The Ancients - The Trojan War

Episode Date: July 5, 2026

The story of Achilles, Odysseus and the siege of Troy has captivated audiences for millennia, but behind the legends lies a deeper mystery. Was this epic war a myth, a memory of a real Bronze Age conflict, or something in between?Today Tristan Hughes is joined by Eric Cline to explore the reality behind Homer’s greatest tale. From the legendary heroes of The Iliad to the ruins of Troy, discover what archaeology and ancient texts reveal about the Trojan War, and whether the story of Helen, Paris and the fall of Troy truly has a historical foundation.MORETroyListen on AppleListen on Spotify The Bronze Age CollapseListen on AppleListen on Spotify We're going on *TOUR* to Australia and New Zealand! - grab your tickets here.The Ancients is now on YouTube! Watch here: @TheAncientsPodcastPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. The Trojan War. It is one of the oldest stories in human history. The tale of a grinding 10-year siege launched by honour-bound Greeks to seize back their beautiful Spartan queen, Helen of Troy. A once glorious city brought to its knees by the efforts of Agamemnon and Achilles, of Ajax and Odysseus, of Menelaus and Diomedes. All the tragic heroes whose trials have been etched into the world's imagination. Now the war forms the beating heart of Homer's first great literary masterpiece, the Iliad, and directly informs its sequel, The Odyssey. And so with Christopher Nolan's blockbuster film on the horizon, we're exploring the Odyssey's

backstory. What do we know about the Trojan War? Who was it between? When might it have been fought? And most crucially, is it just a story or did it really happen? are the kernels of truth behind this epic. Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

And to dive headfirst into the ruins of Troy, I'm joined once again by friend of the show, Dr. Eric Klein. Let's get into it. Eric, always a pleasure. Welcome back to the show. Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure to be back. Now, first and foremost, the most important question of all, Eric,

what tie are you wearing today? Ah, good question. I am wearing what I consider to be my Trojan War tie. What it actually depicts, I have no idea, but it is warriors in battle with shields. So this is what I wear when I'm lecturing on the Trojan War in class. So that's the tie for today. I do love anyone who follows you on social media, Eric, you have your regular posts of the various ties that you wear depending on what lectures you're teaching. It's a great little thing that you have there. But of course, we're talking about the Trojan War today, the myth, but of course also the real world that it's set in. And this is one of the things that I love so much about the story, the myth of the Trojan War, Eric, is it such an amazing gateway for people to learn more about this fascinating late Bronze Age world that is set in? Yeah, it really is. It's a gateway,

if you will. It's almost a gateway drug until the late Bronze Age. But yes, the big question that we've got, of course, is the story that's come down to us, how accurate is it? That's what we've got to ask. And that's where the archaeology is going to come in. But the story itself is an interesting glimpse into a world that has now disappeared, and in fact, it had already disappeared by the time that Homer collated everything. I mean, absolutely. Questions like, could this Trojan war have happened, but also another one, which I love, Eric, which we'll delve into, could there actually have been more than one real Trojan

war? Yes. I think that there certainly could have been. I actually think that Homer is compiling and amalgamating a couple of them, and telescoping them into one grand narrative. But I think from the other side, from the Hittite side, I think we've got evidence of at least four different conflicts. And yes, and to anticipate what you already kind of asked, I will say right up front, I think the Trojan War happened, or I think something happened around which everything else was built. So we used to have arguments about

this at the dining room table as to whether it took place or not. I was firmly on the side that it happened. Others were not so sure. So, you know, it made for interesting dinnertime conversations, shall we say? Well, absolutely. And that's a great statement to have straight away in this chat, Eric. We're going to be talking Hittites, Misenians, and so much more as the chat goes on. But let's start with the Trojan War story, the myth itself. Eric, it is quite the epic. But let's talk through the big main points of the Trojan War. war myth of the Trojan War story? Yeah, the way I explain it to my students, I usually leave all the gods and the goddesses out,

and I just talk about the human interaction, and it boils down to something very simple. You've got Troy, which is somewhere up on the northwestern coast of Anatolia, modern-day Turkey. At Troy, you've got a king, Priam. He's got a number of sons, among whom is one with the name of Paris, who is also, by the way, known as Alexander. He's got both names. Just like Troy itself is also known as Ilios, right? And that's where we get the Iliad from. At any rate, Paris slash Alexander is sent over to Greece. He's sent over specifically to the Mycenaean palace in the area of what will later be Sparta, right? And this is where Manilaeus is ruling. It's a trade delegation. It's an embassy. And we actually know archaeologically that the Mycinians and the Trojans are trading at that time.

We've got Misena and pottery at Troy. But so Paris comes over, meets up with Mennelais. Menelaus, by the way, happens to be married to the most beautiful woman in the world, namely Helen. But Menelaus himself is not all that bright a bulb. And even while Paris is visiting, he goes over to Crete and visits the king over there. leaving his wife alone with this nice-looking young guy from Troy. And when Manilaeus returns home, he finds his wife is gone, as is Paris. The story that the Trojans told is that she went with Paris willingly.

The story that the Mycenaeans told is that she was kidnapped. Now, it happened that Manalais had a brother, Agamemnon, the king of kings. He was king up at Mycenae. And Exanderlone, isn't it? Yes. And he basically said, yo, bro, literally, because it was his brother, help me get my wife back. And we're told in book two of the Iliad, the so-called catalog of ships, that Agamemnon asked all the other Mycenaean kings to help them out.

They all sent ships with 50 warriors in them, and they sailed over to Troy to get Helen back. and we of course know exactly how many ships there were. We are told this by a later author because we get the saying, Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships, exactly. But in fact, if you go through the catalog of ships in book two and you count up the ships as I have done when I was very bored on a train, this is a true story. I was on a train going from London down to Penzance and Cornwall

and I had what was then the new translation by Fagels, Robert Fagels, and I counted the ships. There are, in fact, 1,167 ships. So I've been trying to change this. Helen, the face that launched 1167 ships, but it hasn't caught on for some reason. I don't know why. But anyway, they go over to Troy and they besiege it for 10 years. And that's the famous 10-year siege. There's trials and tribulations.

