The Mask of Troy (50 page)

I first visited Troy as an archaeology student in 1984, when the custodian allowed me to sleep under the eaves of the old excavation house next to the site. That night I wandered alone among the ruins, and knelt at the spot where Heinrich Schliemann uncovered the fabulous ‘Treasure of Priam’ in 1873. When I was there it had been almost half a century since the last excavations, and to visit Troy was to enter the world of Schliemann, to see the site as I imagined he had seen it for the last time in 1890 shortly before his death. I felt the same when I visited the site again while writing this novel, to view the results of renewed excavations: Schliemann’s personality remains embedded in Troy like another layer in the archaeology. Without Schliemann, there might have been no ‘Troy’ in the popular imagination; it was his unique vision, his belief in the truth of the Trojan War and in Homer, that gives the ruins such power today.

Schliemann again followed ancient sources when he went to Greece to excavate the Bronze Age citadel of Mycenae, stronghold of Agamemnon in Homer’s
Iliad
. The second century AD travel writer Pausanias wrote that Agamemnon had been buried inside the walls, and just within the massive stone ramparts Schliemann found the famous ‘grave circle’ with its shaft graves, containing a treasure that exceeded even his finds at Troy. Unlike the ‘Treasure of Priam’, which proved to be from the third millennium BC, centuries older than the likely date of the Trojan War - about 1200 BC - there was little doubt in Schliemann’s mind that the treasures from the Shaft Graves were Late Bronze Age, dating to the likely time of Agamemnon.

The excavations in 1876 were supervised on behalf of the Greek Government by Panagiotis Stamatakis, who was in frequent conflict with Schliemann over his methods. Schliemann’s book
Mycenae
(1878) conveys his excitement: he found a rock-cut grave, the first ‘sepulchre’, but was forced by heavy rain to abandon it without - he claims - reaching the burials, only returning to it several weeks later after having uncovered other shaft graves and a huge wealth of gold, confirming that he had indeed found the tombs of royalty. In late November he reached the bottom of the first grave and found the famous ‘Mask of Agamemnon’, lifting it and claiming to see a skull which crumbled away on exposure to air. In the same shaft were two other bodies, one bizarrely deformed. Schliemann telegrammed the King of Greece to announce the discovery, later rendered in perhaps the most thrilling catch-phrase in the annals of archaeology: ‘today I gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.’

Whether or not Schliemann dug secretly at Mycenae is unknown. The fictional account in the Prologue draws inspiration from Schliemann’s own account of excavating the Treasure of Priam at Troy three years earlier, when he claimed he saw gold, dismissed the workers and dug out the treasure himself, his wife Sophia by his side (
Troy and its Remains
, 1875). Schliemann felt compelled to defend himself against claims that he made a ‘traffic’ of treasures (
Mycenae
, p. 66). There is little doubt that he embellished aspects of his accounts, and that his excavation techniques sometimes did not meet the standards of the time. Schliemann’s own story mirrors the uncertainties and fascination of Troy itself. Like the flawed ancient heroes he worshipped, like Agamemnon himself, Schliemann is best seen as he saw those heroes, as a character shrouded in myth but bedded in a brilliant reality, one that shines through from those extraordinary days of discovery in the 1870s when his vision entranced the world.

 

The present-day excavations at Troy in this novel are fictitious and unrelated to the renewed programme of investigations carried out at Troy since the 1980s. Those investigations have shed remarkable new light on Troy and its environs, and suggest how much remains to be discovered. The Bronze Age beachline in the Plain of Troy has been conjectured, as well as the likely location of the harbour for sailing ships at Beşik Bay, on the Aegean coast opposite the island of Tenedos (Bozcaade). The overlapping shipwrecks in this novel are fictional, but are based on my experiences diving on shipwrecks in the Aegean ranging in date from the Bronze Age to the twentieth century. The shell-first construction technique of the galley is seen in a late Bronze Age merchantman excavated off south-west Turkey, and in Egyptian boats. The 1915 wreck is based on the famous Turkish minelayer
Nusret
, a full-scale replica of which can be seen at the Çanakkale naval museum. Unexploded mines and other ordnance from the 1915 Gallipoli campaign still litter the sea bed in the Dardanelles and have frequently been destroyed by Turkish navy disposal teams.

