Collection Valérie FARANTON

KUBABA
et Michel MAZOYER (éds.)
Série
Antiquité
Université
de Paris 1 HOMÈRE ET L’ANATOLIE 2
Panthéon
Sorbonne
 Collection KUBABA
Série Antiquité

Valérie FARANTON et Michel MAZOYER (éds.)

HOMÈRE ET L’ANATOLIE 2

Association KUBABA, Université de Paris I,

Panthéon – Sorbonne,
12 Place du Panthéon 75231 Paris CEDEX 05
L’Harmattan, 5 -7 rue de l’Ecole Polytechnique
75005 Paris
 HOMER AND ARCHAEOLOGY:
PERSPECTIVES FROM THE EAST AEGEAN -
WEST ANATOLIAN INTERFACE

Catalin Pavel
Kennesaw State University

This article concerns the contribution Anatolian

archaeology can make to Homeric studies. It consists of
three parts. The first part presents the prerequisites for
such a discussion, namely Troy’s identification with
Hisarlık (I.1), the date and historicity of Homer (I.2), and
the relationship between Homer and Aegean archaeology
(1.3), and between Homer and Near Eastern archaeology
(1.4). It concludes with a description of the Anatolian
influences on Troy (I.5). The second part addresses the
archaeology of Homer’s Troy by investigating Hittite
archaeology and written sources (II.1), the discoveries on
the Anatolian sites on the Interface and farther East (II.2),
the destruction layers in Troy itself (II.3), as well as a
number of methodological problems (II.4). The third part
of the article proposes some major questions that the
archaeology of Homeric landscapes should solve (III.1)
and deals with types of future discoveries that might be the
key for a better understanding of Homer’s world (III.2).

I. The necessity of a complementary Anatolian

approach.

I.1. Troy’s location. Anatolian archaeology can be

brought to bear on Homeric scholarship primarily because
Troy can now be safely identified with the ruins at

9
Hisarlık, on the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles, in the
Turkish province of Çanakkale. During the Late Bronze
Age, this was a major settlement at the northern extremity
of a region best defined as the East Aegean - West
Anatolian interface, between the Mycenaean islands of the
central Aegean and the Anatolian hinterland and whose
southern end would have been Rhodes (Mountjoy 1998,
33, 38). The arguments for locating Troy here are as
follows. First, from Homer’s poems it has always been
clear that Troy (Ilios/Ilion) was situated very close to the
Achaean camp on the Dardanelles1. Second, since
Classical times the settlement at Hisarlık has been
identified by inscriptions2and coins3 as Ilion. Third,
excavations since Schliemann’s first campaigns in the
1870s until this day have unearthed at Bronze Age
Hisarlık a citadel with remarkable architecture and finds as
well as a 30ha fortified lower city4. Fourth, a number of
surveys across the Troad have established that the largest
site in the Troad is undoubtedly Hisarlık5. Fifth, Hittite
sources of the late 15th to the late 13th c. speak of
conflicts between Mycenaeans and Hittites (or their
vassals) in the Interface, including over “Wilusa” in the
region later named the Troad6.
While controversies over details subside, equations of
Troy with places outside the Troad often pertain to fringe
archaeology (Troy in Finland, Troy as Atlantis7) Homer as
an Assyrian scribe in Cilicia etc.), and in any case no
better candidate than Hisarlık has been proposed to date.

1
recent review in HERTEL, 2011, p. 46-48.
2
FRISCH, 1975.
3
MANNSPERGER, 2006.
4
DÖRPFELD 1902, BLEGEN, CASKEY and RAWSON 1953, BLEGEN ET
AL. 1958, Studia Troica volumes, of which 19 have been published
since 1991 and the final publication of Korfmann’s excavations
forthcoming, summary e.g. in EASTON ET AL. 2002, KORFMANN 2006
5
ASLAN ET AL., 2003
6
STARKE; 1997 and infra¸ II.1
7
recently SCHROTT, 2008

10
None of the five indications presented above is in itself
decisive, but such convergence of independent evidence,
in the less-than-ideal world of archaeology, makes for an
unusually solid hypothesis. Theoretically, it is not
impossible that Troy might be one day identified with
some other settlements in Anatolia or the Aegean, or that
Troy may have been after all just a figment of a poet’s
imagination, but in either case, Anatolian archaeology
would still be able to contribute to a more thorough
understanding of the world (in fact, worlds) from which
the Homeric poems draw their sap.

I. 2 Homer’s date and historicity. Homer probably

composed the Iliad in the last quarter of the 8th c., with the
events described there supposedly placed around the final
decades of the Mycenaean civilization8. Many scholars
nuance or even negate this theory, such as Finley9 who
sees the Iliad against the background of the
Protogeometric, or West10 who situates Homer around the
middle of the 7th c.11, but engaging with their arguments is
far beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that
such positions are not as conflicting as they may appear to
be. Archaeology shows that both the Bronze Age and the
Iron Age make substantial contributions to Homer’s
universe, and that the material culture of the Iliad and the
Odyssey conflates objects typical for the times between
roughly 1600 and 700, predominantly between the 12th to
8th c. That material culture and facts of civilization
described in Homer appear to cluster towards the
beginning and the end of this time span is a phenomenon
noted by Snodgrass12 and Sherratt13, but often researchers’

8
MORRIS, 1986 ; JANKO, 1992 ; LATACZ, 2004 ; REECE, 2005 ;
general considerations in BRYCE, 2008.
9
FINLEY, 1978.
10
WEST, 1995.
11
cf. MORRIS, 1986, for whom nothing in Homer actually predates the
8th c
12
SNODGRASS, 1974.

11
options are much more polarized, e.g. Latacz14, for whom
the Iliad can only reflect Mycenaean circumstances, and
Dickinson15, for whom burial customs, dress, weapons,
tripods etc. in the Iliad all must belong to the Dark Age,
while for each of these items some other scholars can be
named who believe that they can be satisfactorily
explained solely on the basis of Mycenaean evidence. But
even if assigning this artificial world described by
Homer’s Kunstsprache exclusively to a certain period is
occasionally attempted, for a majority of researchers this
is a composite epic landscape reflecting not only some
memory of a Mycenaean past as well as Dark Age and
early Archaic realities of the Aegean and the Anatolian
coast, but also complex Near Eastern influences. Sorting
out what comes from where is immensely complicated by
the mechanisms of epic distancing by which the poet
sketches an ideal heroic society in the power field of the
emerging ideology of the urban aristocracy and the
Panhellenic conscience16. This, to say nothing of the
nebulous history of the transmission, writing down, and
later editing and interpolation.
Just as no one ever spoke the language of the Iliad, no
real Homeric society, circumscribed chronologically and
geographically, ever exhibited the metal usages from
Homer (bronze for weapons, iron for agricultural and
industrial tools) or a funeral just like Patroclus’17. A
radical consequence of this awareness were the often
quoted statements – almost Schliemannesque in their
passion – that the Iliad is “no history book”18, indeed “no
guide at all” for understanding the Mycenaean past (M.I.
Finley’s warning, with recent adhesion from Bennet19).

13
SHERRATT, 2005.
14
LATACZ, 2004, p. 211.
15
DICKINSON, 1986.
16
SNODGRASS, 1974 ; PETRE, 1983.
17
SNODGRASS, 1974, 122-123 ; MORRIS, 1997, 539.
18
HAMPL, 1962 ; followed by KOLB, 2010, but cf. EDER, 2004, p.105
19
BENNET, 1997.

12
This is tantamount to an a priori denial of the possibility
that we may ever know what the “irresponsible humors”
of the poet have done to the actual historical facts which
inspired him20. But let us not throw out the baby with the
bath water. The “kein Geschichtsbuch” position can be
taken to mean that the events in the Iliad did not happen as
described in reality, but, quite on the contrary, are
distorted by rhetorical and ideological devices, and
therefore one should completely discard Homer as a
document that can be used for historical reconstructions.
By this criterion, one would have to agree that most
ancient (and later) historiography is also unusable. Such a
position sometimes comes close to an excuse for evading
the responsibility of engaging with the infinite intricacies
of archaeological evidence relevant to the Homeric poems.
For instance, Sherratt’s21 useful exposé of the limits of
“Homeric” archaeology is concluded by an analysis of the
relevance of contemporary Belfast street murals for the
understanding of the Iliad. Now the archaeology of the
time where Homer places his description, kept in check by
the archaeology of the time when he makes that
description, can surely help us at least as much as the
murals in Belfast to place the Iliad in a larger context. And
in fact that is archaeology’s claim – not to find the truth
about the Trojan war, but to project the Iliad against a
richer, more sharply defined background.
Individual archaeologists may have varying degrees of
confidence in the historicity of Homer, ranging from no
confidence whatsoever22 to the cautious belief that there
must be a factual basis of some kind for Homer’s poetic
manipulations23, to Carl Blegen’s absolute confidence,
after his excavations in Troy 1932-38, that “there really
was an actual historical Trojan War” (1963, 20). As to the

20
CARPENTER, 1946, p. 60.
21
SHERRATT, 2005.
22
SHERRATT, 2005.
23
VERMEULE, 1986.

13
director of the Troy excavations for the largest number of
campaigns, 1988-2004, Manfred Korfmann, he somewhat
provocatively asserted that “the onus to defend positions
should now be on those who believe there is absolutely no
historical association between what happened at Late
Bronze Age Troy and the events in the Iliad”24. It must be
borne in mind that the public pressure to take a firm stand,
one way or the other, on the problem of the Trojan war,
together with vulnerability to endless polemics are some
of the nuisances that come nolens volens with the
privilege of excavating at Troy25.

I.3. Aegean archaeology and Homer. Aegean

archaeology has offered so many comparanda for Homeric
passages, some revelatory, some just intriguing, that it is
very tempting to somehow correlate them with
historical/philological studies26. Examples spring to mind
easily. Can the frescoes from Thera, even despite the lack
of equivalents in Mycenaean palatial art, be made to
testify to lost heroic poetry at this very early stage27? Is
not the cremation of the warrior on Toumba the best
historical approximation we can get of Patroclus’ funeral?
Indeed, this heroon from Lefkandi in Euboia, magnificent
in a time perhaps undeservedly called the Dark Age28,
seems to strengthen the idea that Homer’s most vivid
memories are from those centuries29.
24
KORFMANN, 2004, p. 41 and the same position before the start of his
own excavations, 1986, 28 ; along the same lines LATACZ, 2004, p.
150.
25
FINLEY, 1964 vs. BLEGEN, 1963; JABLONKA AND ROSE, 2004 vs. F.
Kolb, cf. KOLB’s, 2010 renewal of attacks against Korfmann’s work;
LATACZ, 2010, p. 156-159 on Schrott’s Kilikien-These.
26
review of recent developments in WIENER, 2007.
27
MORRIS, 1989 ; BENNETT, 1997, p. 527.
28
POPHAM, CALLIGAS AND SACKETT, 1993 ; ANTONACCIO, 1995.
29
FINLEY, 1978 ; PETRE, 1983 ; EDER, 2004, p. 118, DICKINSON,
1986, p. 24-25, with WIENER’s, 2007, p. 26-29 comments on the
apparent simultaneity of the great Toumba burial and the burning of
Troy VIIb3, v. infra).

