page_title: Troy
section_title: Homeric Troy
hierarchical_section_title: Troy / Homeric Troy
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Landkarte der Troas English: Map of the Troad, including the site of Troy. Note that the modern coastline has been altered to show a bay at the mouth of Scamander where the Greek ships would have been. Nederlands: ligging en omgeving van Troje
context_page_description: Troy was a city in the northwest of Asia Minor, southwest of the Canakkale Strait, south of the mouth of the Dardanelles and northwest of Mount Ida. The location in the present day is the hill of Hisarlik and its immediate vicinity. In modern scholarly nomenclature, the Ridge of Troy borders the Plain of Troy, flat agricultural land, which conducts the lower Scamander River to the strait. Troy was the setting of the Trojan War described in the Greek Epic Cycle, in particular in the Iliad, one of the two epic poems attributed to Homer. Metrical evidence from the Iliad and the Odyssey suggests that the name Ἴλιον formerly began with a digamma: Ϝίλιον; this is also supported by the Hittite name for what is thought to be the same city, Wilusa. According to archaeologist Manfred Korfmann, Troy's location near the Aegean Sea, as well as the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea, made it a hub for military activities and trade, and the chief site of a culture that Korfmann calls the "Maritime Troja Culture", which extended over the region between these seas.
context_section_description: Homeric Troy refers primarily to the city described in the Iliad, one of the earliest literary works in Europe. This is a long originally oral poem in its own dialect of ancient Greek in dactylic hexameter, in tradition composed by a blind poet of the Anatolian Greek coast, Homer. It covers the 10th year of a war against Troy conducted by a coalition of Achaean, or Greek, states under the leadership of a high king, Agamemnon of Mycenae. The city was defended by a coalition of states in the Dardanelles and West Anatolian region under another high king, Priam, whose capital was Troy. The cause of the war was the elopement of Agamemnon's brother's wife, Helen, with Paris, a prince of Troy. 
  After the literary time of the poem, the city was destroyed when the Greeks pretended to leave after secreting a squad of soldiers in a gigantic wooden horse monument, which the Trojans brought inside the walls. In the dead of night they exited the horse and opened the gates to the Achaeans nearby. Troy was burned and the population slaughtered, although many had other fates.
  Besides the Iliad, there are references to Troy in the other major work attributed to Homer, the Odyssey, as well as in other ancient Greek literature (such as Aeschylus's Oresteia). The Homeric legend of Troy was elaborated by the Roman poet Virgil in his Aeneid. The fall of Troy with the story of the Trojan Horse and the sacrifice of Polyxena, Priam's youngest daughter, is the subject of a later Greek epic by Quintus Smyrnaeus ("Quintus of Smyrna").
  The Greeks and Romans took for a fact the historicity of the Trojan War and the identity of Homeric Troy with a site in Anatolia on a peninsula called the Troad (Biga Peninsula). Alexander the Great, for example, visited the site in 334 BC and there made sacrifices at tombs associated with the Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroclus. In Piri Reis book Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of the Sea, 1521) which details many ports and islands of the Mediterranean, the description of the island called Tenedos mentions Troy and its ruins, lying on the shore opposite of the island.
  The fact that the topography around the site matches the topographic detail of the poem gives to the poem a lifelike quality not equaled by other epics. In the Iliad, the Achaeans set up their camp near the mouth of the River Scamander (modern Karamenderes), where they beached their ships. The city of Troy itself stood on a hill, across the plain of Scamander, where the battles of the Trojan War took place. The site of the ancient city is some 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) from the coast today, but 3,000 years ago the mouths of Scamander were much closer to the city, discharging into a large bay that formed a natural harbor, which has since been filled with alluvial material. Recent geological findings have permitted the identification of the ancient Trojan coastline, and the results largely confirm the accuracy of the Homeric geography of Troy.
  In November 2001, the geologist John C. Kraft from the University of Delaware and the classicist John V. Luce from Trinity College, Dublin, presented the results of investigations, begun in 1977, into the geology of the region. They compared the present geology with the landscapes and coastal features described in the Iliad and other classical sources, notably Strabo's Geographia, and concluded that there is a regular consistency between the location of Schliemann's Troy and other locations such as the Greek camp, the geological evidence, descriptions of the topography and accounts of the battle in the Iliad.
  The Dark Age following the fall of Troy is called so because for a time writing in Greece disappeared. There are consequently no historians from the period. Writing reappeared in the Archaic Period, after which, in the Classical Period, many historians turned their pens to record such histories of the Trojan War as had survived in oral tradition. They offer a span of about two centuries from the 1334 BC date of Duris of Samos to the 1135 BC date of Ephoros of Kyme in Aeolis. Blegen preferred the 1184 BC date of Eratosthenes
caption: Map of the Troad, including the site of Troy
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