At Troy, I have imagined the fictional house excavation taking place close to the northern wall of the late Bronze Age citadel where structures may remain buried. The features of the house are based on other late Bronze Age buildings at Troy, including the sloping walls. Photographs of these structures can be seen on my website
www.davidgibbins.com
. The remains of the beacon pyre are fictional, though there is much destruction debris and evidence of burning. The wall-painting of the lyre-player is inspired by an actual fresco of a lyre-player found at the Mycenaean palace of Pylos in Greece, though without an inscription; as yet no inscription has been found to suggest a date for Homer as early as the late Bronze Age.

The passageway and chamber beneath Troy in this novel are also fictional. However, an extraordinary discovery in the 1990s was a water chamber and a complex of tunnels, totalling about 160 metres in length, beyond the south-western edge of the citadel. The idea of a large round chamber derives from the ‘beehive’ or ‘tholos’ tombs of the Aegean Bronze Age, the most spectacular of which is the structure at Mycenae that Schliemann dubbed the ‘Treasury of Atreus’. My idea that structures such as these may have been used as arsenals is consistent with the highly centralized control over bronze-working evidenced in the Mycenaean Linear B archives, and the known example of a strongroom used to store ingots in the Minoan Palace of Zakros on Crete.

Bronze arrowheads have been found at Troy, and the Mycenaean arrowheads described in chapter 3 can be seen in the British Museum. Iron-making spread across Anatolia and the Aegean in the final quarter of the second millenium BC, first producing high-status blades and eventually spearheads and arrowheads. The spread has been thought of as a slow process because of the expertise needed, but a perspicacious ruler could have seen the potential and seized on the technology to gain ascendancy in a long-standing conflict, potentially tipping the balance in a siege such as that described by Homer at Troy.

 

The story of the Trojan Horse does not appear in the
Iliad
, and is only mentioned three times in the
Odyssey
, in such a way that the reader was clearly expected to be familiar with it. The story that has come down to us is traditionally ascribed to the
Ilioupersis
- the ‘Fall of Troy’ - by Arctinus, thought by some to have been a pupil of Homer. Only a few lines of that
Ilioupersis
survive among the so-called ‘Trojan cycle’ of epic fragments, though it is possible that the Roman poet Virgil had access to more when he created Book 2 of the
Aeneid
- the account of the Fall of Troy that is the main basis for the story of the Trojan Horse in modern imagination, despite being written over a thousand years after the events it purports to describe. The fictional
Ilioupersis
in this novel fills the gap in Homer’s work; the fictional context of its discovery, a buried library at Herculaneum, forms part of my novel
The Last Gospel
. The idea that the horse should be understood less literally intrigued Homeric scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including the possibility that it was a siege-tower or a ship, or an allegorical manifestation of Poseidon, horse-god as well as god of earthquakes and the sea; as we understand better the natural cataclysm that may have accompanied the Fall of Troy, these ideas may acquire renewed currency.

In ancient tradition the Trojan
palladion
(Latin
palladium
) was a small wooden statue of the god Pallas, equated by the Greeks with the goddess Athene. It was supposedly rescued from Troy and kept in the Temple of Vesta in Rome, and then removed to Constantinople by the emperor Constantine the Great and buried under his column there. The story is full of uncertainty; some in antiquity believed the palladion remained concealed at Troy and was only discovered there in the first century BC (Appian,
Mithridates
53, following Servius). The idea that there were two palladions, a ‘public’ palladion and something hidden, derives from an account by Dionysius of Halicarnassos, writing in the first century BC: ‘Arctinus says that a single palladion was given by Zeus to Dardanos, and that this remained in Ilion (Troy) while the city was being taken, concealed in an inner sanctum; an exact replica had been made of it and placed in a public area to deceive any who had designs on it, and it was this that the Achaeans (Greeks) schemed against and took’ (
Roman Antiquities
1.69.3, trans M.L. West in
Greek Epic Fragments
, Harvard University Press 2003, 151). The tradition that Dardanos - the legendary founder of Troy - received the palladion from Zeus, that it had thus ‘fallen from heaven’, has led to the fascinating theory that the original palladion was meteoritic, consistent with the veneration of meteorites by other early cultures.

