’s epic, also fanned the flames in a way. To learn about the technique for creating, learning and transferring of oral legends they undertook several expeditions to the Balkans to study the living epic tradition. Having collected and studied a huge amount of folklore material, they found out that in time epic was based not on telling some finished texts, but rather on transferring a set of resources used to develop a song: plots, canonical images, and stereotyped word-and-rhythm formulas, which singers used like language words. In particular, this allowed performers to reproduce (or, more precisely, to create in the course of the performance) poems consisting of thousands of lines.[43] Each time the song was an improvisation, though, it remained a form of collective creativity.

Fig. 22. American historian Moses Finley calling on the “deletion” of Homer’s Trojan War from the history of the Greek Bronze Age. (Image © Olga Aranova.)

The folklore nature of Homer’s poems that were of exactly such formula style was proven, thus (over 90 percent of the Iliad text was comprised of such formulas – a staggering number, especially upon considering the refinement and intricacy of the Greek hexameter).[44] It is hard to expect that folklore tales would mirror some true historical reality.

Moses Finley, a reputable historian, insisted on that point, too. In his book The World of Odysseus (1954), he affirmed that searching through Homer’s works for authentic testimonies concerning the Trojan War, its causes, outcome and even composition of coalitions is just the same as studying the history of Huns in the 5[[th]] century by the Song of Nibelungs or appealing to the Song about Rolland to reconstruct the course of the Battle of Roncevaux Pass. Finley grounded his doubts on both the data for comparative philology and results of the economic history study of Homer’s society by means of the model proposed by French anthropologist Marcel Mauss.

In his famous book The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss studied the mechanism of operation of traditional society’s economy based on the gratuitous expenditure principle. According to Mauss, archaic economy does not push advantages. At its bottom there is the potlatch (a holiday held to distribute all of the tribe’s property; however, another tribe receiving the gifts undertakes to make a greater and more generous potlatch. Thus, accumulated and spent wealth circulation starts, for the prestige of ones and enjoyment of others.[45]

By reconstructing the system of exchange in the Hellenic world, Finley discovered that the socio-economical relations mirrored in Homer’s poems were close to those existing under eastern despotism and that they were absolutely untypical for the Mycenae society during the Trojan War period (13[[th]] and 12th centuries B.C.). The Iliad and the Odyssey somewhat restored the reality of the 10[[th]] and 9[[th]] centuries B.C. (i.e. the Dark Ages). On this basis, Finley directly stated that the Trojan War depicted by Homer should be razed from the history of the Greek Bronze Age.

Moses Finley had written his book before Michael Ventris and John Chadwick published deciphered results of the so-called linear writing B – the most ancient syllabary, samples of which were found on artifacts of Mycenae Greece.[46] The article Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives[47] by Ventris and Chadwick provoked a chain reaction in the scientific world. One by one, the studies appeared, reconstructing the Crete and Mycenaean period of ancient history. According to Chadwick’s testimony, 432 articles, brochures and books by 152 writers from 23 countries appeared[48] in the period 1953–1958 alone. These studies demonstrated that linear writing was used in all big centers of Mycenaean Greece as the official writing, and therefore, it was a factor that combined politically different societies in a uniform cultural space. A more important thing was that according to these studied high-level culture and developed political life were there on the Aegean islands of the 2nd millennium B.C.

Fig. 23. Knossos plates with linear writing B (XV century B.C.)

Authoritative French historian Paul Fort asserted: “The texts discovered in Knossos, Pylos, Mycenae, Phebe, etc., made it possible, at last, to reconstruct the everyday life of the contemporaries of the Trojan War and even that of a few generations of their predecessors since the 13th century B.C. Due to these, peasants, seamen, handicraftsmen, soldiers, officials once again began speaking and acting. And the golden masks of the Athenian museum became more than simple masks of the dead”.[49]

The results of decryption of ancient written sources, together with analysis of archaeological finds, served as an additional argument in favour of Finley’s and his predecessor’s hypothesis that the author of the Iliad did not realize customs and everyday life of the Hellenes in the 13[[th]] and 12[[th]] centuries B.C.

The results of decryption of the Mycenaean written language, along with analysis of the archaeological finds, confirmed that the author of Iliad did not realize customs and everyday life of the Hellenes in the 13th and 12th centuries B.C.

For the Greek theocratic monarchy in the Trojan War times, the kings were considered as living gods, unapproachable by mere mortals and managing their empires by means of a developed bureaucratic apparatus. According to Homer, the kings were quite close to the people and not devoid of democratic methods of rule.[50]

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Примечания

1

Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge (London, 1975).

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2

Herodotus, Histories, VII, 43.

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3

Strabo, Geography, XIII, 26.

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4

Lucan, Pharsalia, IX, 964–969.

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5

Ecumene (also spelled oecumene or oikoumene) is a term originally used in the Greco-Roman world to refer to the inhabited universe (or at least the known part of it). The term derives from the Greek οἰκουμένη (oikouménē, the feminine present middle participle of the verb οἰκέω, oikéō, “to inhabit”), short for οἰκουμένη γῆ “inhabited world”. In modern connotations it refers either to the projection of a united Christian Church or to world civilizations.

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6

Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, Epitome, III, 5.

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7

Osip Mandelstam, Stone (N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 1981).