14
 In her review of archaeological evidence for Homer,
Lorimer30 wrote about the complete disappearance of the
boar’s tusk helmet, (Od. X, 260-5) the most iconic element
of BA material culture from Homer, not seen, in her view,
by anyone during the four centuries preceding Homer’s
description, and she speculated about the implications this
had on the potential of traditional poetry to accurately
transmit information. But archaeology shows that such
helmets could live on into the Subminoan on Crete and
even, probably as heirlooms, into the Protogeometric; a
BA plaque with a boar’s tusk helmet was visible on Delos
as late as the 8th c.31. Archaeology can no doubt also make
things more complicated than they are in Homer: silver
studded swords are placed by archaeological evidence
alone either before the end of LHIIIA132, or as late as the
finds in Salamis in Cyprus around 70033. Similar
controversy surrounds the chariot technique or body
shields. But even contradictory archaeological evidence
helps to bring the debate forward.

I.4. Near Eastern archaeology and Homer. Near Eastern

archaeology, following in the footsteps of the early
realization of Homer’s familiarity with Oriental literature,
started catching up with Aegean archaeology, to such an
extent indeed that to some it may even seem easier now to
identify the foreign sources of Homeric poetry, than what
is actually Greek in it34. When analyzing the imagery of
Achilles’ shield, encircled by the stream of the Ocean, one
turns to Phoenician silver plates with multilayered
decoration surrounded by snakes35. To find analogies for
the palace of Alkinoos, one turns to Assyrian

30
LORIMER, 1950, p. 453.
31
COLDSTREAM, 2003, p. 215.
32
BENZI, 2002, p. 345 with n.11.
33
BURKERT, 2011, p. 419.
34
MORRIS, 1997, p. 623.
35
FITTSCHEN, 1973, pl. VIII b, cf. MARKOE, 1985.

15
architecture36, and Agamemnon’s Gorgon shield (Il.
11.36) is best paralleled by the Greek shields found in
Carchemish37. One understands why Ulysses is shooting
“through” axes when one sees Ramesses’ II seals from
Beth Shean38, and one peruses, with the Trojan horse in
mind, the reliefs of Tiglath-Pileser and Sennacherib
showing siege engines39. If there is no question that Near
Eastern archaeology can contribute to the study of Homer,
it is still the case that, within it, Anatolian archaeology is
lagging behind. Long preoccupied with the Classical ruins
of Ephesus, Miletus and Pergamon, the archaeology of
what is today Western Turkey opened up tremendously in
the past half a century towards local cultures, such as
Lydian, Phrygian, or Carian, a movement that can be
probably traced back to Blegen’s excavations in Troy in
the thirties. It would of course be difficult to imagine an
archaeological study of Homer doing without the territory
where Troy itself once stood, and researchers have indeed
now gone so far as to suggest that the history of the Trojan
war is not the province of Homer studies, but of Anatolian
archaeology instead40.

I.5. Anatolian archaeology and Homer. The explanation

of why Anatolian archaeology is the last Near Eastern
archaeology to have been accepted among Homeric
sciences has to do with both political history and with the
circumstances of archaeology’s development as a
discipline41. In any case its place is well deserved, since
we now know that Troy is strongly culturally influenced
by Anatolia42. Thus, the fortified citadel of LBA Troy and

36
COOK, 2004.
37
BURKERT, 2011, p. 415.
38
MORRIS, 1997, p. 622.
39
ANDERSON, 1970.
40
CARTER AND MORRIS, 1995, p. 2.
41
Pavel, 2011b.
42
Review of evidence in KORFMANN, 1995 and 1998, LATACZ, 2004,
p. 38-40 and BECKS, 2006, JABLONKA, 2011a, p. 724-728, with the

16
the defensive ditch surrounding a lower city testify to an
Anatolian planning scheme common in the 2nd
millennium (Kültepe and especially Alișar Hüyük, for the
fortifications43 ; Boğazköy, and later Carchemish for
defensive ditches44 ; for such a ditch found in 2007 by
magnetic prospection at Gordion45, who also indicates
examples from Syria and Palestine). In Anatolia sloping
fortification walls are already paralleled for Troy I in
Limantepe46 and rectangular towers are also widespread47.
By contrast, the Mycenaeans used no defensive ditches,
their mainland palaces had no mudbrick superstructure
and their fortifications did not use the battered face
technique48. Mycenaean lower cities are rather rare (e.g.
Pylos or Tiryns), and generally not fortified (geophysical
survey has however proven in the past decade Mycenae
itself to be an exception). In the Orient in any case a
fortified lower city is almost a sine qua non. The “saw-
tooth” masonry technique has been claimed both for
Anatolia (Alișar Hüyük49) and for the Mycenaeans50, with
Klinkott51 arguing that “undulating” walls are a local
tradition. The numerous stelae and/or cup marks found
next to all the gates in Troy clearly reflect Hittite/Central
Anatolian, and Syrian, beliefs52. The cremations from
Troy’s and Beșik Tepe’s cemeteries, the house-like tombs,
the pithoi as funerary urns are Anatolian53. Also single

latter two balancing Anatolian with the (limited) Aegean imports and
architectural influences.
43
KORFMANN, 1995, p. 180.
44
NAUMANN, 1971.
45
ROSE, 2012, p. 10.
46
JABLONKA, 2011a, p. 725.
47
NAUMANN, 1971.
48
IAKOVIDES, 1977.
49
KORFMANN, 1995, p. 180.
50
JABLONKA, 2011a, p. 726
51
KLINKOTT, 2002.
52
KORFMANN, 1998, p. 373-375 ; BECKS, RIGTER AND HNILA, 2006
53
BASEDOW, 2000 ; in Greece they are very rare before LHIIIC,
BENZI, 2002, p. 371.

17
finds like the Oriental god (worshipper?) statuette54 and
the Hittite seal55 show how anchored Troy is in the
Anatolian world. The pottery found in Troy is in fact
mostly Anatolian. Only some 1% is Mycenaean, speaking
for both trade (imports), and acculturation (imitation of
Mycenaean forms and decoration by local potters)56.
Schliemann named the Aegean grey ware he had found in
Orchomenus Grey Minyan Ware, and when Blegen and
his team, with their Helladic bias, found something similar
dominating Troy VI/VII assemblages they were quick in
“recognizing” the Minyan Ware57. But Grey Minyan and
its counterpart in Troy, now known as Anatolian Grey
Ware, actually “developed independently at the end of the
third millennium, with a completely different set of
shapes, and during MHII and III these two traditions met
on the West Anatolian coast and the shapes mixed”58.
It is hardly necessary to emphasize that, given its
position on the Dardanelles, the trade in which it was
engaged, its Aegean influence, and its history of contacts
and colonization (in the Iron Age by people from the
Balkans) one cannot use exclusively Anatolian
archaeology to understand Troy. Jablonka59 has warned
that “to construct Anatolian, Aegean or Thracian
archaeologies corresponding to present-day political
boundaries between Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria is
meaningless.” It appears in fact that the blurred
relationship of the Iliad with historical realities can only
come into sharp focus at the convergence point of Aegean,
Anatolian and Near Eastern scholarly lenses. LBA/IA
Greece could even be described as a logical extension of
the Near East, given its permanent contacts with Egypt,

54
KORFMANN, 1998, p.373 ; MAZOYER, 2008b
55
HAWKINS AND EASTON, 1996.
56
PAVUK, 2005.
57
ALLEN, 1994, p. 39.
58
PAVUK, 2005, p. 270.
59
JABLONKA, 2011a, p. 727.

18
Levant and Anatolia60, while the Aegean-Anatolian
interface blends influences from both regions with local
traditions.

II. The archaeology of Homeric Troy

II. 1. Hittite sources and Hittite archaeology. The

Hittites are absent from the Homeric poems, unless
remembered as the Trojan allies Keteioi/Cheteioi61 or as
the Halizones62. It is perhaps not surprising that an empire
so completely wiped out from history after its collapse is
not given a more important place in Homer. After all,
Assyrian expansionism, which must have been a sensitive
issue in Homer’s own time is not reflected in it, and
Homer takes his “epic distance”63 even from the
Mycenaean colonization of the Western Anatolian coast in
the LBA, leaving Miletus to “barbarian speaking” Carians
(Il. 2.867-9). In any case, as stated in the prefatory
paragraph of this article, Hittite texts have been pivotal in
identifying the location of Troy64. Indeed most researchers
(Latacz 2011a, 159-160) now equate Ahhiya/Ahhiyawa,
Homer’s Achaeans, from Hittite texts of the 15th to 13th c.
with a conglomerate of Mycenaean kingdoms65, under the
authority of Mycenae or Thebes, perhaps even a sort of
very early Delian league66. The vast majority67 also
upholds the identification of Hittite Wilusa with Ilios,
(capital of) a vassal state of the Hittites (Alakšandu –
Muwatalli II treaty around 1290-1272), former territory of

60
MORRIS, 1997, p. 600 ; KUHRT, 1995.
61
Huxley, 1959.
62
Bryce, 2006, p. 139.
63
Bennet, 1997, p. 352.
64
review of Hittite textual evidence in GÜTERBOCK, 1986 ; STARKE,
1997 ; BRYCE, 2005, p. 357-371 ; FREU, 2008 ; BRYCE 2011.
65
NIEMEIER, 1998.
66
CLINE, 2011.
67
LATACZ, 2011a, p. 158-159

19
the Arzawan kingdom. The same goes for pairs such as
Miletus - Milawata/Millawanda, or Alexandros/Paris -
Alakšandu68. From Hittite tablets we now know that the
Ahhiyawa and the Hittites had a first direct military clash
by the early 14th c. when Attarissiya (perhaps a chief of
Miletus69) engaged the protégés of the Hittites with 100
chariots. The other direct military confrontation attested in
the sources took place over Miletus under Muršili II, who
in 1318 sent out an army to punish the city for its
defection to Ahhiyawa. Importantly, the so-called
Tawagalawa letter mentions another conflict, this time
perhaps a diplomatic, but possibly also a military one,
between Hittites and Ahhiyawa over Wiluša sometime
before mid. 13th c.70. The two powers are again described
as being on fighting terms on the Western coast before and
into the reign of Hattušili 3, 1255-1230. The last mentions
of Ahhiyawa, in documents from Tudhaliya III/IV, belong
in the same paradigm, with the Mycenaeans apparently
supporting the anti-Hittite actions of Tarhuntaradu in the
West (as they had supported Piyamaradu), and they also
speak of the Hittite king bringing Miletus (again) under
his authority. It is then safe to sum up that at least
occasionally Achaeans and Hittite vassals would wage war
against each other on the Anatolian coast. It should be
noted that they may have also been allies, e.g. during the
Assuwa rebellion against the Hittite, quelled by Tudhaliya
I in 143071. Wilušya and Taruiša (Ilios and Troia?) are
mentioned, one after the other, in the Hittite list of those
“countries” in revolt (id., 142).