There's actually a failed attempt to begin with, but never mind. The Iliad jumps in. It's only the last 50 days of the 10th year that we are told. And eventually the Misenans capture Troy through the strategy of using the Trojan horse, which, by the way, is only mentioned in passing in the Iliad. It's in one of the other epics. And they loot the city, pretty much kill everybody, and take Helen back home, and everybody except for the Trojans lives happily ever after. So that's the basic story.

Oh, and yeah, by the way, Odysseus, it takes him another 10 years to get home. That's where the Odyssey comes from. And that's where we have movies being made about this, right? I mean, absolutely. And then, of course, Agamemnon getting home, being murdered by his wife and so on and so forth. So all of those stories that emerge out of it. Eric, thank you for kind of laying out the story there. But the compiling of it, that narrative, that story that we have today and so many famous

parts of it, you mentioned the face that launched, well, maybe we should say over a thousand ships. There you go. Is it all compiled down by one source? I mean, what do we know about when this story is collated and how long after when events supposedly took place? Excellent, excellent question. In fact, that's part of what's called the Homeric question, which is actually a series of smaller questions. But one question that we've got is, first of all, did Homer ever actually exist? And if he did, was he a he or was he a she, or was he a couple of people, or all of these have been suggested that Homer might have been a woman, that there might have been more than one person that wrote the Illy and the Odyssey. My absolute favorite is the suggestion that Homer is not a person, but is a profession. You are a Homer.

In other words, you're a singing bard. And to me, that makes a lot of sense. But we can't prove it. And there's all kinds of places that claim they're the origin of Homer and all that. What we do know is that he, if he existed, he or she or however many, would have been sometime in the 8th century BC. So somewhere between like 750 and 700. But what he is doing also, he's not writing the story down. He's not actually writing it.

Story is not written down for another 100, almost 200 years. What he is doing supposedly is compiling it, pulling together everything, because this is a story that's been handed down by word of mouth for 500 years. I mean, the Trojan War, and again, we've got problems there too. When did it happen if it happened? Well, if it happened at some time between, say, 1250 and 1150 BC to give the broadest range possible. But if it takes place at 1250 and Homer's at 750, that's 500 years. That's five centuries.

That's like, what are we now? We're 20 to 25. That'd be like us trying to put together something. It happened in the 1500s or 1600s. So one of the other questions we've gotten then is how accurate is the story if you're trying to figure out does it really tell us about the Bronze Age? Is it almost kind of like if someone was trying to, if let's say Shakespeare's plays were being passed down word of mouth for several centuries and only now in the present day they were actually being written down that kind of idea? Yes, exactly, something like that. And then the question would be how much in that is actually reflective of what it was like in Shakespeare's day.

how much of it is actually our day and how much is somewhere in between. So the Trojan War takes place right at the end of the late Bronze Age, I think, right around the time of the collapse. And so that's the Bronze Age. Homer is the Iron Age. And so are the people, places, events, objects, like chariots and all that? Are they Iron Age things that Homer would have known? Or are they Bronze Age that were passed down?

or could they be a combination of the two? And there's some Bronze Age and some Iron Age. And this is what scholars have been fighting about for more than 100 years, basically. So, yeah. Fantastic. One more question before we really delve into that late Bronze Age world, Eric, is the whole story of the Trojan War, including elements like the Trojan horse, like the actual sack of Troy, the homecoming afterwards. The sources that actually write this down that we have surviving for these various elements of it

is not all just Homer's Iliads and Odyssey, is it? Right, right. We've got something that we, as a grand hole, called the epic cycle. And the Ili and the Odyssey are just two books in that epic cycle. And in fact, we've got, there's one called the Little Iliad, there's one called the Kipria and all that. The problem is all the others are gone. All we have are snippets. There is one guy, Proclos, who does write down and tells us the gist of many of them, including who had actually written them. Like, it's not Homer, it's so and so. And in those other epics, that's where we find out the whole backstory, you know, with the golden apple and the goddesses and all that. But it's also where we get the story of the Trojan horse. because, as I mentioned, it's only in passing in the Iliad. So you really need the rest of the epics to flesh out the story. And most people don't realize that. So when I'm teaching this in class,

I assign the bits and pieces from the epic cycle as well as the Iliad and the Odyssey. So it's a conglomeration, and that's why it can be really interesting as to exactly what you think happens. And other details which we can get into, like, what actually was the Trojan horse? Was it a thing? Was it real? But let's start, I mean, the first thing we will cover is the Bronze Age world in which the Trojan War is set. So, Eric, the late Bronze Age, what does this central eastern Mediterranean world look like at that time? So it's an interconnected world. It's globalized, if you will,

but it's localized. It's globalized locally, right? So Susan Sherritt at Sheffield has said it was a globalized Mediterranean, and I think that's a great way to describe it. So from, say, oh, the 15th century, maybe even the 17th century, BC, all the way down to the 12th century, we have connections between the great powers of the day. And in geographic terms, that would be basically from Italy on one side, to Mesopotamia on the other, from Turkey down to Egypt, to put it in modern terms. The societies are Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites in Anatolia, Cypriots, Canaanites, Assyrians, Babylonians. Trojans are in there, but they're not one of the great powers. What they are is controlling the access to the Black Sea.

