Homer's Troy

Abstract

A THIRD, and possibly final, stage in the archaeo-logical exploration of Troy has been reached with the excavations organised by the University of Cincinnati under the field direction of Dr. Carl Bleger, formerly assistant director of the American School of Archseology at Athens. It is remarkable that of the three great sites of Homeric civilisation, Troy, Mycenae and Tiryns, the first-named, which inspired the excavation of the archaeological sites of the eastern Mediterranean, should still, at the last, afford a problem in the exact determination of its chronological and cultural relations. Schliemann's final identification of the Sixth City at Hissarlik, and not the Second, as the Homeric Troy in 1890, and Dorpfeld's demonstration of a sequence of nine phases in the history of the city, extending from the Early Bronze Age to Roman times four years later, satisfied a generation which knew not Knossos and the history of Helladic culture. It has since become evident that the Sixth City, notwithstanding Mycenaean contacts, is neither completely contemporary with, nor its culture identical with that of, the Mycenaean age. The work of the American expedition, as is indicated by Mr. E. J. Forsdyke in his lucid summary of the present position of the archaeological and historical problem in The Times of May 22, has confirmed this by showing that the Sixth City goes back to Pre-Mycenaean Middle Helladic, and that “the Achaean moment”, the period when the Achaean military aristocracy held sway, fortified by matrimonial alliances with Mycenaean heiresses, which corresponds with the conditions of the Homeric world, is represented by an inferior reconstruction after the Sixth City had been destroyed by earthquake about 1300 B.C., in which the walls were repaired in rougher masonry and the houses irregularly built with odd stones from the ruins. About 1200 B.C. this Seventh City was destroyed by fire. It was rebuilt and inhabited, presumably, by the Achaean conquerors.