As less than thirty texts mention the Ahhiya(wa)72,

about a dozen mention Wiluš(i)a73, and just one, perhaps

68
LATACZ, 2010.
69
NIEMEIER, 1999, p.149, cf. 2006, p. 50.
70
GÜTERBOCK, 1986, p. 37 ; de Martino, 2011, p. 185.
71
CLINE, 1996, p.150.
72
CLINE, 2011.
73
DE MARTINO, 2011.

20
two, T(a)ruiša, many uncertainties remain (Miletus,
clearly of more importance to the Hittites than Wilusa, is
only mentioned three times as Milawata). Of course
nothing could be further from archaeology’s true goals
than a frenzied search for more tablets. Besides, the
probability of new Hittite texts concerning Troy coming to
light from the archives in Boğazköy-Hattuša, Maşat
Höyük-Tapikka, Ortaköy-Šapinuwa and Kuşaklı Šarišša,
and of fragments from older excavations being rejoined or
reinterpreted is not high, given the slow rate at which new
evidence has accrued since the heated debates about Greek
names in Hittite sources in the early 30s. It is also true that
rare recent discoveries such as the tablet from Hattuša
found in 1986 and the reading of Karabel A inscription
were exactly what was needed for F. Starke74 to finally
prove that Wilusa was situated in NW Anatolia.
Unfortunately, hoping to one day find tablets in Troy’s
state chancellery is less justified. One must have existed,
since the Alakšandu treaty was supposed to be read out to
the king three times a year (§19 of the treaty75). But such
an archive must have been destroyed when the Mycenaean
palaces on the acropolis were razed in the Hellenistic
period so that the temple for Athena could be built. No
tablets have ever been found in Troy, a situation that is
actually the rule in Western Anatolia, and also applies to
important Mycenaean sites themselves, such as Gla or
Athens76. The only written evidence for the Trojan BA, a
Hittite seal77, was however found in 1995 upon
dismantling one of the pinnacles (E 8/9) left unexcavated
by Schliemann, which raises the question whether
Schliemann’s excavations simply failed to retrieve such
evidence. Only very few such areas are still available for
study, as Blegen, and later Korfmann’s teams, have

74
STARKE, 1997.
75
LATACZ, 2004, p. 110.
76
MELLINK, 1986, p. 101.
77
HAWKINS AND EASTON, 1996, LATACZ, 2010, p. 98-122.

21
excavated some of them (e.g., the F 4/5, respectively E 4/5
pinnacle). However, one cannot exclude the possibility
that one day a silver vessel or a bronze sword will be
found at Hattuša with a Hittite inscription to the effect
that, for example, the object was presented to the king in
the year the Ahhiyawa were defeated (sic!) after a ten year
siege of vassal Wilusa. This may be to ask for the
impossible, but one recalls the silver bowl, unfortunately
of unknown provenance, from Ankara78, with precisely
this unique epigraphic formula of dating. The bowl had
been namely offered to the king “in the year that
Tudhaliya Labarna smote the land of Tarwiza”, and
recently Durnford, after thoroughly discussing this bowl79,
asked whether Tudhaliya’s capture of Tarwiza may have
become the subject of legend in Anatolia several
generations earlier than the conflict immortalized in the
Iliad.
On the other hand, Hittitologists, just like Homerists,
often tend to relish a quasi-exclusive focus on the written
evidence, which is abundant and prestigious, to the
detriment of archaeological evidence. Glatz’s assessment
of the main problems confronting present-day Hittite
archaeology may sound strangely familiar to
archaeologists of Homer’s (or the Bible’s) landscape :
“historical questions determine archaeological research
agendas and simultaneously provide their interpretive
framework”80. Events reconstructed as very clear cut from
textual sources are nevertheless often shown by
archaeological research to have happened quite
differently. For example, Hattuša was not violently
destroyed by invaders, but in fact the royal court
abandoned the capital and dilapidation followed81.
Another problem of Hittite archaeology, less acute in the

78
HAWKINS, 2005 ; DE MARTINO, 2011, p. 191-192.
79
DURNFORD, 2010, p. 69.
80
GLATZ, 2011, p. 879.
81
SEEHER, 2001.

22
Aegean world, but particularly setting back research on
the Western Anatolian coast, is the overwhelming
concentration of research on key sites (Hattuša and
Hisarlık, respectively). One of archaeology’s main duties
would be to help us understand the relationships between
Mycenaeans and Hittites to a much greater extent than we
are enabled to do by the rhetoric of official tablets or their
interaction in Miletus, substantial but hard to extrapolate.
Trade and material culture contamination in general
between the two civilizations appear surprisingly poor.
Clearly, archaeology might further refine what “Hittite”
material culture actually means. Glatz82 proposes to
replace the Hittite label with North-Central Anatolian
(NCA), thus acknowledging that ethnic definitions are
very vague in a territory of constant acculturation. But for
now, Troy itself completely lacks Hittite pottery and
objects, except for the seal mentioned above, which is not
complemented by the necessary evidence for actual
sealing83. Troy is not unique in this, as on the mainland
west of Eskișehir, Hittite objects are virtually absent84,
with just a few objects from central Anatolia having
reached the Aegean (eight counted by Cline85, or “one
percent of all Orientalia found in the Bronze Age
Aegean”). By the same token, there is a conspicuous
absence of Mycenaean material in central Anatolia86. We
do have from the capital Hattuša a bowl from around 1400
(the time of the Attarissiya affair!) with an incised
drawing showing a Mycenaean warrior in full battle
array87, and an Aegean sword, certainly captured by the
troops of the same Tudhaliya (I/II) on the coast while
quelling the Assuwa rebellion and then inscribed with a

82
GLATZ, 2011, p. 882.
83
PAVÚK, 2005, p. 275, n.46.
84
SEEHER, 2005.
85
CLINE, 1991, p. 140.
86
BENZI, 2009, p. 454 with n.1.
87
BITTEL, 1976 ; GÜTERBOCK, 1984.

23
dedication in Akkadian (88another sword comes from
Alaca Höyük). Some Mycenaean pottery found in Mașat
Höyük, 100km from Sinope, and in Kușaklı near Sivas,
together with the identification of what appears to be the
first Mycenaean shards (a kylix) from Hattuša89, still do
not manage to alter this picture of extreme disjunction. It
has been suggested that a trading embargo was in
operation, or perhaps the Mycenaeans’ containers were
simply not fit for land transportation90. But a better
regional coverage, aiming beyond key sites, might nuance
this and correlate with the circulation of ideas and
techniques, which seems better attested91.

II.2. Troy and the archaeology of the Anatolian

Interface. The most meaningful way to begin an
archaeological investigation of the Iliad today is to
properly situate Troy in its Interface and Anatolian
context, which is still insufficiently researched. The
archaeology of the Troad can first offer a better
understanding of the network of settlements around
Troy92. R. Aslan and G. Bieg have identified so far 28
settlements in the Troad datable to Troia VI/VIIa, of
which four were apparently fortified, Fığla Tepe, Eski
Hisarlık, Ballı Dağ, and Hanay Tepe93. The latter (the so-
called Calvert’s Farm, already excavated by Calvert and
Schliemann) is one of the only two settlements in the
Troas with Troy VIIb pottery. None of these 28 is
comparable with Troy in size or continuity of occupation,
the largest settlement on the Gallipoli peninsula
(Kilisetepe) being only half as big as Troy, and most
settlements exhibiting exclusively Troy I and Troy
VI/VIIa levels. The closest site to Troy (and its harbour

88
BRYCE, 2005, p. 125, 360 ; CLINE, 1996.
89
GENZ, 2004.
90
KELDER, 2006, p. 52 ; BENZI, 2002, p. 383.
91
NIEMEIER, 2006, p. 54 ; WIENER, 2007, p. 14.
92
BLEGEN ET AL., 1958, p. 11.
93
ASLAN ET AL., 2003, p. 167.

24
settlement/cemetery) on the Anatolian mainland where
Mycenaean pottery has been found is some 150 km to the
South94, but others may be found. Some 40 tumuli are
known in the Troad, some thought to belong to Homeric
heroes, but none seems to be earlier than the 6th c. More
intensive survey and excavations may surely bring
novelties in this regard. A key site in the Troad for
understanding Troy is Beşik Tepe, only 7km away from
Troy, where a settlement could not be located, but whose
VIh-VIIb1 necropolis was excavated in 1982-198795. This
was used, with one exception, by the same population as
that buried in Troy’s only cemetery found, the small,
poorly preserved VIh necropolis excavated by Marion
Rawson and belonging to some part of the lower city96.
The exception was an extended inhumation in an untypical
cist grave, for which Basedow97 only found parallels in
Macedonia, attributing it to the family of an immigrant.
Imitated Mycenaean wares/shapes are present in most
intact graves, but the cemetery, one should hasten to say,
does not include Mycenaean soldiers. A stone-built two-
room tomb (15-West) is one of the most remarkable
burials in NW Anatolia and gives us tantalizing glimpses
of the burials of the Trojan elite. Here, a double cremation
in a Gray Ware krater included a partially melted sword
and was associated with a floor covered with Mycenaean
and Anatolian pottery. Last but not least, the small finds at
Beșik are the main proof for Troy’s LBA exotic trade
contacts98. Best Anatolian parallels for Beşik Tepe are
Bakla Tepe’s LBA burial grounds with Mycenaean pottery
and weapons, and especially Panaztepe, a cemetery of the
mid-second millennium with international (including
Mycenaean) goods99. The finds there in the 2000s showed

94
KORFMANN, 1998, p. 376, Fig. 7 ; NIEMEIER, 2006.
95
KORFMANN, 1986 ; BASEDOW, 2000.
96
BLEGEN, CASKEY AND RAWSON, 1953, p. 370-391.
97
BASEDOW, 2000.
98
review in Jablonka and Rose, 2004, p. 625.
99
Basedow, 2000 ; 2002.