So they're a major port. There are other ones as well like Ugarit in North Syria, but Troy is the big one controlling the Dardanelles and everything. So they're all interconnected. They're trading. They're getting raw materials from each other, silver, gold, tin, copper, but they're also trading finish goods, perfume, olive oil, textiles, sandals, things like that. Sandals, wow. Sandals from Crete. Yes, we have one text at Mari.

in Mesopotamia from about 1800 BC that says, Kaff to you, that would be Crete, Minowans, leather shoes, which would probably be sandals, that were sent to Hamarabi, but he returned them. And that is the Hamerabi, the Lockoad guy, with the I for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And I always wondered why he returned the shoes. And in attack, the book 1177 that I wrote about the Bronze Age,

I wanted to call it Hamarabi's Shoes, and that title was vetoed. But yeah, so we've got a lot of trade. They are dependent upon each other. That's what brings them up to heights of greatness during the late Bronze Age, but it's also what helps bring them down when everything collapses because they needed each other, and when one went down, there's a domino effect, and they eventually all went down to some degree. and that globalized network of trade just collapses.

And that rich archaeological record that scholars like yourself used today, Eric, to learn more about this period, as you mentioned earlier, kind of just repeating what you were saying, it's using that alongside the epic cycle, alongside these amazing texts that have survived, to try and learn more about what is fact, what is fiction, what glimmers of information, what information can we glean from the, epic story of the Trojan War. Yeah, absolutely. In a way, actually, it's very similar to trying to use the Bible and figure out what history is in that. It's actually very similar. There are some scholars that do both, and they look at Homer and they look at the Bible. So, yeah, again,

much like the Bible's not a history book, so Homer is not a history book, but they both contain some historical facts. And what we need to do is, tease them out. And so figure out what is believable in Homer. Obviously, the gods and goddesses, maybe not so much, but when he describes a chariot and says, you know, it has four spokes in its wheel or six spokes. Well, is that accurate for the Bronze Age or for the Iron Age? And so we have entire books and articles that have been written saying, yeah, okay, this is Iron Age, this is bronze age. This is a, you know, so yeah, so it's a whole cottage industry trying to figure out what is accurate about the Bronze Age and Homer and what could be more of his time period,

the Iron Age. Well, Eric, let's focus on Troy, the place first of all, because you've already mentioned, it seems like we do know some information about it, and we should be imagining a thriving trading hub, a trading settlement in the late Bronze Age? Yes, we should. That's what it's known for. It's known as a breeder of horses, according to Homer, but it's also an entrepoux, an international trading port. Part of the problem, though, is, and we can get into this, is the site that we have excavated as Troy, with nine levels, nine cities, one on top of another. There's not actually anything in the Bronze Age levels that says it's Troy. The later levels, the later Greeks and Romans, they thought it was Troy.

You know, they basically call it new Troy. But as has been pointed out by some people, we could be digging in the wrong place, to quote, Indiana Jones, right? So it might be that Hisserlick, which is the mound that we've been excavating since the time of Sleiman in the 1870s, it could be that's not Troy. That's playing a real devil's advocate. I definitely, I think it's Troy because there's no other good. contender. People have searched that whole area and try to figure out if it's not there, where could it be? But I think there's nothing else that could be. There are people that look for it elsewhere, including people that claim it's in England, which I'm like, yeah, not so much.

But yeah, go Google it. You can find out there's entire books on it. So yeah, but I think Northwest Anatolia, I think the site of Hissolik is probably it. And it's not the only site like that. Magito, for example, there's nothing at Magito that says it's Magito, but it's got to be Megito. There's no other place for it. So, you know, we have these situations in archaeology. I just want to mention Troy and the Trojans, first of all, Eric, because really getting a good sense back in the Bronze Age of its strategic position. You mentioned it's localized, lots of trade along the sea, the Mediterranean, the Aegean, going up to the Black Sea as well, So it's primarily positioned to take advantage of all the river.

Oh, it absolutely is. And in fact, we're told by a number of sources that if you're trying to get up the dartnells to the Black Sea, you have to put into a port like Troy until the winds are going the right way or you can't get up there. So you may be in the port for several weeks waiting for the winds to get to the proper quarter. So Troy benefited from all of that. In fact, that whole area, there have been battles fought.

I mean, the Trojan War is not the only one there. You go right across the straits, and you're at Gallipoli from World War I. So it is a contested periphery for much of its history. And in the Bronze Age, it's in between the Misenians on one side and the Hittites on the other. And the Trojans are almost collateral damage. I might suggest at some point that the Trojan War is actually between. the Mycenaeans and the Hittites, not the Trojans. But we can get into that.

We will absolutely. I mean, I must ask about the Trojans themselves. I mean, archaeologically, do we actually know much about the people? We don't know that much about the people per se. We have their material culture. We have the ceramics. We have the houses. We have various things like that.

But trying to reconstruct the Trojans is an effort. You know, we're going to need to use all the tools at our disposal. including now if we were to find any more skeletons, any more bodies, which the previous excavators did find, we should be able now to do DNA analysis on them and see what we can come up with. But to my knowledge, that hasn't been done yet. So we know a fair amount about them, and yet. And this is where it's, well, it's frustrating, but that's archaeology. You know, there's no writing that's been found at Troy in the Bronze Age. There's one little seal with a man's name on one side and a woman's name on the other. But even that is from a level after the Trojan

war. So where's the archives? Where are the tablets? Where's the correspondence? We don't have it. So did Hendricks Lehman throw it out when he excavated, in quotes, the palace? The one that he was actually looking for it, that he went right through and throughout, is the archive in his back dirt pile? So, you know, inquiring minds need to know. We've got all kinds of questions. And Eric, well, let's just cover Schleeman quickly because it's important in the story of Troy, because who was this figure who was so desperate to find Troy, to find evidence of the of the Trojan War, whose name has become, there I say, I mean, famous, but to others, infamous in the field of archaeology today.

Yes, yes, infamous. He's the man we love to hate. Yes, exactly. An enthusiastic amateur who found all the right things for all the wrong reasons, excavated as badly as you can possibly excavate, and yet was like the luckiest man alive at that time in terms of archaeology. He's also the man. It's his fault that I'm an archaeologist.

