The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (39 page)

In fact, Schliemann’s next major venture was to excavate Mycenae, in southern Greece, the home of Agamemnon, the Bronze Age king who led the expedition to Troy; here he uncovered still more treasure and revealed again that, where archaeology was concerned, his intuition was awesome. A dig at Tiryns, the home of King Diomedes (another Homeric hero), in 1884 uncovered some of the finest remains of Bronze Age civilization to date.

In 1889 Schliemann returned to Hissarlik and renewed his search for evidence of Homer’s Troy. What he found, in 1890, was at once exciting and depressing. Outside the mound, and well beyond the limits of what he had believed to be Homer’s Troy, he came upon the remains of a large building that in turn contained the remains of pottery that was unmistakably Mycenaean. The conclusion was obvious: he had sliced straight through the Troy he was looking for. In the following year,
Schliemann died of a stroke, collapsing in the street; his death frustrated his plans for still more ambitious excavations.

Schliemann had indeed proved that Troy existed – ancient records make it clear that there was simply no other great city in the area. But of the nine cities that had been uncovered, which one was it? Schliemann had been convinced that it was the second from the bottom – because it showed signs of having been destroyed by fire – and in order to reach it, he had ordered his workmen to slice a huge trench through the seven layers of ruins that lay above. He was to learn too late that
his
Troy was a thousand years too old and that his brutal methods had destroyed a large part of the city he was looking for. But again, which of the other eight
was
Homer’s Troy?

Schliemann’s collabourator, Wilhelm Dörpfeld, continued and completed Schliemann’s work. The discovery of the large building containing Mycenaean pottery – probably a royal hall – had furnished him with the clue he needed. It indicated that the walls of Homer’s Troy extended well beyond the boundaries of the mound of Hissarlik. And when Dörpfeld excavated at the southern edge of the mound, he soon uncovered walls greater than any Schliemann had found. This – the sixth city from the bottom – was the city they had all been looking for. These walls had a slight inward slope, just as Homer had indicated in the
Iliad
(Patroclus had made a determined attempt to scale them), and there was a mighty tower that must have been about sixty feet high before it had been reduced by more than half. There was a gate in the east wall and the remains of another tower, built of limestone blocks. Inside the walls he uncovered the ruins of five large houses and deduced that the citadel had risen in concentric circles. And although “Troy 6” measured only two hundred yards by a hundred and fifty yards, it must have been as impressive as a medieval castle. It was obvious now why the Greeks had failed to take it by storm. It must have towered over the plain of Scamander as Mont Saint Michael still towers over the flat Britanny marshes.

The next great step forward in Mediterranean archaeology was taken by the Englishman Arthur Evans, who began to excavate near the city of Heraklion, on the island of Crete, in 1900 and uncovered the remarkable royal palace at Knossos. He announced this as the palace of the legendary King Minos. According to Greek legend, the king’s wife, Pasiphae, had a taste for bestiality and became pregnant by a bull, giving birth to a monster called the Minotaur, which was half man and half bull. The legend also tells how Minos demanded a yearly tribute of seven youths and seven maidens from Athens and how these were
thrown to the Minotaur, which was kept in a specially built labyrinth. The Greek hero Theseus went to Crete as part of the yearly tribute, killed the Minotaur, and escaped from the labyrinth with the help of a thread, given to him by Minos’s daughter Ariadne. Evans’s excavations revealed pictures of youths and maidens turning somersaults over the back of a bull, suggesting that there had been a bull cult at Knossos. And the mazelike palace was full of symbols of a double-headed axe, known as
labrys
. It began to look as if the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur was based on fact after all. If so, the same could apply to the story of the Trojan War.

One of Evans’s most important discoveries at Knossos was a quantity of clay tablets written in a form of hieroglyphics – actually, two forms, which became known as Linear A and Linear B. Evans was convinced that they were written in the unknown language of the ancient Cretans, which would mean that the Minoan civilization of Crete was not Greek. However, Linear B was deciphered by the scholar Michael Ventris in 1952, eleven years after Evans’s death, and proved to be an early form of Greek. (Linear A remains undeciphered.) And names found in the Linear B tablets included many place-names that had been mentioned in Homer.