25
convincingly that the Panaztepe sequence corresponds
closely to that of Troy for the later 13th and 12th
centuries100.

But what about outside the Troad, southward down the

Interface? Miletus must have had a key role to play in the
history of interactions between Mycenaeans on the one
hand and Hittites and their vassals (the Hittite
Commonwealth101), on the other. It is in any case thus far
the site where the coexistence of Mycenaean and Hittite
elements is best documented. Although by mid-14th c. the
Mycenaean presence on the Southern Aegean coast of
Anatolia and the islands across from it (esp. Rhodes and
Kos) was reinforced by a new colonizing wave102, their
only significant settlement in the Near East remains
Miletus, with its cemetery Değirmentepe103 and perhaps,
to judge only from the necropolis, Müsgebi104. Mycenaean
finds are mapped on the Anatolian mainland from Troy all
the way south to the sites facing Rhodes, including Larisa,
Panaztepe, Sardis, Smyrna, Bakla Tepe, Limantepe-
Clazomenai, Bademgediği Tepe, Ephesus and Iasos105. It
is unclear to what extent such artefacts may have been
imported or brought in by intermediaries106. At sites such
as Troy VIf-h archaeologists reckon with some 1-2%
Mycenaean wares, and in Ayasuluk/Ephesus, capital of the
Arzawa land, as well as in settlements in the Seha River
Land such as Panaztepe and Limantepe107, with some 1%.
In contrast, Miletus yields over 95% Mycenaean wares

100
ERKANAL AND ÇINARDALI-KARAASLAN, 2010 ; cf. ERKANAL AND
ERKANAL, 1986.
101
LATACZ, 2004, p. 77.
102
NIEMEIER, 2006.
103
BRYCE, 2011, p. 369.
104
MEE, 1978, p. 137 sqq.
105
MOUNTJOY, 1998, p. 35 ; NIEMEIER, 2006, p. 54.
106
ROSE, 2008, p. 409.
107
MELLINK, 1984, p. 450-1.

26
(Latacz108 following an analysis by W.D. Niemeier). This
corroborates well with the city’s fortifications,
architecture, pottery and burials to prove that Miletus was
a Mycenaean settlement with considerable admixture of
Anatolian elements, possibly resulting in a bilingual
culture109. Whether such a culture may have also
developed at Troy is unclear for now110, although we
know of the Greek Alakšandu in the royal family, as an
adopted son, or perhaps the son of the Trojan king’s Greek
concubine. For Miletus, W.-D. Niemeier has notably
attempted a correlation between archaeological remains
and Hittite texts. First, he associated burnt destruction
layers of Miletus V with Mursili’s II destruction (dated
either 1319/18 or 1315/14; 1999, 150 and 2006, 51).
Second, Niemeier observed that an Anatolian style
fortification wall, with evenly spaced rectangular bastions,
was built in Miletus VI in the late 13th c., and attributed
this to Tudhaliya III/IV bringing Miletus under his control
after the Tarhuntaradu incident111. But it should be noted
that even in this time period, despite Hittite-type swords
being found in Miletus’s cemetery or the Mycenaean shard
depicting a Hittite ritual horned conical tiara, the material
culture of Miletus remains decidedly Mycenaean112. J.
Latacz113 has notably advanced the fascinating hypothesis
that, having lost Miletus, their main bridgehead in
Anatolia the Mycenaeans were forced to search for
another in, or simply retaliate against, the Hittite vassal
Wilusa.

108
LATACZ, 2004, p. 249.
109
NIEMEIER, 1998.
110
BENZI, 2002, p. 364.
111
NIEMEIER, 1999, p. 153 and 2006, p. 53; see BENZI, 2002, p. 372
and BASEDOW, 2007, p. 56 for other perspectives.
112
NIEMEIER, 2006, p. 53.
113
LATACZ, 2004, p. 285-6.

27
 The Mycenaean past of Ephesus (Apasa) is just now
beginning to be investigated114. A Mycenaean cult center
is suspected here by Bammer115 and in any case its LBA
fortifications (limestone blocks foundations) are built in a
similar manner to Troy VI’s (Niemeier 1999, 142).
Excavations since 1999 at Bademgediği Tepe (Puranda)
near Metropolis made this the southernmost site with
(Trojan) Anatolian Grey Ware and also brought to light a
fragmentary krater with a sea battle, more detailed than
any other LHIIIC image we have. The warriors resemble
the Sea Peoples from Ramesses III’s reliefs at Medinet
Habu, which strongly connects some of these Sea Peoples
with the Interface116. A seal with Luwian-inspired
characters recently found at Bademgediği117 may provide
an interesting comparison with the ones from Troy and
Beycesultan. Finally, it is worth asking to what extent
Homer may have been inspired by Old Smyrna’s late 8th
c. 650m long fortification wall118? The poet, probably born
in Smyrna and well-travelled in the area119 may have seen
Troy’s Bronze Age walls, still standing at least 8m high,
but a visit to the ruins at Hisarlık, as postulated by
Korfmann and others120, is not mandatory.

When one discusses Western Anatolian sites outside

the Interface but still caught between Ahhiyawa, Hatti and
Arzawa, the one example that immediately springs to
mind is Beycesultan121, important counterpart to Troy and
sites in the Lower Interface such as Miletus, Müsgebi and

114
EASTON ET AL., 2002, p. 97.
115
BAMMER, 1990, p. 142.
116
MOUNTJOY, 2005.
117
DE MARTINO, 2011, p. 194.
118
WINTER, 1971 ; Hertel, 2011, p. 49.
119
LATACZ, 2011b, p. 19-22.
120
recently COOK 2004, p. 50.
121
MAC SWEENEY, 2011 ; MELLAART AND MURRAY 1995 ;
MELLAART, 1998.

28
Iasos122. The Beycesultan V palace of the 18th c. was
indicated by Korfmann123 to be the closest equivalent to
Troy VI/VIIa as an ancient Anatolian palace, and the
megaron complex of Beycesultan II, the “Little Palace”,
offers another parallel. Also a Luwian site from the Hittite
sphere of influence, its occupation sequence (Beycesultan
IVc-II) corresponds to Troy VI-VIIa, with little overlap
with LBA Miletus. The absence of Hittite material culture
in Beycesultan III (roughly the 13th c.) is surprising, since
Beycesultan was more exposed to Hittite political
influence than Troy, and has been considered the result of
“active rejection” on the part of the local population124.
Has this phenomenon happened at Troy, too? Aegean
culture is also hardly represented in Beycesultan,
Mycenaean pottery and other objects being very scarce,
e.g. a fragmentary boar’s tusk helmet125 and Aegean type
sword pommels126. Beycesultan II was destroyed in a fire
towards mid. 12th. c., very soon after the collapse of the
Hittite empire. Eight unburied human skeletons were
found in the destruction layers. Projectiles and weapons
were found across the site, but could not be ascribed to the
Hittites, indeed they had various different origins. Hittite
seals were used after the fall of the Hittite empire, perhaps
because they were by then devoid of political
connotations, and could be adopted for aesthetic
reasons127. Since 2007, Beycesultan is being reassessed by
new excavations which will give the site its much needed
first C14 dates, but unfortunately it remains one of the
very few inland Western Anatolian sites that have been
excavated so far.

122
KUHRT, 1995 ; for the latter BENZI, 1985.
123
KORFMANN, 1998, p. 376.
124
MAC SWEENEY, 2011.
125
MAC SWEENEY, 2011, p. 117.
126
MELLAART AND MURRAY, 1995, 122-124 ; BENZI, 2002, 383.
127
MAC SWEENEY, 2011, p. 120.

29
 Sites farther east, firmly positioned in the Hittite orbit,
can also shed indirect light on Troy’s situation. For
example, for the transition from the Hittite period to the
early IA, Phrygian Gordion is a crucial site. Thracian
immigration in the late 12th c. is probable at Gordion as it
is for Troy in VIIb2 (Rose128 also considers the possibility
of increased commerce with Thrace). For Mary Voigt129 a
(new?) wave of immigration must have taken place after a
brief abandonment at the end of LBA and the EIA, when
changes in material culture from house form and
construction to storage and (Thracian-looking) pottery
indicate that the LBA/Hittite affiliated population moved
out or abandoned the area and a new group occupied the
site towards 1000. Importantly, recent work by Voigt and
Henrickson130 redated Gordion’s major phases, showing
again that dating major destruction horizons by heavy
reliance on literary references may be wildly inaccurate
for the periphery of the Greek world131. The Iron Age
citadel from Gordion matches well Troy as a Western
Anatolian royal citadel.

Lydia (the Hittite vassal Seha River Land, Homer’s

Maeonia) can also contribute to this debate. The
assemblages from well-excavated Sardis, obstinately
Anatolian in the second half of the second millennium also
testify to growing Mycenaean imports, and Sardis’s Iron
Age is another example of how Central Anatolian
influences blend with local (Lydian) traditions. But newly
discovered remains can also help to make this picture
more vivid – remarkably, even without any excavation.
Within the framework of the Central Lydia Archaeological
Survey, microtopographic and geophysical survey
revealed in 2007 at Kaymakçı on a hilltop overlooking the

128
ROSE, 2008, p. 411, 420.
129
VOIGT, 2011, p. 1077.
130
VOIGT AND HENRICKSON, 2000.
131
GREAVES, 2011, p. 503.

30
Gygaean lake (Marmara Gölü) a citadel with a vast lower
city and its cemeteries. The citadel’s size of 8.6 ha makes
it “larger than that of contemporary Troy, Mycenae, Gla,
and Beycesultan, […] the largest known Middle to Late
Bronze Age site in western Anatolia”132. Kaymakçı has
therefore been tentatively identified with the capital of the
Seha River Land (Maddunassa?). The pottery collected
parallels late Troy VI through Troy VIIa and
corresponding finds from Beycesultan, Panaztepe etc.
Occupation at Kaymakçı, and at the many fortified sites
around the lake, appears to cease by the end of the Bronze
Age, and three of these sites show burnt and vitrified
mudbrick (id., 209). Most interestingly, the general
organization of Kaymakçı’s citadel, and its arcuate-shaped
inner wall resemble the fortifications of Troy133, a site
whose layout has long been considered, despite influences,
“without parallels”134. Excavations in the future might
help clarify this intriguing relationship, as well as other
problems that confront researchers in Troy and
Beycesultan, such as the extent of the local population’s
“rejection” of a Hittite material culture, the density of the
lower city, burial rites, and population shifts.