It's all Schleman's fault. My mother gave me a book when I was seven years old called The Walls of Windy Troy. And it was a biography of Schleeman written for children. And it was all about him and his life and his excavations at Troy. And I read it and turned to my parents and announced, I'm going to be an archaeologist. And lo and behold, and in fact, what do I specialize in? Troy and the time of the Georgia War. So be careful what books you give your kids when they're below the age of 10, is what I would say.

All right. So Sleiman, German businessman, made not one but two fortunes, millionaire because I think it was indigo and gunpowder he was selling during the Crimean War. Then he came over to the United States, made another fortune in California during the gold rush, 1849. He wasn't actually digging for gold. he was the middleman between the gold miners and the banks. He was buying the nuggets from the miners, selling them to the banks, I think, including

the Rothschilds. But apparently he had his thumb on the scale. And so it was basically run out of town. I actually, with a student, we found his name on a passenger list of a ship leaving Sacramento. And he was apparently one step ahead of the law. But he had another fortune. He had made another, you know, a million dollars. And so at the age of about 40, he retired and spent the rest of his life looking for Troy.

The problem is you can't believe anything he says in his personal life. For instance, he came to America, said he had been living there for quite a while and therefore wanted a divorce from his first wife. He had actually not been there that long. He also wanted to become an American citizen, hadn't nearly been in the States for long enough, bribed a person to say he had been, and so on. Right. And then eventually, as he's going around, he marries a young 16-year-old. He's 40. She's 16. Sophie or Sophia. And apparently his only requirement was that she'd be able to read Homer in the original,

which she could. So from the age of 40 on, he starts looking for Troy, eventually ends up in northwest Anatolia, northwest Turkey, and is trying to identify the various sites, using Homer in one hand, looking for a place that's got hot and cold running water that is small enough that, you know, that they, Hector and Achilles can run around a couple of times. And anyway, he eventually hooks up and finds a guy who owns Hisserlich, you know, and says, I want to find Troy. Can I dig at your site? let's partner and starts digging, and Sleiman eventually claims that he has found Troy. Conveniently leaves the partner out of it, and so we go. And then we've got all kinds of stuff that he, I would say, makes up, like finds Priam's treasure, which is neither Priam's nor a treasure.

But he says that Sophie helped him excavate it, which she didn't. She was back in Athens. So, you know, you can't trust his personal life, and I'm not sure. sure you can trust his professional life. But he is the guy that dug at Troy first and found he thought six levels, turns out there are nine, but he thought it was city number two down the second one at the bottom. It's actually either city number six or city number seven, which was basically at ground level when he started excavating because the later Greeks and Romans had shaved off the top of the mound to build a temple to Athena and then a temple to Jupiter. So they had taken off like the top 30 feet of the mound. And so he started digging. He was at the level that he wanted,

but he figured it happened 3,000 years ago. It's got to be deep. He told his men to go and they went down 45 feet or so in a great trench. And so, you know, probably within the first couple of weeks, he dug through and threw out exactly the palace that he had come to find. So you can see why we love to hate him. He dug through so much. But I wanted to cover that story now in the order because I guess that's the context, Eric, as to why earlier we were able to kind of, not quite pinpoint, but to say the location of Troy with quite a lot of accuracy. And it seems that, yes, although he excavated, unlike any archaeologist, proper archaeologists would do today, like he did strike gold in the fact that most do believe that this is the site, this was the site of Troy today.

Yeah, I would agree. And it turns out now, one of the main arguments for the people that said it wasn't Troy, as they said it's too small, that it doesn't fit Homer's, you know, Homer's description. But first and foremost, I think Homer may have been conflating two of the levels. He's, describing the beautiful city of six, but the destruction of seven. And in the meantime, Monfred Corfman, when he started excavating at the site in 1988, throughout the 90s, they started doing remote sensing, including with a cesium magnetometer. And they realized that what Schleiman and then Dortfeld and then Blagin had all been excavating was just the top Citadel, where the palace had been, all the fields around the mound, which today are growing

sunflowers, there's a whole lower city underneath that, which means the city is 10 to 15 times larger than we had thought it was. And that whole city, yeah, there are later Roman and Hellenistic ruins on top, but underneath it, we've got the cities, Troy 6, Troy 7, we've got it. And there is evidence of destruction, including human bodies and arrowheads of a Greek type down there. So fortunately, since Sleiman destroyed everything that he touched, he only was up on the citadel. The whole lower city, nobody has touched it until now, the last like two, two and a half decades.

So, yeah. So that's why I'm pretty convinced that it is, Troy. It is a wealthy city. Now we know it is as big as Homer describes it. It fits. Eric, we'll come back to that because I think that's a lovely area that will finish the episode in once we've covered more of the context of that Bronze Age world and these big players. The two major players at the time that the Trojan War supposedly happened in the late Bronze Age.

I will also mention you mentioned those various layers of Troy. We have another episode that we recorded with Brian Rose and we go through each and every So if people want to learn more about that, please do go and check out that episode called Troy. But, Eric, let's now introduce these two major powers in the Bronze Age world that almost in a kind of way, I guess, sandwiched Troy in the Hittites and the Mycenaeans. Eric, which one would you like to begin with? I thought you were going to ask me which one would I like to be, but which one would I like to begin with. Okay, fine. So, all right, well, let's start with the Mycenaeans since we've been with them.

It's a conglomeration of separate kingdoms. It's not like an empire or anything like that. Literally, when Agamemnon does call on all the other kings to bring ships to rescue Helen, that's the way it looks. It's this conglomeration. So we know there are Mycenaean palaces at Mycenae, at Pylos, at Tirans, at Orkomenos, and so on. There's a lot of them. It is a common culture. They are all, you know, using the same sorts of ceramics, which we usually call late Halatic. Late Halatic 3A, 3B, 3C, 14th century, 13th, 12th century. They're all using the same writing system for the palaces. It's mostly used for accounting. This many chariot wheels comes in, this much copper goes out, this much textiles are sent. And it turns out

linear B, which was deciphered by Michael Ventress in 1952, it's an early form of Greek. So we can actually now read it. But only the scribes in the palaces would have used it. And in fact, when the palaces collapse and go down, that art of writing linear B is lost. It goes away. and they're going to have to adopt the Phoenician alphabet by the 8th century to start writing again. So the Mycenians are this conglomeration of separate kingdoms, but unified by a similar culture, if you can put it that way. And they, Mycenae, for example, really starts flourishing in about 1700 BC. We've got the shaft graves from that time period, which our dear friend Heinrich Schliemann also excavated. and he, you mentioned Agamemnon, being murdered by his wife when he got back from the Trojan War.