Evans’s view dominated British archaeology for many years. An American named Carl Blegen disagreed. His excavations on mainland Greece in the 1920s convinced him that the Greeks had dominated Mediterranean civilization for a very long time indeed – as far back as 1900
BC
. In 1932 he began a new series of excavations at Hissarlik, whose aim was to use the latest dating techniques (which relied heavily on pottery) to try to establish the age of
all
the levels and to learn as much as possible about each.

Blegen was able to establish that the bottom layer dated back as far as the fourth millennium
BC
(Modern dating is 3600.) But when he came to study the sixth Troy, which Dörpfeld had believed to be Homer’s, he reached a conclusion that seemed to contradict Dörpfeld: that it had been destroyed by an earthquake. The walls had crumbled, and in one place the foundations had even shifted. That seemed to rule it out as the Troy burned down by Agamemnon. And Dörpfeld, who visited the site in 1935, had to agree. Blegen dated Troy 6 about 1260
BC
, possibly ten years earlier.

But at the next layer, which he called 7a (because he found many subordinate layers in the course of his digging – a total of no less than fifty), he found something that looked much more promising. The streets of 7a were a kind of shantytown, where there had formerly been
houses of the nobility, now there were cramped “bungalows”. It looked as if all the people who normally lived outside Troy had been crowded into its confines – which is what you would expect in a siege. Inside the gate was a building that Blegen called the “snack bar” – a combination of bakery and wine shop. (Blegen imagined the Homeric heroes rushing in there after battle to refresh themselves.) Moreover, this Troy
had
been burned. He found smashed skulls, charred skeletons, and an arrowhead. It was this that led Blegen to announce triumphantly, “The sack of Troy is a historical fact”.

There was one obvious objection to this shantytown being Homer’s Troy: if the walls had been badly damaged by earthquake at some earlier stage, then surely the Greeks would have had no trouble in conquering the unprotected citadel? But closer examination disposed of this objection. Although the walls had been damaged, the circuit still remained complete; they would still have been a formidable obstacle. Many scholars were convinced that Blegen had found the Troy of the
Iliad.

But other objections began to appear. There
was
evidence of burning in Troy 6 – Dörpfeld had noted it at the turn of the century. What is more, the “bungalows” and the “snack bar” had been built on the sites of the noble houses. But the
Iliad
is full of noblemen and women. Surely, the obvious scenario is that Troy 6 – “earthquake Troy” – was the Troy besieged by the Greeks, and that when it fell, its noblemen were slaughtered; that is why their houses gave way to lesser structures.

It is possible, however, that an earthquake caused the downfall of Homer’s Troy. It has even been suggested that the story of the wooden horse may be a “folk memory” of this event. The sea-god Neptune (Poseidon) was often worshiped in the form of a horse and was supposed to be the master of horses. He was also the god of earthquakes. Suppose a great earthquake occurred in the tenth year of the war, which shook the walls and destroyed some of the noble houses in the citadel. And suppose the Greeks seized this opportunity to scale the walls – perhaps even using a siege engine that looked not unlike a horse?

What we
do
know is that the palaces of these Greek heroes – Agamemnon and Nestor and Diomedes – were themselves destroyed half a century later (about 1200
BC
), probably by mysterious raiders known as the “sea peoples”. So the mighty Achaean civilization was brought to its knees not long after it had destroyed Troy. Writing still did not exist, except on clay tablets (and they were used only for making lists or writing letters, not for preserving poetry); but the stories of Troy and its heroes lived on in the memories of the bards. Centuries passed; the Mediterranean was plunged into a dark age. Finally, writing in its
modern form – with paper and ink – was invented and at last the great epics were written down. Apart from the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, there were other epic poems – the
Thebais
, about the siege of Thebes and the
Cypria
, about how Paris stole Helen – and comic epics like the
Margites
(whose hero is a fool) and the unpronounceable
Batrachomyomachia
, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice. All these are attributed to Homer. Yet since scholars are inclined to date writing in Greece as late as 650
BC
, this means that Homer may have been alive six centuries after the fall of Troy.