II.3. The destruction layers in Troy. How does one treat

archaeologically a war which has been dubbed “la guerre
fantôme”135? If no real event should actually be imagined
behind Homer’s war stories136, then archaeology must
“limit” itself to describing the very general context of war
techniques in the Aegean and W Anatolian world, with
further SE European and Near Eastern ramifications in the
four centuries that separate Homer from the war he
purports to describe, since all and none may have played a
part in his description. Of course, both skeptical and
132
LUKE AND ROOSEVELT, 2009, p. 208.
133
ROOSEVELT, 2010, p. 53.
134
JABLONKA, 2011a, p. 726.
135
BENZI, 2009.
136
CARPENTER, 1946 ; FINLEY, 1964 ; HERTEL, 2008.

31
enthusiastic readings of Homer are attested in the ranks of
archaeologists. When Korfmann’s excavations at Beşik
had just started, he felt comfortable mentioning his
“feeling […] that the cemetery which we have just laid
bare at the harbor of Troy should belong to the very time
when the Trojan war ought to have occurred”137. The
results later contradicted this impression138, and he took
constant care in his publications to distance himself from
those single-mindedly searching for the Trojan war. A few
years later he stated, for example, that the destruction
levels in Troy tell us “absolutely nothing about the
historicity of the Trojan war”139.

Many scholars investigating the historicity or

otherwise of the Trojan war have discussed the example of
other epics140. As is well known, the Nibelungenlied turns
the invasion of Burgundy by the Huns in its reverse and
makes Attila the Hun the contemporary of the bishop of
Passow, at the end of the 10th c CE. In the Chanson de
Roland, a Basque ambush against the rear of
Charlemagne’s army becomes Charlemagne’s nephew’s
battle against 400,000 Saracens. Such comparisons
highlight the inherent limits of the epic in relaying
historical information, a goal they in fact never set for
themselves, but achieve only incidentally. While
presenting a cautionary tale for those who want to take
Homer to the letter, these comparisons are also themselves
of limited relevance, since how epics are shaped and
transmitted is fundamentally influenced by the presence of
literacy and external trade, as well as by a society’s values
and class structure. Also, social memories of war have a
life of their own in all societies from ancient times to
today. Guernica was clearly far from being the most

137
KORFMANN, 1986, p. 28.
138
BASEDOW, 2000.
139
KORFMANN, 1995, p. 179.
140
e.g. FINLEY ET AL. 1964.

32
important operation of the German Luftwaffe, but because
of Picasso’s painting, it is one of the most well-known
episodes of the Spanish civil war. The attention given by
the media in France in 2011 to the archaeological
excavations uncovering the German soldiers buried in
their bombed shelter at the Killianstollen in Carspach
(Haut-Rhin), with all their personal objects including pipes
and a rosary with a bullet among the beads141, or to the
Lancaster bombardier found 4m deep in the soil of
Lorraine, with the crew’s silk maps, morphine vials etc.142,
might make one forget these were in no way key military
units of the first and the second World War, respectively.
It is some of the random survivors, and some of the
random victims, that history often decides should stand as
symbols for all the others. Homer’s story of the Trojan
War may incorporate echoes of any of the fighting done
around Troy and anywhere on the coast between
Mycenaeans (together with some of the Sea Peoples?) and
the Arzawans or Hittites or their (former) vassals,
including the above mentioned conquest of Mycenaean
Miletus by Mursili II. No wonder many researchers have
spoken of two143 or several Trojan wars, coalesced by
Homer into one magnificent war144. Homer himself knows
of other wars around Troy, such as its sack by Herakles
(Il. V. 638-642) before the Achaean siege, although this
rather reflects more recent altercations, belonging to more
modest times closer to Homer’s own145. The abduction of
Helen is incidentally as good a casus belli as the
rationalizing explanations of Mycenaean expansionism
proposed by pragmatic modern scholars (cf. a letter from
Ugarit about ships and troops being prepared in order to
capture a “sinful wife”, RS 18.06146). But if Homer was

141
LANDOLT, 2012.
142
OLIVIER, 2008, p. 95-96.
143
HILLER, 1991.
144
KORFMANN, 1998, 379 ; CLINE, 1996.
145
PETRE, 1983, p. 12.
146
WIENER, 2007, p. 32.

33
speaking of a real war fought in a real city, and if that war
left recognizable traces in the archaeological record, then
archaeology should be able to identify them as destruction
layers.

In the present state of our knowledge, Troy exhibits a

number of destructions from the end of the 14th c. to the
end of the 10th which would be potential candidates for
such a Trojan war (for an excellent introduction to the
archaeology of the Trojan war147). Few things help us
more build an image of a city’s history than its destruction
layers, be they due to natural catastrophes or to war. They
have something to say about everything from
environmental conditions and geopolitical conflicts, often
providing sealed contexts and preserving objects that
would have otherwise never reached us. Above all they are
major chronological indicators, often yielding a useful
terminus ante quem and a terminus post quem in C14
years for activities at the site. But they can also be used for
relative dating and for the comparison of “before” and
“after” pottery assemblages or construction techniques,
especially when changes in society are visible after the
destruction due to internal developments or the influx of
new population (for the pitfalls of correlating
archaeological destructions with information from written
sources, v. infra, II.4). The following section is a catalogue
of these layers for LBA/IA Troy. Early Bronze Age
conflagrations, such as those in Troy II (2550-2250), are
not included here, although they may offer archaeological
comparanda to Late Bronze Age events, such as the
phenomenon of smaller, denser buildings replacing
monumental buildings after a destruction148.

147
VANSCHOONWINKEL, 1998 ; WIENER, 2007 ; and BENZI 2009.
148
JABLONKA, 2011, p. 719.

34
 Troy VIh, the largest Trojan citadel, came to an end in
a severe destruction149. The upper part of the fortification
wall as well as the superstructures of the large houses that
stood inside the fortress collapsed, and damage to towers
VIh and VIi, as well as subsidence of the fortification wall
is noted. No house appears to have burned and no human
victims have been found.
The dating of this destruction is based on
Mycenaean pottery, the chronology of which is constantly
being refined. The most recent thorough reassessment was
done by P. Mountjoy150, who dates this destruction to the
end of LHIIIA2, around 1300 (a little earlier for Benzi151).
Blegen, Caskey and Rawson152 and Mountjoy153 are
definitely for the earthquake interpretation, and so was
Korfmann (occasionally with some reserve, e.g. 1995).
They often use the fact that Troy is not impoverished after
this destruction and its culture remains the same in the
ensuing phase VIIa, when also relationships with the
Mycenaeans are maintained, as an argument against the
interpretation of the destruction as a result of war (with the
Achaeans). For Rose154 however there is no uniform
agreement whether this was due to an earthquake, an
invasion or both. Other researchers see Troy VIh as
destroyed by war155, either by the Achaeans156 or by the
Hittites and their allies157. Some interesting bronze
arrowheads from late Troy VI appear to be rather from
VIg than VIh: one has parallels in Pylos, but also

149
Archaeological indications and interpretation in BLEGEN, CASKEY
AND RAWSON, 1953, p. 89-92, 98, 262, 329-332; BLEGEN, 1963, p.
143-145, 147; HILLER, 1991; MOUNTJOY, 1999a.
150
MOUNTJOY, 1999a.
151
BENZI, 2002, p. 352.
152
BLEGEN, CASKEY AND RAWSON, 1953.
153
MOUNTJOY, 1999a.
154
ROSE, 1998.
155
ALLEN, 1994 ; BRYCE, 2005.
156
MELLINK, 1986, p. 100.
157
BASEDOW, 2007.

35
resembles an arrowhead (imported?) at Alișar Hüyük in
Hittite territory158 ; another one has mainly Hittite parallels
at Alaca Höyük and Boğazköy159.

Troy VIIa came to an end with another important

destruction following a period of “tell tale” changes in the
life of the settlement160.
Before describing the destruction layer, it is appropriate
to note in the archaeological record some signs of a
potential threat or “emergency”. These may include the
substantial additions to the fortification wall, especially by
the East gate. Small houses are now crowded closely
together abutting the inside face of the wall, where streets
used to run before. Unprecedented in VIIa is that almost
every house (e.g. 730 and 731) had numerous pithoi sunk
to their full height (1.75 - 2m) in the floors, with the rim
covered with stone slabs. They maximized the storage
capacity to the point of honeycombing the floors on which
people walked. It would thus appear that the acropolis was
obliged to shelter a larger population than in Troy VI. The
excavators of 1932-38 argued that in this period the
quantity of imported Mycenaean material plummeted. In
addition to these findings by Blegen’s team, the
excavations after 1988 showed that the SW gate VIU,
found in 1995, the largest gate in the wall of Troy VI, was
blocked before the destruction, at the same time when a
little street running up the East gate VIS is dismantled, and
when a mudbrick bastion is reinforcing the area around the
NE bastion.

158
BLEGEN, CASKEY AND RAWSON, 1953, p. 270 ; cf.
VANSCHOONWINKEL, 1998, p. 244 n. 93.
159
BLEGEN, CASKEY AND RAWSON, 1953, p. 17, 262.
160
Archaeological indications and interpretation in BLEGEN ET AL.
1958, 10-13, 51; BLEGEN, 1963, 147-164; HILLER, 1991;
KORFMANN,1996, 2002, 2003; VANSCHOONWINKEL, 1998; BECKS,
2006.

36
 As to the destruction proper, Blegen mentions great
masses of stones and crude brick along with burned debris
found in a destruction deposit up to 1.5m high161. A man,
considered a war victim, was covered by debris on the
western slope of the hill outside the acropolis wall, and the
bones of another individual appeared to be found in house
700 as well as outside in the street, with other victims
being suggested by a lower jaw bone in house 741, skull
fragments in street 711, etc. Blegen found almost no
weapons in the citadel; a bronze arrowhead in street 710
(“of a type known in the contemporary Mycenaean
world”162) became for some an object of ridicule163.
Korfmann’s excavations have however added more
victims to this picture, for example the hasty burial of a
girl with burnt feet. Also, the so-called Terrassenhaus
outside the citadel, the only house of VIIa which could be
almost completely excavated, was destroyed at the end of
this period164. All its rooms burned in a “devastating fire”.
The excavators found arrow points and spearheads165, and
many sling stones in almost all rooms. But most
importantly, in the burnt layer on the street South of the
Terrassenhaus 180 sling stones were found in piles, of
which one pile of 121166. Small deposits of sling bullets
are known elsewhere in Troy, e.g. 15 of them in a VIf
layer167.
Mountjoy168 reanalyzed Blegen’s Mycenaean pottery,
which had not been reexamined since 1958, and dated the
destruction of VIIa to “late LHIIIB and probably in

161
ROSE, 2008, p. 409.
162
BLEGEN ET AL., 1958, p. 12, 51.
163
e.g. FINLEY ET AL., 1964, p. 1 n.2.
164
BECKS, RIGTER AND HNILA, 2006, p. 46-47.
165
KOPPENHÖFER, 1997 dates them rather in VIIb1.
166
“deposits of unused weapons”, KORFMANN, 2002, p.216; some
problems with this interpretation : BENZI, 2002, p. 354-5, HERTEL,
2008, p. 199 n. 23, VANSCHOONWINKEL, 1998, p.244 n. 93.
167
BLEGEN, CASKEY AND RAWSON, 1953, p. 232-233.
168
MOUNTJOY, 1999b.