The shape that such an object could have taken, worked perhaps by early metallurgists into a powerful symbol, is a matter for conjecture. At Troy, Schliemann discovered many pottery items decorated with incised swastikas, a symbol well-known from India where it was seen as auspicious or generative - the Sanskrit word
swastika
means ‘to be well’. The Troy finds were among the earliest swastikas known, and fuelled an association between these symbols and the theory of an ‘Aryan’ race which came to obsess German nationalists. On the Trojan pottery, both the right-facing swastika and the left-facing version - known in Sanskrit as the
sauwastika
- are seen, with neither clearly more prevalent. However, the most extraordinary find of a swastika from Troy, incised on the vulva of a female idol, is left-facing, and left-facing swastikas can be seen on the wrought-iron gates of Schliemann’s house in Athens, among other emblems derived from Troy. And Schliemann did not only find them at Troy: digging into the first sepulchre at Mycenae, in the same grave where he was to find the Mask of Agamemnon, he discovered several small golden disks decorated with the reverse swastika - just as he had seen on pottery at Troy (
Mycenae
, p. 152). The swastika is visible in reverse through Nazi flags, but it was the right-facing version that had become the symbol of Nazi Germany by the early 1930s.

The Nazi camp in this novel is fictional, as are all the characters portrayed therein. However, the details are based closely on descriptions and photographs of the much larger camp at Bergen-Belsen in the immediate aftermath of its liberation by British troops on 15 April 1945. I have not intentionally used the words of eyewitnesses, though I have tried to convey the language of British soldiers and medical staff at the time. Of huge importance has been the Imperial War Museum, London, for its archive of Belsen and other Holocaust material, and for publications that continue to provide insights, for example into the emergency medical provisions in the first days after liberation and the special care of children. The fictional experiences of the ‘girl with the harp’ draw on actual accounts, including selection at Auschwitz to join the camp orchestra. The archives allow one to move from the sheer enormity of the holocaust to the individual, not only the survivors and liberators but also the perpetrators. Among the shocking revelations in 1945 at Belsen was the role of the female SS auxiliaries. Numbers of SS guards were shot by a British SAS patrol that entered Belsen shortly before liberation, and in the days that followed British troops killed others who tried to escape. Three of the female guards as well as the camp commandant and six others were sentenced to death at the Belsen trial and hanged on 13 December 1945.

The camp at Belsen was liberated by elements of the British 11th Armoured Division, VIII Corps, 2nd Army, who with Canadian 1st Army formed the left hook of the Allied advance into Germany. In February 1945 the British and Canadians fought their last major battle in and around the Reichswald forest, experiencing conditions comparable to the American battles in the Hürtgen Forest over the previous months. The casualty toll of these battles is the backdrop to the insistence in my novel that a battle be avoided in the fictional forest beside the camp, at all costs. Even in April 1945 there were pockets of German resistance that were able to stall the Allied advance for days, not only remnant
Waffen-SS
and
Wehrmacht
but also fresh units such as the
2nd Marine-Infanterie-Division
(remustered
Kriegsmarine
sailors) as well as
Hitler-Jugende
and the
Volkssturm
, the boys and old men who were Hitler’s last reserve. German officers interviewed after the war were derisive of the slow pace of the Allied advance along a wide front, and felt the war could have been won months earlier using spearhead ‘Blitzkrieg’ tactics similar to those the Germans had used in 1940. There is little doubt that one factor behind Allied decision-making was the need to discover Nazi scientific secrets and technology before it was destroyed, or used against them. The activities of covert units such as 30AU - 30 Commando Assault (later ‘Advance’) Unit, the brainchild of Commander Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels - are still shrouded in secrecy, and there can be no certainty how successful the Allies were in revealing the Nazis’ most deadly secrets, particularly biological and chemical weapons.