The Trojan War

About the same time as the run-up to the Battle of Qadesh, the Hittites were also busy on a second front, in western Anatolia, where they were trying to contain rebellious subjects whose activities were apparently being underwritten by the Mycenaeans.23 This may be one of the earliest examples that we have of one government deliberately engaging in activities designed to undermine another (think Iranian support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, thirty-two hundred years after the Battle of Qadesh).

It is during the reign of the Hittite king Muwattalli II, in the early- to mid-thirteenth century BC, that we first learn from texts kept in the state archives at the capital city of Hattusa of a renegade Hittite subject named Piyamaradu who was attempting to destabilize the situation in the region of Miletus in western Anatolia. He had already successfully defeated a vassal king of the Hittites in the same region, a man named Manapa-Tarhunta. It is thought that Piyamaradu was probably acting on behalf of, or in collusion with, the Ahhiyawans (i.e., the Bronze Age Mycenaeans).24

Piyamaradu’s rebellious activities continued during the reign of the next Hittite king, Hattusili III, in the mid-thirteenth century BC, as we know from correspondence called by scholars the “Tawagalawa Letter.” The Hittite king sent the letter to an unnamed king of Ahhiyawa, whom he addresses as “Great King” and “brother,” implying a level of equality between the two of them. We have already seen that similar terms were employed when the Egyptian pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaten were writing to the kings of Babylonia, Mitanni, and Assyria a century or so earlier. The interpretation of these texts has provided important insights into the status of the Aegean world and Near Eastern affairs at this time.25

The Tawagalawa Letter is concerned with the activities of Piyamaradu, who continued to raid Hittite territory in western Anatolia, and who, we are now told, had just been granted asylum and traveled by ship to Ahhiyawan territory—probably an island off the western coast of Anatolia.26 We are also introduced, on what was once the third page/tablet of the letter (the first two are missing), to Tawagalawa himself, who is identified as the brother of the Ahhiyawan king, and who was present in western Anatolia at that moment, recruiting individuals hostile to the Hittites. Intriguingly, in an indication that relations between the Hittites and the Mycenaeans had previously been better than they were at this point, we are told that Tawagalawa had earlier ridden (“mounted the chariot”) with the personal charioteer of the Hittite king himself.27 The letter also refers to a dispute between the Mycenaeans and the Hittites over an area known as Wilusa, located in northwestern Anatolia. This region came up in our discussion of the Assuwan Rebellion that took place nearly two hundred years earlier, and it seems that the Hittites and the Mycenaeans were once again at odds over the territory, which is identified by most scholars with Troy and/or the Troad region. Given the date of the letter, in the mid-thirteenth century BC, it is certainly reasonable to wonder whether there is a link to the later Greek legends regarding the Trojan War.28 The tale of the Trojan War, as traditionally related by the blind Greek poet Homer in the eighth century BC, and supplemented by both the so-called Epic Cycle (fragments of additional epic poems now lost) and later Greek playwrights, is well known. Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, sailed from northwestern Anatolia to mainland Greece on a diplomatic mission to Menelaus, the king of Sparta. While there, he fell in love with Menelaus’s beautiful wife, Helen. When Paris returned home, Helen accompanied him— either voluntarily, according to the Trojans, or taken by force, according to the Greeks. Enraged, Menelaus persuaded his brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and the leader of the Greeks, to send an armada of a thousand ships and fifty thousand men against Troy to get Helen back. In the end, after a ten-year-long war, the Greeks were victorious. Troy was sacked, most of its inhabitants were killed, and Helen returned home to Sparta with Menelaus.

Was there really a Trojan War? Did Troy even exist?

The ancient Greeks themselves were not entirely certain when the Trojan War had taken place—there are at least thirteen different guesses as to the date made by the ancient Greek writers.29

By the time that Heinrich Schliemann went looking for the site of Troy in the mid-nineteenth century AD, most modern scholars believed that the Trojan War was only a legend, and that the site of Troy had never existed. Schliemann set out to prove them wrong. To everyone’s surprise, he succeeded. The story has been told many times and therefore will not be repeated in detail here.30 Suffice it to say that he found nine cities, one on top of another, at the site of Hisarlik (Turkish Hisarlık), which is now accepted by most scholars as the location of ancient Troy, but was unable to determine which of the nine cities had been Priam’s Troy.

Since Schliemann’s initial excavations, there have been several additional expeditions to Troy, among them those by his architect, Wilhelm Dörpfeld; by Carl Blegen and the University of Cincinnati in the 1930s; and finally by Manfred Korfmann and now Ernst Pernicka and Tübingen University from the late 1980s until today.

The destruction of the sixth city—Troy VI—is still a matter of debate. Initially dated to ca. 1250 BC, it was probably actually destroyed a bit earlier, about 1300 BC.31 This was a wealthy city, with imported objects from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Cyprus, as well as from Mycenaean Greece. It was also what one might call a “contested periphery”—that is, it was located both on the periphery of the Mycenaean world and on the periphery of the Hittite Empire—and was thus caught between two of the great powers of the ancient Mediterranean Bronze Age world.

Dörpfeld believed that the Mycenaeans had captured this city (Troy VI) and burned it to the ground, and that it was this event that formed the basis of Homer’s epic tales. Blegen, digging several decades later, disagreed, and published what he said was indisputable evidence for destruction not by humans, but by an earthquake. His argument included positive evidence, such as walls knocked out of line and collapsed towers, as well as negative evidence, for he found no arrows, no swords, no remnants of warfare.32 In fact, it is now clear that the type of damage that Blegen found was similar to that seen at many sites in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, including Mycenae and Tiryns on mainland Greece. It is also clear that these earthquakes did not all take place at the exact same time during the Late Bronze Age, as will be seen below.

Blegen also thought that the following city, Troy VIIa, was a more likely candidate for Priam’s Troy. This city was probably destroyed ca. 1180 BC, and may have been overwhelmed by the Sea Peoples rather than by the Mycenaeans, although this is by no means certain. We shall leave the story here for the moment and pick it up again in the next chapter, when we discuss the events of the twelfth century BC.