Yeah, lesson learned, don't take a bath if you've been gone for 10 years. Your wife may come in and kill you because that's what happened there. So Sleiman, when he found the shaft graves at Miscay, he thought he had found the graves of Agamemnon, but in fact, it wasn't. It was the first dynasty at Miscay. So, again, it's an example of how Shleiman finds the right things for the wrong reasons or misidentifies or whatever. So the famous line he said there, I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon. No, it wasn't Agamemnon you were looking at.

It was some unnamed king from 400 years earlier. But, you know, it got the world's attention. So Agamemnon, Prime's Treasure, he's like the P.T. Barnum of archaeology, if you will he's a showman. All right. So we've got the Mycenaeans on the Greek mainland. They are going to start collapsing by about 1,200 BC. By 1050 BC, nobody's calling themselves a Mycenaean anymore. And they have to then rebuild from the ground up after the collapse. So that's the Mycinians on one side. The Hittites on the other, they are in what is now modern day Turkey, ancient Anatolia, a.k.a. Asia Minor, as you would call it, in the Roman period. The Hittites, they're capital cities at Hattusas,

which is way off to the east, but they conquer most of Anatolia. Their dates are just about the same as the Mycenaeans. They move to Hattusas in about 1700 BC, and they are gone by about 1,200 BC. In fact, they collapse almost more thoroughly than any of the other societies during the late Bronze Age collapse. And capital city of Hattusas is abandoned. In fact, there was a strife in the royal family. And so they were destined to go down anyway, I would say. But among their conquests on the western coast of Anatolia would have been, Troy. Now, they knew Troy, we think, again, nothing's 100% certain. We think it's a city they

called Willusa. And Willusa gets mentioned in their records quite a number of times from the 15th century BC onwards, right down to about 1,200. So it's in their records for 300 years. Now, what's interesting, Willusa, if you look at the Greek name, you know, It's Troy, but it's also Ilios, as I said. Ilios originally would have had a digamma in front of it, meaning it had a W. But the W. The W.W.S. So Troy was actually Wilios.

Willios. And Wilios and Wilus are, yeah, it could be a false friend, but it also could be the same place. So, Corfman, for example, the German archaeologist who did the remote sensing, he was quite convinced that Troy and Willisah were the same place. As am I, I think, again, Occam's Razor, simplest solutions, the most likely. There's no other place to put Willisah except at this area. But isn't there also that other interesting bit of evidence that comes back to what you're saying Paris's other name is too? Yes, Paris's other name is Alexander. Right. So we have two names for everything. It's almost like there are

two separate stories that have been interwoven, right? And again, it's the same thing we find of the Bible. There's two stories in Genesis that have been interwoven. So the parallels are kind of interesting. So anyway, yes, with Willousa and Alexander, all right, so in the Hittite texts, they talk about interactions with Willisah. Their first interactions are back in the 15th century. There's something called the Asawa Rebellion. There is a confederation of 22 cities and areas in northwest Anatolia that the Hittites call collectively Asawa. That's actually where the later name Asia comes from, comes directly from Osawa. Two of the cities that they list, because they give us the names, two of the cities are Willusia, which is an early form of Willusa, and Tarusa, which is a

is probably the Troad. So we probably got Troy and then the Troad, the area around Troy. And they are part of this Oswek coalition. The Hittites say that the king of Willusa at that time rebelled. And so the Hittite king with his army, it was Tuthaliyah, either the first or the second, or not sure which one, he went and put down the rebellion and took the king of Willissa away as a hostage, putting his son on the throne, not the Hittite king's son, but the Wulusian king's son, guy named Kukuni. And Kukuni promptly rebelled again the minute the Hittites left. So the Hittites came back, put him to death, and quelled the rebellion. Yeah. Okay, so we also have at Hattusas, the capital city, in 1990, a guy operating a bulldozer. He was a

was widening the road so the tourists could get in to see the capital city. He found a bronze sword. And on the bronze sword, which looks suspiciously like a type A sword that the Mycenaeans would have had in the shaft graves, it looks like that. There is some argument about whether it is or not, but it looks Meissen to me. There is an inscription on the blade written in Acadian, not in Hittite, but Acadian, the diplomatic lingua franca of the day, like French was in the time of Benjamin Franklin, and on the sword in Acadian, it says, I, Tudhalia, dedicate these swords to the storm god for thanks for putting down the Osawa Rebellion. Okay, so if we've got a Meissenian sword that's being used in the Osir Rebellion, which was at

Willousa, and there is obviously more than one sword, because in the inscription it says, I dedicate these swords. Do you have the Mycenaeans as arms dealers and selling weapons to the Trojans, or do you have Mycinians fighting at Troy? Now, hand in love with that, there's another entity mentioned by the Hittites in their text called Akiyawa. And the Ahiawa text start at the same time, and some of them are linked to Willusa. So people have been arguing since about 1916, more than a century, could Akiawa be the Achaeans? Could they be the Mycenaeans? I think the answer is yes, because otherwise you have this area that the Hittites knew about

that they talk about that we haven't found archaeologically. and on the other hand, we have a place we know archaeologically, the Mycinans, that wouldn't be mentioned by the Hittites, which makes no sense because we know archaeologically that they're trading back and forth to some extent. So I think we've got Troy in the Hittite text, and we've got Ahiyawa in the Hittite text, and those texts talk about battles on and off for 300 years. That battle with the Asua rebellion is just the first of what I call the Trojan Wars. There are three more, and one of them, which is dated to about 1,300 BC, maybe a little bit later, involves the Hittites going to Willusa and helping a king who had been deposed by an unnamed enemy, and they put him back on the throne

and sign a mutual defense treaty for him and his descendants. What was his name? Alexandus, we know. His name is Alexandus of Willusa in Hittite. Is that not Alexander of Willios? That is Paris of Troy. Again, it could be a false friend, and people have been arguing about this for decades. I think it's not a coincidence.

