The hero of Troy

A poem, a mound in Turkey, and the question of what a legend actually preserves

A For most of the period during which educated Europeans read Homer, nobody supposed that the city he described had existed. The poems were literature: a narrative of divine interference and heroic temperament, composed centuries after the events it purported to describe, and set in a place understood in roughly the way one understands the setting of a legend. The idea that a merchant with no archaeological training might identify the site by reading the text as a map was regarded, reasonably enough, as eccentric. Nothing in the intellectual climate of the time encouraged it, and the few scholars who had proposed candidate locations had done so without much expectation of being tested.

B That is nevertheless approximately what happened. Excavations begun in the 1870s at a mound in north-western Turkey, at a location others had already suggested, uncovered fortifications, and beneath them further fortifications, and beneath those more again. The mound proved to contain the remains of at least nine successive settlements, each built on the levelled rubble of its predecessor across some three thousand years. The excavator, convinced he had found the city of the poem, drove a trench through the middle of the mound to reach the earliest layers, and in doing so destroyed a great deal of what lay between — including, as later work established, the levels most likely to correspond to the period he was seeking.

C The identification of which layer is which has occupied specialists ever since. The settlement labelled Troy II, whose burnt remains yielded the celebrated hoard of gold, was found to date from more than a thousand years before any plausible date for the war, which disposed of the excavator's own conclusion. Attention moved to two later candidates: one a substantial and prosperous city whose walls show damage that may indicate an earthquake, the other a poorer and evidently crowded successor that was destroyed by fire and where weapons and unburied bodies have been recovered. Neither identification is secure, and both have distinguished advocates. The difficulty is that the two layers are separated by only a few decades, that the dating methods available carry uncertainties of the same order, and that a city rebuilt quickly after a disaster leaves a confused record of both.

D The most substantial revision came from excavations resumed in the 1980s, which used geophysical survey rather than the spade to look beyond the citadel. They detected a defensive ditch enclosing a lower town far larger than the fortified summit, suggesting a settlement of perhaps several thousand inhabitants rather than the few hundred a citadel alone implies. If the reading is right, the place was a substantial city controlling a strategically valuable strait, which is precisely the kind of prize over which bronze-age states fought. The interpretation was disputed with unusual acrimony — a public exchange between the excavator and a historian at a neighbouring university, conducted partly in the newspapers — and the dispute has still not entirely subsided. What was at stake was not merely the size of the settlement but whether it had been important enough to be worth attacking.

E Documentary evidence has come from an unexpected direction. Hittite archives, recovered from a capital hundreds of kilometres inland and unconnected with Greek tradition, refer to a vassal state in the region under a name that corresponds closely to one of the two names Homer uses for the city, and to a troublesome foreign power whose name resembles the term the poems use for the Greeks. The archives record diplomatic friction and at least one armed intervention. They do not describe a ten-year siege, a wooden horse or a stolen queen, but they establish that the place, the neighbours and the hostility were real. Their value lies precisely in their indifference: a scribe recording a border difficulty for an inland court had no interest in Greek heroic tradition and no reason to shape his account to fit it.

F What this amounts to is contested precisely because the question is usually asked in the wrong form. Whether the war happened as described is not a question the evidence can answer, and probably never will be: an oral tradition transmitted for four or five centuries before being written down does not preserve events, it preserves a shape into which events, ballads, other wars and pure invention have all been folded. The poems are not a chronicle with embellishments to be stripped away. Removing the gods and the improbable feats does not leave a residue of history; it leaves a shorter poem. This is the point at which enthusiasts for the historical reading and their opponents most often talk past one another.

G The more useful question is what the poems preserve, and here the answer is more interesting than a simple verdict. Certain details in them — a boar's-tusk helmet, a particular kind of shield, a system of land tenure — belong demonstrably to the bronze age and had disappeared entirely by the time the poems were written, which means they were carried through centuries of oral transmission by singers who cannot have known what they were describing. A tradition that transmits obsolete equipment accurately for four hundred years is not a reliable record of a war. But it is not fiction either, and the mound in Turkey is exactly what one would expect to find beneath such a tradition: a real city, destroyed more than once, in the right place, at approximately the right time, remembered by people who had forgotten almost everything about it except that it mattered.