37
transitional LHIIIB2-IIIC early, but not later”, around
1190/1180169. While the interpretation as war is upheld by
a majority of researchers, Blegen170 was decidedly for the
Trojan one. But the fact that the invaders could have been
Mycenaeans is neither confirmed nor contradicted in any
way by the archaeological record. No Mycenaean weapons
have ever been found at Troy (with the doubtful exception
above). In fact, the closest location with Mycenaean
weapons South of Troy is Pergamon171. Mountjoy172 and
Mellink173 attribute the VIIa destruction to the Sea
Peoples174.

While Korfmann175 focused on the final days of VIh

and VIIa as significant destructions of a large citadel, three
partial destructions seem to have occurred during the
phase VIIb. Troy VIIb1 (or VIj, since there is no cultural
disruption), originally indicated by Blegen176 as showing
no signs of destruction, appears to have actually been
burnt towards the end of LHIIIC middle (Mountjoy
1999b).
This gave way to the Balkan influence in Troy
VIIb2177. This citadel, occupied by the Thracians, was
considered by Blegen to have been destroyed by fire (he
had found burning in a couple of houses178), and
Korfmann’s excavations suggest this fire in LHIIIC late

169
Similarly MELLINK, 1986, p. 94, VANSCHOONWINKEL, 1998, p.
243: second quarter of the 12th c.
170
BLEGEN,1958 ; 1963.
171
NIEMEIER, 2006, p. 54.
172
MOUNTJOY, 1999b.
173
MELLINK, 1986.
174
Along the same lines, FINLEY ET AL., 1964, p. 4-6, BRANDAU,
SCHICKERT AND JABLONKA, 2004, further discussion in
VANSCHOONWINKEL, 1998, p. 250.
175
KORFMANN, 2002.
176
BLEGEN, 1963, p. 167.
177
ROSE, 2008, p. 410-411.
178
BLEGEN, 1963, p. 172.

38
was caused by invaders179. Less chronological precision
can be aimed for here because Blegen’s pottery from the
30s could not be located anymore and Mountjoy’s
reassessment of VIIb pottery was based only on photos
and drawings. Rose180 dates the end of VIIb1 and VIIb2 at
around 1130 and 1050 respectively. The Trojan war was
placed in VIIb2 by Hood181 and Hertel182, and this is
retained as a valid alternative to VIIa by Mountjoy183.
Wiener184 has reviewed the evidence for the general fire
destruction dated 1000/950 (or rather 950/900), of the
small and destitute Troia VIIb3185. This destruction
however does not appear to have been that general to
Basedow186 and Rose187, cf. Jablonka188 : “evidence for
some destruction by fire while other houses look as if they
have been left intact.” After this, nothing is built in the
quasi-deserted Troy until the second half of the 8th c.,
when the infiltration of Greek colonists eventually gave
the site a new identity.

Discussion. The provisory character of the

archaeological evidence, acquired in different theoretical
paradigms, and their problematic correlation with Hittite
texts and Homeric poetry made recently Peter Jablonka,
who excavated in Troy for 25 years, to simply state
prudently that the citadels of both VIh and VIIa were
destroyed by “unknown causes”189, and particularly the
179
KORFMANN, 1995, 175-176, BECKS AND THUMM, 2001, p. 424 for
the many bone arrowheads; but cf. MOUNTJOY, 1999b, who argues for
an earthquake.
180
ROSE, 2008, p. 410.
181
HOOD, 1995.
182
HERTEL, 2008.
183
MOUNTJOY, 1999b.
184
WIENER, 2007, p. 26sqq.
185
BECKS AND THUMM 2001, p. 424.
186
BASEDOW, 2007.
187
ROSE, 1999.
188
JABLONKA, 2011a, p. 724.
189
JABLONKA, 2011a, p. 721.

39
destruction of VIIa in a war is “far from conclusive” (id.,
725). The archaeological clues pertaining to late BA and
early IA destructions of Troy are indeed of unequal value,
and derive their strength mainly from corroboration. Here
are a few concluding remarks on the relevance of such
indications.

1. Some of them are intrinsically eloquent, such as

the picture of the collapsed stones left in situ in J6 by
Blegen as evidence for the earthquake. Some though are
fully a matter of interpretation, such as using a decline in
imported Mycenaean pottery in VIIa as a proof that the
Mycenaeans constituted a threat to Troy190, because it has
since been established that much of the Mycenaean pottery
in Troy is locally made with very few actual imports, and
on the other hand Mycenaean imports decline in the
Levant and Cyprus too around this time. By the same
token, can the houses inside the citadel walls of VIIa,
suddenly so densely clustered, be interpreted to reflect
changes in society brought about by external threats, if at
the same time the Terrassenhaus is built outside the
citadel191?
2. We lack general criteria to determine when a
destruction will appear serious enough in the
archaeological record to be considered a lost war, and
equally one cannot import criteria from somewhere else,
e.g. expect to see Troy’s VIIa record replicate exactly the
destruction of Beycesultan in mid 12th c. or the
Achaemenid destruction of Sardis in 546. Some of the
destruction layers in Troy presented above are not reported
from large enough (by archaeological standards) areas of
the site, most of them cannot be safely (also by
archaeological standards) associated with war, and none of
them can be, on archaeological evidence alone, suggested

190
As Blegen did, but also recently VANSCHOONWINKEL, 1998, p.
245.
191
BECKS, RIGTER AND HNILA, 2006.

40
to be the result of war with the Mycenaeans. In fact, for at
least one of them, the Trojans seem to be something other
than the Anatolian people Homer is talking about. Thus,
for all we know, one of the Trojan Wars may have been
fought between the Sea Peoples and the Anatolian
Trojans, or between Achaeans and Thracian
immigrants192.
3. It is also well known that absence of evidence is
not evidence of absence. A lost war may well not leave in
the archaeological record many traces that we can still
understand. Not many warriors with enemy spears in their
chests will be trapped by the collapse of burning houses in
areas where no cleaning is done by either winners or losers
once peace ensues. Few of those houses will never be
affected by any disturbance (foundation walls or leveling
of surfaces) for the rest of more than a millennium when
the city is almost continuously inhabited, and even fewer
will find themselves exactly where trenches of modern
archaeologists happen to be placed. Such traces of war as
are actually left may not be so eloquent that one will be
compelled to infer from them the existence of a war.
Therefore using Troy’s remains to establish whether a
(lost) war took place is fraught with uncertainties: the
chances are slim that we will obtain decisive indications
that a war took place, while the lack of such indications
does not prove that a war did not take place.
4. A well-documented fortification ditch surrounding
the lower city, cut deep into the sediment and up to 2m
deep into the bedrock in Troy VI Middle, was since the
end of Troy VI gradually filling up until, not being
maintained/recut, by the end of VIIa it may have almost
disappeared from the landscape193. Apparently the same
happened to another defense, an outer ditch, insufficiently
excavated, dug perhaps in Late VI to set a larger boundary

192
cf. CLINE, 1996, p. 150-151 for speculations about a Hittite
destruction of Troy in the 15th c.
193
JABLONKA ET AL., 1994, JABLONKA AND ROSE, 2004.

41
for the expanding lower city194. Did these ditches respond
initially to a concrete threat, associated perhaps with the
use of war chariots, or rather the growing of a large lower
city and the associated sense of identity calling for sharper
boundaries? Interestingly, Mannsperger195 has proposed to
see in the ditch and wall protecting the Achaean camp in
the Iliad the reflection of Homer’s knowledge of the actual
Bronze Age ditch surrounding the lower city of Troy. But
the ditch was completely backfilled in Homer’s time and
there is so far no evidence for 8th c. construction activities
accidentally bringing it to light. This actually happened in
Classical times, when foundations of walls were
occasionally sunk into the ditch as builders were searching
for bedrock, so that some knowledge of this ancient
feature can be presumed. A suggestion was made by
Kullmann196 to equate Herakles’s wall (Il. 20,144 sqq.)
with the wall of the lower city, wall, however, which has
not been identified197. It must be borne in mind though
that there are serious limits as to what the archaeology of
the lower city can still discover, given the poor
preservation of Bronze remains there, affected by erosion
and massive construction activities in later times198.
5. Also, some arguments aim for textbook situations,
for example contending that the war against Troy must
have taken place when the defender, Troy, was at its peak,
and therefore had most riches to offer to raiders, or that the
war must have taken place when the aggressor, the
Mycenaean world, was at its peak and therefore could
mobilize most military units. Such arguments are double
edged swords, for when a city is at its richest it might also
be able to defend itself better, while when a civilization is
declining there may be additional impetus for warrior

194
JABLONKA, 2006.
195
MANNSPERGER, 1995.
196
KULLMANN, 2002.
197
BECKS, 2006, p.158 for some controversial positive evidence.
198
A thorough description of these problems in JABLONKA, 2006, p.
168-170.

42
expeditions to secure necessary resources or simply to
consolidate the position of a ruling elite. As an aside, a
fleet as numerous as that described by Homer, 1176 ships,
is out of the question. Before the Trojan war, Herakles
sacked Troy with 6 ships (Il. V. 638-642), and from a
letter of the last king of Ugarit (RS20.238) we know that
“seven enemy ships” caused “considerable damage” to
that city, contemporary and comparable in size to Troy
(and also yielding some Mycenaean finds).
6. Some other indications cannot yet be used to their
full potential, e.g. the observation that many settlements in
the Troad become deserted around Late VI and VIIa, with
the population perhaps becoming concentrated in Troy199.
More research in the Troad, as well as more certainty that
this is how things also developed around Gordion or
Kaymakçı, can enhance the relevance of such
observations.