And I think that the Alexander and the Alexandus are the same. And we've got the story of a Trojan War from two different sides. We've got the Hittite version and we've got the Homeric version. So my question, when people say to me, was there a Trojan War? I said, yeah, but there were four of them. And, you know, well, was Homer really writing about A? Trojan War. Yeah, absolutely.

He was writing about a Trojan War, but which one? Right. So, and even the last one, there was a guy named Walmoo that is in charge at Troy, and the Hittites help him as well. So I usually, and I just told my students this in my ancient Near East class yesterday, I am like the ultimate skeptic. I want three sources of independent evidence before I'll believe anything. And for the Trojan War, I think we've got it. It's circumstantial, but you've got Homer and the Hittite records, right? And you've also got archaeology. So those three, to me, together, suggest that something happened. I won't say it happened just as Homer describes, because I don't think it did. But something happened. There is a nucleus, a kernel of truth, around which the epic.

was written. It's like King Arthur, right? Same thing. It's really great exploring that. And, I mean, just to pick up Alexandu, like Paris, although it's not evidence, you know, for the exact Paris that's mentioned in the Trojan War, what it does seem to be evidence for is that that is a royal name in Troy, in Waluza. So that's kind of the kernel of truth you can get just from that record. Exactly, exactly. And we have other things that we can pull out from the Hittite records, too. There is, for example, the name of a Mycenaean king that fights at Willoussa, including with the number of chariots that is there. We also have another one that talks about riding with the brother of the king in a chariot. And then there are other hints.

Like at one point, the Hittite king banishes his wife overseas to Akiyawa. So Akiyawa has to be overseas, which would work out well. if it's mainland Greece. But again, scholars have been arguing about this. Ahia has been suggested as roads, as somewhere else on the western coast of Anatolia, as Thrace, you know, on and on and on. But I think, again, by default, only the Mycenaean mainland really works for Ahiawa. So there's a lot to play with, and it's a lot more complicated than one might expect.

But again, that's what makes it fun. It's a jigsaw puzzle. You're missing half of the pieces. And you don't know what the picture looks like because you're missing the top of the box as well. But you've got enough of the jigsaw puzzle that you could try to figure it out and get close to an approximation as to what happened. But the only way we're ever going to find out what actually happened is to invent a time machine and go back, right, which I'm waiting for. I'll be the first in there. Eric, it's so interesting. I mean, just to recap, so evidence in the archaeological record that

there was clearly contact between the Hittites and the Mycenaeans trade. And what it seems like at Raluza, there's Mycenaans going across the Egean Sea and fighting in what is today, kind of North West Antoinette, Western Antiolea, great. The next thing I'd like to ask you about then is the kind of the makeup of the Mycenaean forces. Of course, in the Trojan War, you get this idea of they all come together all of these different kings and they journey across the sea. But you mentioned earlier, this classic image we have of the Mycenaeans is that, you know, Greece is divided up between many different kings ruling their own places. What will be Sparta, Pylos, Mycenae, Athens and so on. But the Hittites mention a kingdom of Ahiawa. And I think they mentioned a

great king as well. Yes. Yes. So, that's a problem. Is there potentially which would align with the Trojan War text, actually, those Mocenean kingdoms aren't as independent as people might have thought, and was there actually an overlord king, one like Agamemnon, who was kind of chief of the king? The king of kings. Yes, it's possible. It is possible.

I cannot rule that out. And in fact, it's been suggested by a couple of scholars that that might have been the case. But we can't prove it one way or the other. If it is, I would say, the Hittites misunderstood to a certain degree. If there were a king of kings, and let's say Mycenae were at the forefront, then the Hittites would have, you know, nailed it. Yes, there is one guy that we really should be corresponding with that the other's answer to. You could say that. But if it's more of a conglomeration, a confederation, then the Hittites didn't

understand that they had to deal with a corporation, if you will. One analogy I made in one of the articles or books I wrote was to the Dealian League, the later Greek confederacy that they formed in the aftermath of the Persian invasions. And it could be that the Misenians were like a Bronze Age Delian League, where you had everybody was equal and everybody had a vote. But then again, you could have had an Agamemnon. If, though, you had one primary kingdom, then the question. is which one is it. Is it my sinai? Maybe, maybe not. That just happens to be one of the first that we excavated, again, courtesy of Sleiman. It could be tyrants. It could be Pylos. It could be Thebes, which is, the Bronze Age, is underneath the modern city at Thebes. But that has been

suggested as the dominant power, in part, because we have yet to excavate it, you can suggest whatever you want. So the upside is we don't actually know what it was. At the very least, it's a conglomeration. It's a confederation. At the very most, it's a unified conglomeration with one leader. But we haven't been able to figure that out, in part because the writing is just the accounting text from the palaces. We don't have any epics. We don't have anything that would be history. Not like the Hittites do. The Hittites, we've got that for them. We know all about them.

We know there's a major king. We can tell you his name. We can tell you when he lived. We can't do that for the Misenians. We don't actually have the names really of any Misenian kings that we know of. I mean, we've got what Homer says, but we don't have any elsewhere. So it's kind of interesting what we do and don't have from the ancient world. And the Misenians, to a certain degree, even though we know a heck of a lot about them,

there are still huge gaps in our knowledge, which we're not going to fill until we find an archive or something, which I'm not sure we ever will. So getting more of a sense of whether those rulers of those Misenaian cities could have banded together to go raiding in Anatolia or had a bit of a warrior king ethos like Achilles of Agamemnon and Manilaes, that's not clear as of yet from what we have. No, and I'm not sure it ever will be. We do have mentions elsewhere. The Egyptians mention an area called Tanaya, which I think is mainland Greece.

