Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Trojan War (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sometime about 3,200 years ago, one of the most famous wars in ancient history took place. Maybe. It's been the subject of some of the greatest works of Western literature and has given us some of the most enduring cultural references. And it was also the subject of one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 19th century. Learn more about the city of Troy and the Trojan War on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

Starting point is 00:00:54 It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The story of the Trojan War is one of the oldest stories in the world. It's the subject of the Iliad and the Odyssey by the Greek poet. Homer, as well as the Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil. The Trojan War was also depicted in Greek and Roman art and songs, and was one of the most definitive events of the Bronze Age.

Starting point is 00:01:26 Maybe. That maybe has to do with the fact that for centuries, most historians assume that the Trojan War was fictional. Assuming it did happen, the epic poems which made it famous, weren't written until about 400 years after the fact. So, imagine something that took place in the early 17th century being handed down via oral traditions and then being written about for the first time today. At the time when the Trojan War took place, the entire area around the Aegean Sea was culturally Greek. Troy was believed to have

Starting point is 00:01:57 been located somewhere around the Dardanelles on the Anatolian Peninsula, in what is the modern day country of Turkey. The story of the Trojan War is pretty involved, and you could easily spend hours of podcasting time going over it. So for the purposes of this episode, I'm just going to give a very brief overview of the events leading up to the war and how it was resolved. Even if you think you don't know anything about the Trojan War, you actually probably do know something because there are so many cultural references that refer to the war, which are still with us today. The cause of the war was not one of territory, resources, or money. It was entirely personal. And it started with the Queen of Sparta, the wife of King Menelaus, or as she's known to

Starting point is 00:02:37 history, Helen of Troy. According to legend, Helen was the most beautiful woman in the world and was the daughter of Zeus. What sparked the war was Helen's abduction, or eloping, depending on your version of the story, with the Prince of Troy named Paris. Again, according to legend, Helen was promised to Paris by the goddess Aphrodite, who offered him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world in exchange for a golden apple. Aphrodite was in a contest between herself, Hera and Athena. This was known as the Judgment of Paris, from which the famous 1976 wine tasting that I covered in a previous episode got its name. As you can probably guess, this greatly angered Menelaus, who got his brother, King Agamemnon of Myccia, to join him in a war to bring Helen back.

Starting point is 00:03:23 The entire Greek world assembled an army and an armada of a thousand ships. The soldiers in this army were some of the greatest names of the ancient world, Achilles, Odysseus, Nestor, and Ajax. The men and the ships headed across the Aegean to lay siege to Troy until they could get Helen back. This did not turn out to be a quick operation. The siege actually lasted ten years. There were a series of skirmishes over that period, but the Greek army could not make Troy concede and give up Helen. To be fair, the siege was never a complete siege. The Greek forces couldn't afford to sustain a full siege for a decade, so it was only a partial force for most of the time.

Starting point is 00:04:02 However, after 10 years, finally in a desperate gambit, Odysseus came up with a plan. They would trick the Trojans into thinking that the Greeks had left. They would burn their camps and leave behind a wooden horse. The horse was inscribed with the following, quote, The Greeks dedicate this Thanksgiving offering to Athena for their return home. The Trojans were excited, having survived the siege and seeing their besiegers sent home. With this victory trophy, they dragged it into the city and debated what to do with it. Some suggested they burn it, some thought they should throw it off a cliff, and others thought that they should dedicate it to the goddess Athena for their victory.

Starting point is 00:04:40 However, others, including the Trojan princess Cassandra, didn't think it should be brought into the city at all. And according to legend, Cassandra was cursed by the god Apollo with the gift of prophecy. She would always be right, but would never be believed. The horse, of course, had Greek soldiers hidden inside. At night they snuck out, opened up the gates of the city, and the Greeks, who were actually just hidden, flooded it. and sack Troy. Helen returned to Sparta and lived the rest of her days with King Menelaus, who actually bore her no ill will despite the entire episode. So that is a very compact version of the Trojan War with a whole lot of details left out. But even if you've never heard the

Starting point is 00:05:18 story before, you probably recognized a bunch of references. Achilles, and his famous heel, is something that is still regularly mentioned today. A beautiful woman may still be compared to Helen of Troy. A metaphor for subverting something from the inside is known as a Trojan horse. A Cassandra is the opposite of an optimist who always predicts bad news. And just for the record, the city of Paris was not named after Paris of Troy. Rather, it was named after a local tribe called the Parisi. The story of the Trojan War slipped into legend and history. The Odyssey and the Iliad and many other epics kept the story of the Trojan War alive. According to the Romans, the Trojan prince Aeneas took the search.