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8

A.I. Zaitsev, “Ancient Greek Epos and the Iliad by Homer”, Homer. The Iliad (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2008); p. 398.

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9

Alessandro Baricco, Omero, Iliade (Collana Economica Feltrinelli, Feltrinelli, 2004).

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10

L.S. Klein, Bodiless Heroes: Origin of the Images of the Iliad (St. Petersburg: Khudozhestvennaya Literature, 1992); p. 4.

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11

Heinrich Alexander Stoll, Der Traum von Troja (Leipzig, 1956).

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12

Under the Russian law Heinrich Schliemann and Yekaterina Lyzhina remained married.

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13

V.P. Tolstikov, “Heinrich Schliemann and Trojan Archaeology”, The Treasures of Troy. The Finds of Heinricha Schliemann. Exhibiton catalogue (Мoscow: Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts: Leonarde Arte, 1996); p. 18.

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14

А.V. Strelkov, “The Legend of Doctor Schliemann” in G. Schliemann, Ilion. The city and country of the Trojans. Vol. 1 (Мoscow: Central Polygraph, 2009); p. 11.

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15

D.A. Traill, Excavating Schliemann: Collected Papers on Schliemann (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1993), p. 40.

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16

Seventeen year old Sophia Schliemann was practically bought for 150,000 francs from her uncle, a Greek bishop Teokletos Vimpos.

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17

V.P. Tolstikov, “Heinrich Schliemann and Trojan Archaeology”, The Treasures of Troy. The Finds of Heinricha Schliemann. Exhibiton catalogue (Мoscow: Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts: Leonarde Arte, 1996); p. 18.

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18

Carl Blegen, Troy and the Trojans (Praeger, 1963).

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19

Heinrich Schliemann, Ilios, City and Country of the Trojans (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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20

Actually it was with the publication in 1950 of his epistolary heritage that the perception of Schliemann’s personality began to change. Comparing data from Schliemann’s letters and his autobiography, the researchers found that “the great archaeologist” was lying at every turn.

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21

American researcher David Treyll insisted that Priam Treasure was a fraud. D.A. Traill, Excavating Schliemann: Collected Papers on Schliemann (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1993).

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22

It was only in 1882 during excavations that architect Wilhelm Dörpfeldw invited to reconstruct urban planning of different periods of the Troy history explained that to Schliemann. After having spent four days in his tent in silence, Schliemann acknowledged that his colleague was right.

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23

In 1876 Russian Archaeological Society was trying to buy Schliemann’s collection. However, the price was unaffordable.

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24

After the exhibition several countries claimed “the treasures of Priam”: Germany (who received it as a gift), Turkey (where they were found), and even Greece (where they had supposedly belonged).

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25

Carl Blegen, Troy and the Trojans.

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26

Carl Blegen, Troy and the Trojans.

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27

Etymologically the name Hesion associated with the word Asia. Hesion – asiyka, a resident of Anatolia. (L.A. Gindin, V.L. Tsymbursky, Homer and the history of the oriental Mediterranean (Мoscow: Vostochnaya Literature, 1996); p. 53).

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28

When she became the wife of Telamon, Hesion bore Teucer, who thus became the half-brother of Ajax Telamonid.

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29

Carl Blegen, Troy and the Trojans.

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30

C. Baikouzis, M.O. Magnasco, “Is an eclipse described in the Odyssey?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 24 (2008). URL: http://www.pnas.org/content/105/26/8823.full

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31

Carl Blegen, Troy and the Trojans.

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32

A. Furumark, Mycenaean Pottery I: Analysis and Classification (Stockholm, 1941).

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33

Carl Blegen, Troy and the Trojans.

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34

Carl Blegen, Troy and the Trojans.

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35

Strabo, Geography, XIII, 25.

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36

Strabo, Geography, XIII, 27.

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37

Strabo, Geography, I, 2.

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38

R.V. Gordeziani, Issues of the Homeric Epos (Tbilisi, Tbilisi University Publishing House, 1978); p. 161.

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39

Michael Wood, In Search of the Trojan War (Plume, 1987).

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40

Lord Byron, Journals, jan. 11, 1821.

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41

R.V. Gordeziani, Issues of the Homeric Epos; p. 162.

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42

Perhaps the first guess about the difference between time of Homer’s world and the time described in Iliad was made at the beginning of the 18[[th]] century by Giambattista Vico, an Italian philosopher (See Vico, Giambattista. The New Science, III).

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43

During his expedition Parry had written down a poem of a Bosnian Avdo Međedović The Wedding of Meho Smailagić that had more than 12,000 lines, that is equal to the volume of the Odyssey. (Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1960)). This was the proof of the possibility of a similar volume of works in the unwritten culture.

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44

Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales.

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45

Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Cohen&West, 1970).

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46

Palace at Pylos, where they found the tablets with texts written with this type of writing, was opened in the early 1950s by Carl Blegenom.

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47

M. Ventris, J. Chadwick, “Evidence for Greek dialect in the Mycenaean archives”, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 73 (1953); pp. 84–103.

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48

John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (Cambridge at the University Press, 1967).

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49

Paul Faure, La Grèce au temps de la Guerre de Troie. 1250 avant J.-C. (Paris, Hachette, 1975).

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50

The leader of the Achaeans Agamemnon makes key decisions not on his own, but at the Military Council. See Iliad, II, 50–444.

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