And Amunhotep III, for example, in the middle of the 14th century, has a list of places in the Aegean on one of a statue basis. And he actually, in that list, Mycenae, Knoissos, and so on. So the Egyptians obviously know about them, and we've got Minoans and Mycenaeans pictured on the walls in the nobles tombs, bringing things to the Pharaoh. So, you know, we're dancing around it, but the Mycenaeans and the Minoans, for that matter, themselves, do not write epics, histories, or anything like that. So we are missing all of those records, unfortunately. So the evidence that we do have then of fighting in and around Wilusa,

believed to be Troy, Eric, Meissenans, Hittites and so on. What do we actually, of course, in the Trojan War, it's pictured as a 10-year siege and fighting outside the walls and so on. But what do we actually know about the nature of warfare at that time? What should we be imagining? Well, I think that's the primary word. We should be imagining because we have to figure it out. But we also, again, have to figure out how much we can use Homer and how much we need to ignore him. Because what we've got, the Trojan War is going to be late Bronze Age. We are told by Homer that the major warriors get in a chariot. They're driven up to the front lines or to the walls of Troy.

They then dismount from the chariot and fight. They're battle taxis, aren't they? Is that the portrayal? Exactly, exactly. They are the ubers of the Bronze Age. Exactly. Yeah, they get off the chariot and they fight hand-to-hand combat. That's what Homer says.

In reality, we know from things like the Battle of Kadesh, which has fought in 1279 or 1274 BC, between the Egyptians and the Hittites in what is now Syria, we know they are using chariots. as a mobile fighting force, right? They're tanks, and there's like 800 chariots in that battle. And trust me, they're not dismounting. They are fighting from the chariots. So what Homer is describing seems to be how chariots and chariot warfare function in his day, in the Iron Age.

But we know from the Egyptians and the Hittites that they're actually fighting completely differently. We also know, and this is from things like the Amarna Letters, which is an archive in Egypt from about 1350 BC, that a large contingent of infantry or archers or anything would be a dozen men, right? A hundred would be huge. So you're not talking lots and lots and lots of people, which is why it's interesting. Again, if you look at Homer and the catalog of ships, and you say, okay, there's either a thousand or somewhere over 1,100 ships. Each ship holds 50 men, and let's just say for argument's sake, we'll go with the face that launched 1,000 ships, because it's easier to multiply 50 and 1,000, right?

That would be 50,000 warriors that go over to Troy, if my maths are correct. That would be the largest army the world's ever seen at that time. there's no way there's that many. So, you know, I would cut a zero off. You know, 500 men, okay. You know, even 50? Okay. And in fact, we are told in the epic cycle that there was an earlier attack on Troy by somebody by the name of Heracles. Uh-huh. Okay. And he attacked Troy in the time of Priam's grandfather, a guy named Leomidon, which would have been somewhere about the 15th century. And it is said, he attacked with six ships. At 50 men on a ship, that would have been 300 men.

That's believable, right? We see 300 all the time in antiquity. Alexander kept going off doing things with 300 men. It's the largest force any one guy can command by themselves, three contingents of 100 each. So, you know, Heracles attacking Troy with 300 men, that's believable. 50,000 under Agamemnon, not so believable. So this is what I mean we have to, I hate to use the word, we have to interrogate Homer and try to figure out what is possible. But we do know what warfare is like in the Bronze Age elsewhere.

And if we can extrapolate and say it was probably that way in the region of Troy as well, then we can go from there. And with Troy having its strong walls, of course, the siege supposedly takes 10 years. But if you've actually got a much smaller force, could there still have been sieges? Is the archaeological evidence there of like a complete destruction of Troy at times? during this period that, you know, a smaller force from overseas, Meissenians could have still been able to take that city, even with such smaller numbers, maybe not over 10 years, but do we know of sieges that then ended in great destructions like that?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I mean, there are nine cities at Troy, and there's evidence that, you know, some of them are destroyed, right? In particular, this Troy 6 and Troy 7, Troy 6, I should say, is split into phases. There's 6A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H. And it really covers the time period from about 1700 down to 1,400 or 1,300 BC. And several of those evidence, partial destructions. And then the last one, Troy 6H, total destruction. But it looks like it's an earthquake rather than humans. There are blocks tossed about, which could have been caused by a battering ram, but is much more likely to be an earthquake. And there's one wall in particular that I show a picture of that's just tilting over, you know, and it's not supposed to do that.

So Troy 6H is pretty much completely destroyed, but probably by an earthquake. The succeeding city, Troy 7. 7A, because there's A and B, but 7A is basically the reoccupation of the city destroyed by an earthquake. And there you can see it looks like a city under siege. There are big storage jars sunk into the ground and then other storage jars above. We see something similar at Canalsas, but here it looks like it's supporting a population, that has suddenly swelled to two times, three times normal. And the beautiful, big buildings of six that Homer describes now have party walls.

And where you had one family, you probably now have three or four families living. It was suggested that it was a siege. Others are now suggesting it was the survivors of the earthquake. and they're trying to rebuild. So either way, 7A, 6I is the reoccupation. What's important is it is also destroyed in the end, and it's definitely destroyed by humans. There are arrowheads in the walls of Greek, Misenian manufacture. There are unburied bodies in the streets.

Montfred Corfman found the body of a body of a... a 17-year-old girl, just kind of lying in the street there. And the lower city definitely shows evidence. In fact, there's one house in the lower city. You can see it's destroyed by an earthquake in 6H and then rebuilt in 7A and destroyed by humans. So you've got earthquake destruction and human destruction. And those date to about the right time period. Either one of them could have been Homer's Trojan War. So when they were excavating under Corfman, the debate was, which is Homer's Troy? Is it six or seven? Is it the one destroyed by an earthquake? Or is it the one destroyed by humans? and honestly, either one would work for Homer's description.