Starting point is 00:05:59 survivors of Troy and sailed around the Mediterranean until eventually arriving on the shores of Italy, where they became the ancestors of the Romans. Julius Caesar claimed ancestry from Aeneas. So you can see that this was a foundational story for the entire Greek and Roman world. You could argue that the Trojan War was perhaps the most important legend from this region from this period in history. However, this is just the first half of the story. As I mentioned before, for a long time, historians assumed that the entire story of the Trojan War was a fable. There wasn't any basis for anything in the story. Other major Greek cities like Athens and Sparta were known. People still live there, and there were ruins that could be explored. But nobody lived in Troy. There were no ruins of Troy that

Starting point is 00:06:44 anybody knew of, which was very odd for a city that was supposed to be so prominent. And that is on top of all the stuff about the Greek gods and goddesses being involved. However, the Romans and Greeks had no doubt that Troy was real, and the site was claimed to be visited by the likes of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Now, fast forward the story about 3,000 years. While most historians assume that Troy was fictional, not everybody did. Some believe that Troy was real, and it was just a matter of finding it. The ancient text gave descriptions of where Troy was generally located, and people went looking for it. As early as the 16th and 17th century, some explorers had come close to finding Troy's location. One early site which was identified as Troy was the city of Alexandria

Starting point is 00:07:30 Troas, which are Greek ruins just south of the modern Turkish site known as Hisserlich. There were several other attempts at pinpointing the location of Troy in the early 19th century, but it was a Scottish writer by the name of Charles McLaren who first identified the spot, which is currently recognized as Troy in 1822. It was the Turkish site known as Hisserlick, not far from the previously identified sites. However, there still wasn't any proof that this location was in fact Troy. The first excavations at Hisserlick began in 1865 by Frank Calvert, a local Turkish man of English descent who owned a nearby farm. His excavations weren't that extensive, but they did capture the attention of the man

Starting point is 00:08:11 who is usually credited with the discovery of Troy, the German businessman and amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schleiman. Schleiman went through the proper channels and secured permission to do a larger excavation at Hisserlich. Hisserlich was what was known as a tell. A tell is basically an artificial mound that was built up over centuries of human habitation. Generation after generation would build upon the ruins of the structures which existed beforehand. The result over hundreds or thousands of years is similar to a layer cake. There are many tells which can be found all over the Mediterranean and Levant. In 1870, Schleiman created a trench that cuts right through the Hisserlick tell, which is like cutting

Starting point is 00:08:52 a slice from a layer cake. Once exposed, you can see all of the layers. What Schleeman discovered is widely considered to be the historical city of Troy, which was mentioned in the Homeric epics. Schleeman was quite wealthy and funded excavations at Troy until his death in 1890. However, that wasn't the end of archaeological research at Troy. Excavations have been conducted at the site almost continuously since the Schleeman excavations. What they found was a city that was established about 5,500 years ago and had some level of occupation until the year 500. There are 46 different layers of strata divided across 10 different major layers. In addition to the buildings, there has also been a trove of objects which were found,

Starting point is 00:09:36 which have been called King Priam's treasures, although there's no proof that they were associated with the actual Trojan king. Later archaeologists have not been kind to Schleeman. For starters, he didn't really discover the site, so giving him credit for the discovery is pretty inaccurate. And secondly, his archaeological techniques were extremely destructive. Jill Rubell Kaba and Eric Klein wrote in their book Digging for Troy from Homer to Hisserlich. Quote, he plowed through layers of soil and everything in them without proper record keeping, no mapping of finds, and few descriptions of discoveries. End quote.

Starting point is 00:10:11 Archaeologists are still trying to fix the problems he created in his dig sites to this day. So, if Troy was a real city, then the next question. and perhaps the big question is, did the Trojan War really happened? And the answer is, we don't know. There isn't really a way to prove the events that might have taken place within the city of Troy. However, the fact that Troy was found to be real does lend credibility to the general story of the Trojan War. Sure, stuff like Helen being the daughter of Zeus and Aphrodite and a golden apple are an embellishment, but the idea of a major war being fought over an abducted queen seems, at least to me, like this sort of thing that would be

Starting point is 00:10:52 remembered for a long time and probably would be written down. Regardless, the tale of the Trojan War shows the lasting power of history and stories. And that is why the tale of a war over a beautiful queen, which was resolved by the subterfuge of a wooden horse, has stuck with us for over 3,000 years. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel, The associate producers are Austin Oakden and Cameron Kiefer. I want to thank everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. I'd also like to thank all the members of the Everything Everywhere community

Starting point is 00:11:33 who are active on the Facebook group and the Discord server. If you'd like to join in the discussion, there are links to both in the show notes. And as always, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Trojan War (Encore)

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