Now, regardless of the ethnic identity of the

populations involved, always a stumbling block for
archaeologists, it may seem unreasonable to imagine that
the city Homer chose, of all historic places available for
his inspiration, as the stage for his stories, was one that did
not mean anything for his audiences200. As E. Vermeule201
put it, it would have been more difficult to invent the
Trojan War than to continue traditions about a real war.
However, the correlation between archaeology and the
Iliad is bound to remain elusive. Homer writes in the last
quarter of the 8th c. about a war for which our better
choice from the available options would probably be
1190/1180, that is, at the end of Troy VIIa. This gap of
some 450 years makes Homer about as far from his Trojan
war as we are from the Copernican revolution.
Information may have been passed along by traditional

199
ASLAN ET AL., 2003, PAVUK, 2005, p. 274.
200
cf. HOOD, 1995, p. 23.
201
VERMEULE, 1986, p. 80, 85.

43
oral poetry, with the help of that magic device, the
hexameter, but perhaps not much more than the essence is
left (Latacz 2004, 2010 has made the most convincing plea
to date that this was actually fully possible, and id. 2011a
offers now a brilliant introduction into the mechanisms of
orally conveying the substance and details of the Trojan
war across the Dark Ages.)
It is only for the general public, that the most important
thing in the Iliad is the Trojan War, or what is left of the
real Trojan War in the Iliad. For the historian, almost
every word in Homer, even the emotions of his gods and
goddesses, is something that is “left”, only from different
historical strata. Homer was not a Dadaist poet or a Cubist
painter. There was no intrinsic merit for Homer or his
audiences in lack of logic or random invention, as there
may have been much later for only a handful of ancient
writers such as Lucian. Deformations must certainly be
reckoned with in the Iliad, but only meaningful ones
underpinned by a rhetoric or ideological rationale. In that
sense, the problem becomes one of identifying what
triggers these deformations202, and being able to map, with
a reasonable chance of success, what material culture
elements stem from which time period and geographical
area203. Most probably, an analysis of the Trojan war must
begin to take shape at the intersection of the two.

II.4. Methodological considerations. Is there a precise

methodology by which archaeology, Anatolian or not, can
be made to meaningfully contribute to what is a historical,
or even literary, debate around Homer ? And will
archaeology ever escape, as Small204 put it, “the tyranny of
the text”? Without the knowledge of, and reverence for,
Homer’s text, Schliemann or Blegen would never have
argued, solely on the basis of material remains, that the

202
Primarily the task of the historian, PETRE, 1983.
203
LORIMER, 1950 ; MATZ AND BUCHOLTZ, 1967 – ongoing.
204
SMALL, 1999.

44
site was burnt and sacked by the Mycenaeans. Indeed they
would have never excavated the site. And arguably the
manner in which one collects and interprets the evidence
for a conflagration at a site where a major destruction is to
be expected is different from the ways of an excavator
without such expectations205. It is not advocated here that
only archaeologists who have not heard of Homer should
be trusted for the excavation of Homeric landscape. But
what is certain is that more reflection is needed on the
theoretical framework within which we blend textual and
archaeological evidence (Leone and Potter 1988, 9).
D. Clarke and A. Snodgrass have notoriously discussed
the hiatus between archaeological and historical data. In
his Analytical archaeology206, Clarke frowned upon the
nicely polished historical narratives produced by
archaeologists based on data which “are never
comprehensive, never capable of supporting but one
interpretation, and rest upon complex probabilities.” And
to be sure, sometimes archaeologists present a narrative so
coherent and plausible that history would have trouble
living up to it. The archaeology of Troy, just like Hittite
sources when one forces them to give more concrete
details about Troy, is often “a join-the-dots puzzle where
many of the dots are of uncertain position or have been
erased altogether”207. Archaeology and Homer remain
“uncomfortable bedfellows”208.

In turn, in his review of the state of the discipline in

Greek archaeology, Snodgrass209 exposed archaeologists’
“positivist fallacy”, a tendency to mechanically equate
what appears to be significant in the archaeological record

205
PAVEL, 2011a, p. 123-132.
206
CLARKE AND SNODGRASS, 1968, p.12.
207
DURNFORD, 2010, p. 65; cf. “apophenia” in Durnford forthcoming,
and, for the “clustering illusion” in field archaeology, PAVEL, 2010, p.
129.
208
MANNING, 1992, p. 141.
209
SNODGRASS, 1987, p. 37-66.

45
with what appears to be significant in the textual evidence,
making archaeological and historical prominence
interchangeable. In other words, he was protesting against
the archaeological habit of requiring the evidence from
excavation to express itself in the language of historical
narrative210. This applies as well to the habit of giving
names from literary sources to isolated buildings (Forma
Urbis Romae…) or excavated sites (putting neōn
katalogos on the map). Snodgrass’s sobering remarks
about how archaeologists identify and name “destruction
levels”, pairing them with historical events, are
particularly valuable, all the more so for being rare in the
archaeological literature. Snodgrass does not speak of
Troy, but focuses on how archaeologists interpreted
evidence for destruction levels of Knossos, Thebes, Tell
el-Amarna and particularly Mycenae, where the “granary
destruction”, the accidental fire of one building, endured
for many decades as an example of violence related to the
“Dorian invasion”. Then he concludes: “one can
appreciate the natural yearning on the part of layman and
scholar alike for a historical reconstruction of some kind,
but it can be a disillusioning experience to scrutinize the
foundations of those that are offered” (id. 47).
The traditional, simplistic solution to this
conundrum was to posit that archaeology is ancillary to
history: history gives us the framework, archaeology fills
in the details. However, archaeology is moving on towards
new approaches that are quite incompatible with written
sources211. As is well known, the archaeology of provinces
and the results of regional surveys are often at odds with
texts issued by the elites of the center. New approaches are
even more necessary when dealing with the archaeology
of “interfaces” and “contested peripheries”, caught
between larger states, for which narratives from the

210
SNODGRASS, 1987, p. 62.
211
Analysis in SMALLS, 1995.

46
center(s) are most often biased, contradictory, or absent212.
This explains archaeologists’ recent efforts to deal with
such communities on their own terms, as more than
passive recipients of influences213. Mac Sweeney uses as
analytical tools the binomial “enactments of community”/
“representations of the external other”. Others begin to
study “composite identities”214. The consensus seems to be
that our conception of the events and developments in an
interface ought not to be straitjacketed by our knowledge
of the neighboring civilizations’ richer history.

Archaeologists, who work with material remains as

opposed to linguistic evidence, have often comforted
themselves that their evidence is objective and does not
have a hidden agenda215 as, say, senatorial historiography
does. This may be true for refuse, ecofacts etc. and all
material remains that are unintended, often incidental
results of human activities at a site. But grave offerings, or
house façades, for example, have to do with self-
representation and may seek to reinvent the truth.
Moreover, archaeological evidence becomes information
only when integrated into a theoretical paradigm of some
sort, no matter how basic, a process in which it necessarily
borrows from the subjectivity of the excavator. In this
sense archaeological evidence is not the antipode of texts.
It is not quite the objective half, which coupled with the
subjective half given by written evidence will restitute for
us the historical truth. Many have discussed how Blegen
was pushing the date for the destruction of Troy VIIa (the
Trojan war for him) as far back as possible, so that it could
be closer to the Mycenaean zenith. The same Mycenaean

212
MOUNTJOY, 1998 and CLINE, 2008 respectively, both referring to
the Western Anatolian coast; BLUM 2003, p. 46.
213
e.g. KORFMANN, 1995 and BRYCE, 2006 for Troy, MAC SWEENEY
,2011 for Beycesultan and Aphrodisias, larger context in MAZOYER
,2008a and COLLINS, BACHVAROVA AND RUTHERFORD 2008.
214
GRUEN, 2011.
215
KOSSO, 2001.

47
pottery used to date the respective layer was moved
gradually up from 1240 to 1270216. Evidence, then, is not
collected or interpreted in the absence of expectations and
theoretical paradigms217.

Carmack and Weeks (1981) have proposed seeing the

contradictions between texts and excavated evidence
(called “disjunctions” or “ambiguities”) as some of the
most meaningful issues archaeologists can focus on. But
to spot contradictions between Homer and archaeological
discoveries one would have to be sure they refer to exactly
the same thing. In other words, it is not methodologically
safe to employ texts to understand what archaeological
finds mean, at the very moment when one is using the
finds to understand what the texts are talking about – it
leaves too much room for wishful thinking and self-
fulfilling prophecies. One can begin to match two different
categories of evidence, and evaluate possible
discrepancies, only when satisfactory explanations can be
given of either category solely on their own terms. Until
then, evidence of a different type should only be used for
constructing hypotheses to be tested within the confines of
one category. Philosopher Peter Kosso notes that the
evidence archaeologists use to substantiate a claim about
the human past must not have been gathered to support the
claim, and ought not to be influenced by, or be in
collusion with that claim218. There are ways of using
archaeology to “prove the Iliad right” that are akin to
getting confirmation for the news in the Le Monde from a
radio reporter who actually reads them from the Le
Monde. In Kosso’s terms, that may give us a different
informational link to the event, but not one that is
epistemically independent219. Homer’s poems are not a
216
VANSCHOONWINKEL, 1998, p. 237-238 ; MOUNTJOY, 1999b, p.
297; SHERRATT, 1997, p. 129-130.
217
PAVEL, 2010, p. 37-46, 59-61; id. 2011a ; 2012, p. 43-45.
218
KOSSO, 1995, p. 177, also 2001, p. 81-90.
219
KOSSO, 1995, p. 190.

48
good case study for Carmack and Weeks’s disjunctions
theory, because they are a (poetically prioritized) amalgam
of historical realities from many times and places.
Sometimes, indeed, and especially when it comes to
artefacts, Homer is specific enough for us to be able to
compare the description with its archaeological
counterpart220 and isolate the deviance of one from the
other. But whenever Homer describes events our
assumptions begin to be rooted in both sources, with the
danger of circularity. The safest thing to do on site seems
to be to test hypotheses derived from Homer against the
archaeological record, but with site specific hypotheses
always coming first.

Scholars who have intimately occupied themselves

with Troy have been struggling to liberate Troy from the
obligation to answer Homeric questions. Manfred
Korfmann unequivocally stated that „sofern sich bei
unserer Arbeit [i.e., archaeological excavations] etwas an
Erkenntnissen für die Klassische Philologie ergeben sollte,
dies in Ordnung ist, wenn nicht, dann ebenso“221. Joachim
Latacz announces that “the study of Troy is no longer
dependent on Homer”222, Maureen Basedow wants a
“Troy without Homer”223, and, most recently, Peter
Jablonka asks “what is Troy’s significance beyond
Homeric questions?”224. They all contributed to accredit
the fact that Troy’s importance in modern research is
given not by its role in Homer, but by its uninterrupted bi-
millenary Bronze Age sequence, fundamental for
reconstructing the life of settlements in the Interface. Until
Korfmann, Troy was dug by archaeologists - Schliemann,

220
Depas amphikypellon appears to be such an example, Bloedow,
2007.
221
KORFMANN, 1996, p. 39, with a more ambiguous position in other
publications, e.g. 1986, 2004.
222
LATACZ, 2004, p. 138.
223
BASEDOW, 2007.
224
JABLONKA, 2011a, p. 725, same position in 2011b, p. 2.