And as for a siege, yeah, it could have lasted 10 years. But some scholars, I think Mary Strauss included, have suggested that there was a saying in the ancient world in nine years and then a tenth, meaning a very long time. And it simply could be that it really wasn't 10 years. But you also, in the epic cycle, have a failed attack. on Troy earlier, where they land on the coast and they sack a city thinking it's Troy. It's not. It's a place called tooth rania. And they basically go, oops, sorry, we thought you were Troy, are bad, and they leave again, and they go back. And it doesn't say how much time elapses between that failed raid and the actual raid on Troy. So I'm not so sure it lasted 10 years or had to last

10 years. But it is what it was worth. It's a story. It's a great story. And I'm guessing, Eric, would we have any idea what the motive would be for that kind of destructive end that you have from that time period? It's near the Bronze Age collapse. You get the word C-Peeples coming in. If there's no evidence for Helen of Troy going there and being the reason, could it be something to do with the C-Peeples or else something else? It could. It could, or it could be much more mundane. Right. To begin with, if Helen even existed. And if the war really were being fought over her, she was just an excuse. They were fighting.

And this is where there's a line in the movie Troy from 2004 with Brad Pitt. There is a line that rings true. Agamemnon says, this is a war being fought. Like all other wars, it's for land. It's for possessions. It's for gold. it's not for the love of a woman. That's an excuse. So yes, the Mycenaeans want Troy because it controls access to the Black Sea. And they get to levy taxes on people going in and out. It's like

controlling the Straits of Hormuz and oil. You know, some things... Very timely, yes. Yeah, some things never change. So Helen would have been an excuse, I think. They were going to fight this anyway. And I mentioned earlier, Troy is on the periphery of the Mycenaean area. The western coast of Anatolia is the periphery of the Mycinans, but it's also the periphery of the Hittites. And so Troy is what we call a contested periphery. It's caught in the middle, right? It's, you know, collateral damage in here. And that's why I suggested that the war might actually be between the Hittites and the Misenians, and Helen's got nothing to do with it, except that she's a nice foil plot for Homer. And that's why I'm not sure we can really believe what he says. And

the same goes for the Trojan horse. You know, was there really a Trojan horse? Eric, the Trojan horse, what do you think? Ah, yes and no. What I think, okay, first and foremost, it is unlikely there actually was a Trojan horse. And even if there were, we'll never find it. There was an April Fool's story that circulated a couple years ago saying they had found part of the Trojan horse. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. So, all right, if there were something like that, it could have been some sort of siege engine.

It could have been a battering ram. It could have been a tower that was pushed up. And we know later in the Iron Age, the Neo-Assyrians use those. You have those beautiful reliefs from Nineveh, isn't it? Yes, of the capture of Lakhish. Yes, exactly. Right. And they would have been doing that at about this time, actually, maybe a little bit earlier.

So, yes, so the Trojan horse could be a, what would it be, a metaphor, a simile, something like that, standing for a siege engine. It could have even, I don't think it was a catapult, but maybe a tower would be the best. That's a possibility. The other possibility is that it is the earthquake, that the Trojan horse and the earthquake are one and the same. That was suggested in the 1950s by a German scholar named Shackermeyer, and he said, Okay, if there were an earthquake, and we do see it, in Troy's. there is an earthquake. He said, who is the god of earthquakes? Who is the Greek god of earthquakes? He's also the god of horses. That would be Poseidon. Exactly. And just like the crashing of the waves is

Poseidon's horse's hooves, so too the sound that an earthquake makes, that you can hear when there's an earthquake. They said that was horse's hooves by Poseidon. So Shackermeyer said, very simply, earthquake equals Poseidon, Poseidon equals horses. Bingo, the Trojan horse is the earthquake, and it's an epic poet's imagination. I mean, imagine saying, oh, and there was a big siege for 10 years, and so-and-so killed so-and-so, and so-and-so, and then there's an earthquake, and they take advantage and run through the walls. That's not a real epic ending to an epic poem, but if you have the Trojan horse and you talk about how to build it. And, you know, if you want to build a Trojan horse, it's actually pretty easy.

You take one of the Misenian ships and you flip it over and the whole becomes the body. And then you just add legs and a tail and a head. I mean, you could make a Trojan horse pretty easily if you want to. But I think, well, first of all, A, I think it never existed. And B, if it did exist, it's most likely a metaphor for the earthquake. and if it's not that, then it would be some sort of siege engine, but even that would be out of context, because that would be something Iron Age

that Homer is putting back into the Bronze Age because near as I can recall, we don't have any evidence for such siege engines back in the Bronze Sades. They are an Iron Age invention. So Trojan Horse, good luck finding it. You're not going to find it. Eric, this has been absolutely great. It just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show.

Oh, my pleasure. I can talk about this with hours, for hours with you. But some other time. Another time. Another time. Yes. Well, there you go. There was fan favorite, Dr. Eric Klein, returning to the show to explain the archaeology

behind Troy and the Trojan War of the late Bronze Age. I hope you enjoyed the episode just as much as we. We did recording it. Thank you so much for listening. If you want more regarding Troy or also regarding Eric Klein, well, first off regarding Troy, we did record an episode a few years back with Dr. Brian Rose, where we really do delve into the archaeology of Troy itself, the archaeological site of Troy. We go through it layer by layer. It's really, really interesting. We'll put a link to that one in the show notes. And we will also put a link to our first ever interview we did with Eric, which is still one of our most popular of all time, that was an episode

all about the Bronze Age collapse. So if you want to listen to either of those episodes, we'll put links to them in The Showlands. Thank you once again for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Lastly, don't forget, You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com slash subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.