So far, we have been obliged to admit that there is not the slightest scrap of real evidence for the siege of Troy, as described by Homer. Schliemann claimed to have found the jewels of Helen and the mask of Agamemnon, and Blegen claimed to have found the palace of King Nestor at Pylos. This may all have been wishful thinking – in fact, it undoubtedly
was
in the case of Schliemann. But confirmation of the Trojan War and its heroes was to come from a completely unexpected source.

In 1834 a young Frenchman named Charles Texier was riding through central Turkey when he heard of some ruins near the village of Bogazköy. They proved to be the gigantic remains of an earlier civilization, with tremendous walls and magnificent ruined buildings ornamented with winged demons and unknown hieroglyphs. It took half a century before it was recognized that these were the remains of a mighty empire that had once extended from Asia Minor down to Syria – the empire of the people known as the Hittites, who had once attacked Babylon. Their empire, like that of the Greeks, collapsed about 1200
BC
; but two centuries earlier it had been one of the greatest nations of the Middle East. The period of the fall of Troy had been the period of the slow disintegration of the Hittite empire. Moreover, most of Asia Minor had been a part of that empire. So Troy was, in a sense, a Hittite town.

The ruins discovered by Texier were those of the Hittite capital, Hattusas, and in excavations undertaken between 1906 and 1908, the archaeologist Hugo Winkler found a mighty library of clay tablets, some in Hittite and some in Akkadian, the language in which diplomacy was conducted. Deciphered during the First World War, the tablets, from the Hittite equivalent of the foreign office, gave a detailed impression of the working of Hittite foreign policy.

These documents provided some fascinating glimpses into Near Eastern history. They revealed, for example, that after the death (around 1360
BC
) of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen (he died of a blow to the head at the age of eighteen), his widow, Enhosnamon,
wrote to the emperor of the Hittites, Suppiluliumas, requesting a husband. An ambassador was sent to Egypt and was there shown tablets containing details of an old treaty between Egypt and the kingdom of Hatti (the land of the Hittites); this convinced him of their good faith, and a prince named Zannanza was sent to Egypt. However, the high priest Ay wanted to marry the widow, and Zannanza was murdered – which caused a diplomatic crisis. All this was told in a document by the son of Suppiluliumas, King Mursilis II.

Was there anything about Troy or the Mycenaean civilization in these amazing records? In 1924 the Swiss historian Emile Forrer announced that he had found references to a country named
Ahhiyawa
, somewhere to the west, and he identified this as meaning “Achaia-land” – Homer always referred to the Greeks as Achaeans, or Achaiwoi. And although a philologist named Ferdinand Sommer criticized Forrer’s findings in a 1932 book entitled
The Ahhiyawa Documents
, Forrer’s case remains remarkably convincing.

Moreover, in 1963 an archaeological dig at Thebes (northwest of Athens) revealed more Hittite documents dating from the right period. Oddly enough, some of these were from the Hittite “foreign office” to the king of Ugarit, the great trading centre in northern Syria. There were also seals from Babylon, which research has shown to have been plundered from the temple of Marduk, sacked by the Assyrians around 1225
BC
. It seems that the Assyrians, who were gaining power in the area and were therefore enemies of the Hittites, regarded the Greeks as allies. So it appears certain that the Hittites were aware of the Greeks (a fact that has been denied by some of Forrer’s critics). In some Linear B tablets, Greece is called Achaiwia, which sounds very like the Hittite Ahhiyawa.

What also emerges from the Hittite records is that the Ahhiyawans controlled some territory of the coast of Asia Minor, including a city called Millawanda or Milawata. Now on the coast of Asia Minor, some two hundred miles south of Troy, there was a Greek-controlled city called Miletus, earlier known as Milatos. Geographical accounts make it clear that Miletus is Milawata. And since the Hittite records refer to the land of the Ahhiyawa as “overseas” from Miletus, this seems to suggest that it
is
“Achaiwia” or Achaea – that is, mainland Greece. Relations between the Miletan Greeks and the Hittites were basically friendly, although Miletus was sacked by the Hittites in 1315
BC
in the course of a quarrel.