49
Dörpfeld, and Blegen – with a preeminent interest in
Greek sites and Greek history. Korfmann reacted to this
and discussed Troy in sharply Anatolian terms. To
mention just one example, he rightly rejected the
misnomer “Grey Minyan” for Troy’s local and
characteristic grey pottery, since that name had unjustified
Greek connotations, and preferred, as did other scholars
non-affiliated with his team, the name Anatolian Grey
Ware. In a similar process, Mountjoy has argued that
Mycenaean pottery from the Anatolian coast should not be
dated any longer in terms of the Mycenaean mainland, but
rather in terms of the local developments of the East
Aegean-West Anatolian interface225. Both Anatolian and
Aegean archaeology are now becoming emancipated from
Homer, dealing with sites for what they are, and not for
their relevance to Homer. Benzi226 is interested in
“Aegean - Anatolian connections in the Late Bronze Age
with, without, and beyond Homer”227). The same
movement in Hittite archaeology was mentioned above228,
and four decades ago saw Dever’s exhortation that
archaeology in Israel should become independent of
Biblical texts229.

III. Archaeology’s next steps

III. 1. Alternatives to Homeric questions. It is hard to

deny that finding archaeological confirmation, however
defined, for written texts produces a certain satisfaction,
not only among the general public but also among scholars
as well. Perhaps it reinforces a faltering trust that we still
are a civilization of the written word whose humanistic
tenets have not been corrupted. It might thus be reassuring
to establish that the myths that have lit the way of
225
MOUNTJOY, 1998, 1999b.
226
BENZI, 2002, 385.
227
cf. BRYCE, 2011, p. 511.
228
GLOTZ, 2011.
229
DEVER, 1972.

50
European civilization were “true”, and not just trading in
the meretricious beauty of artistic fallacies. However, it
becomes apparent that too much energy has been funneled
into answering a question that was, from an archaeological
point of view, incorrectly formulated as follows: has there
been a Trojan war as described by Homer? Prehistoric
archaeology’s answer to this question is, by and large, it
doesn’t matter. This is a false track for archaeology,
Sherratt’s “cul de sac of Homer historicity”230. What
matters is to give (more nuanced) answers to wider and
much more valuable questions such as, what phenomena
are responsible for the almost simultaneous collapse,
around 1200, of the Mycenaean world, of the Hittite
empire, of Ugarit? Who were the Sea Peoples? What were
the Hittites’ relations with their vassals and why were they
uninterested in the trade with the Mycenaeans? Why did
the Hittites not attempt to expand further West into the
Interface, and what drove the Mycenaeans’ expansion
there? What was Troy’s actual role in the trade in the
Interface and beyond? What, if any, was the Mycenaeans’
trade interest in the Black Sea, and how important was
Troy’s location on the Dardanelles? Answers to such
questions will not make Homer’s poetry better than it
already is, and they are not an attempt to make Archaic
Greek poetry fit in the Procrustean bed of archaeological
research in Bronze and Iron Age W Anatolia. But with
these answers, which mostly archaeology can give, Homer
can be more fully defined as the cultural and historical
phenomenon that eventually made of his poems European
foundational myths.
Troy must be framed in an ampler perspective,
encompassing the Troad ; the Interface ; and the
Mycenaean mainland, Thrace, the central Anatolian Hittite
world and the Near East. No one would expect that a
felicitous hit of the spade, or some key artifact is going to
bring us the “truth” about Homer. “Solving” the Trojan

230
SHERRATT, 2005, p. 132.

51
war involves solving an equation with not just one but
many unknowns. To solve it, one needs to supply more
simultaneous equations with some of these unknowns, but
whenever they are found, they generally also include
supplementary unknowns – and so on. The some 150
excavation projects and 100 surface surveys currently
exploring Turkey’s past every summer are constantly
producing new information, equally employed to answer
old questions and raise new ones. The Iliad (and Odyssey)
are so complex they can easily absorb the shock of any
“revelation” and still remain problematic. The archaeology
of a buried Oxford will surely not identify shards of the
bottle from which Alice drank to adjust her height, or the
teeth of the Cheshire cat. But this said, it is possible to
pinpoint a few serendipitous discoveries which would be
welcome to both archaeologists and Homerists and further
our knowledge of Troy.

III.2. Future discoveries. A typical example are the

wrecks. The Uluburun wreck (sunk around 1300) is
fundamental for the study of LBA maritime and terrestrial
trade231 and incidentally it can connect with Homeric
scholarship too: it gave us not only a stone scepter mace
paralleled in Romania and Bulgaria, but also a wooden
diptych writing tablet (cf. Il. 6.168-170). The same for the
cape Gelidonya wreck (a Near Eastern ship sunk around
1200), whose “layer of brushwood dunnage on the hull
[…] explained for the first time the brushwood Odysseus
spread out in the hull of the vessel he built to leave
Calypso’s island, Od. 5.257” (Bass 2010, 800). This latter
wreck also attests to the early presence of Near Eastern
mariners in the Aegean, thereby putting Homer’s mentions
of Phoenicians (id., 801; Il 23.744, cf. Od. 15.415-6) in a
wider perspective. For data on Troy’s trade, a ship found
closer to its harbors may be invaluable. Another lucky
strike would be to find the cemeteries corresponding to

231
PULAK, 2010.

52
Troy’s acropolis. There may be one on the slopes NW of
the citadel232, if not under the concrete of the parking
place for tourists, some 300m from the modern wooden
horse created by Izzet Senemoğlu. Conversely, it would be
fortunate to find the settlements to which the cemeteries of
Beşik Tepe or Müsgebi belonged. One would also like to
find sculptures or frescoes from BA Troy, absent so far --
surely destroyed with the BA palaces from the citadel in
Hellenistic times. Finding any evidence for sealing would
help to convince us that seals such as the Anatolian one
found in a late context (VIIb1), when it was already about
a century old, were actually used for their intended
purpose (some such seals found in Thebes and Mycenae,
where of course they were bound to be misunderstood,
were used as jewelry). Archaeology still gave us no
representation of a scene from the Trojan legend in the
Greek levels of the site233, and no small scale Trojan-
themed souvenir, not even for the Hellenistic period (id.,
408, but “site souvenirs per se did not become common
until the pilgrimage movement in the early Christian
period”, Rose forthcoming). Even without all these, from
cemeteries to souvenirs, the ruins at Hisarlık must have
belonged to an important regional capital with strong
associations with the events sung by Homer.
Tablet caches and other written evidence were
deliberately not mentioned among such archaeological
discoveries. One does not have to abandon hope to find
Troy’s archives (supra), but no archaeological project will
be designed with that in mind, nor will the archaeologists
be the ones to translate and interpret them. Mycenaean
Greece is unlikely to reveal literary texts to complement
the countless inventories known from the Linear B, but
caches like the one found in 1993-1995 in Thebes234 keep
232
BLEGEN, CASKEY AND RAWSON, 1953, 354 sqq. ; BECKS, 2002, p.
300-301.
233
ROSE, 1998, p. 406-407, who however draws attention to the
spectacular sarcophagus from Biga, not far from Troy.
234
LATACZ, 2004, p. 240-247.

53
throwing light on the Mycenaean subtexts in Homer,
backed by the recently discovered Mycenaean palaces in
Iolkos (Jason’s) and in Salamis (Aias’s). The fact that F.
Starke was able to show a Hittite tablet known from 1928
to be the only letter known to us sent by a Mycenaean king
to the Hittite King makes it theoretically possible to
identify others that might mention a conflict over Wilusa
such as the one mentioned in the Tawagalawa letter235.
Watkins236 even saw in a text from Istanuwa, 16th c., the
beginning line of a “Wilusiad” (id., 59) : “when they came
from steep Wilusa”…237 Archaeological field work cannot
be organized around uncovering tablets any more than the
application for an excavation license can revolve around
the avowed goal to find golden jewelry. Rather than
daydream about tablets and gold, the archaeologist should
focus on the often unassuming pottery. It is thus
fundamental to obtain more precise
chronological/typological correlations between Aegean
pottery and Anatolian pottery, as well as between
mainland Mycenaean pottery and Interface Mycenaean
pottery. By the same token, the study of Anatolian Grey
Ware must catch up with the long debated Mycenaean
pottery, so that the former can be better understood both in
the Troad (perhaps future excavations in Bozköy - Hanay
Tepe, abandoned in VIg-h/VIIa judging from an
interesting 2009 survey, Blum et al. 2011) but also in areas
where it was exported, or just transported, including
Canaanite sites238. Advances have been made, and more
are expected in understanding the ratio of locally made
versus imported Mycenaean pottery, and, related to that,
what Mycenaean pottery is imported from the mainland
and what from Anatolian intermediaries. Troy appears to
have developed a peculiar interest in Aegean shapes by
235
LATACZ, 2004, p. 243.
236
WATKINS, 1986, esp. 58-62.
237
But see corrections in STARKE, 1997, p. 473 n.78 and LATACZ,
2004, p.87.
238
Best example being so far Tel Miqne, ALLEN, 1994.

54
copying what other Anatolian settlements in the Izmir area
were already doing239. Pottery provides the elementary and
indispensable basis for modeling the interaction between
Anatolian, Interface Mycenaeans and the Eastern
Mycenaean populations. Good case studies may be sites
such as Larisa, Panaztepe, Sardis, Limantepe-Clazomenai
and Bademgediği Tepe, which yielded both Mycenaean
finds (including imported and locally produced pottery)
and Anatolian Grey Ware.

I have tried to review the contribution of archaeology,

and particularly Anatolian archaeology, to the Homeric
debate, and to highlight its strong points, its limitations,
and some possible next steps. Separating Homeric studies
and the archaeology of Troy has been painful, but the
process is well underway, and as soon as archaeology
becomes fully emancipated, it is bound to return to the
Iliad and offer to it the best possible complement. That is
because Troy has the unique fate of being not only a
leading site for the understanding of the whole Aegean-
Anatolian interface and of the Late Bronze Age in the
Eastern Mediterranean in general, but also a European
and, with Xerxes and Mehmed the Conqueror piously
visiting it, also an Anatolian, lieu de mémoire.

Acknowledgments : My warmest thanks to the editor,

Michel Mazoyer, for the invitation to contribute to this
volume. The author has excavated in Troy 2005-2010 with
the international Troia Project, led by Ernst Pernicka
(project director) with Peter Jablonka and Charles Brian
Rose, to whom I have a debt of gratitude. I am very
grateful to Zoe Petre, Mario Benzi, and Stephen Durnford
for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper,
and to Joachim Latacz who kindly sent me some of his
very recent publications. The responsibility for the

239
PAVUK, 2005.

55
opinions expressed here, and any potential inaccuracies,
remains my own.

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