Troy is yet to be found

When I was thirteen, The Gold of Troy by Robert Pane caught my imagination with its tale of Heinrich Schliemann and his discovery of the ruins of Troy in 1870. I was struck not just by the discovery, but how he discovered it, as a rank amateur, not an archaeologist. He was a fan of Homer and followed clues in The Iliad.

When experts later worked at that site in Hisarlik, they found the remains of many cities built on top of one another. And it turned out that the layer Schliemann had identified as Homer’s Troy was a thousand years older than the time described in the story. The physical record had been damaged by the meddling of amateurs. But the identification of the Hisarlik ruins as Troy stuck. There was no reason to keep looking. That was the end of the question. But maybe the question should be opened again.

Doing research for an historical novel I’m writing (What Cassandra Didn’t Know), I noted that the Scaean Gate was on the south side of Troy. That was the main gate from the ramparts of which Priam and others watched the battles raging in the plain below, which led to the beach with the fortified Greek encampment and a thousand Greek ships.

The sea was to the south of the city, not the west, which is the case at Hisarlik.

Then it occurred to me that Troy had no navy. There’s no mention in The Iliad of Trojan ships, not even fishing boats. The only exception is the ships that Paris used to abduct Helen, which were built expressly for that voyage (V 62–3). There’s no mention of trade by sea or of the impact of the Greek presence blocking the arrival of food or supplies by sea. Life goes on normally inside Troy for ten years of war, with no sign of shortages.

The Trojans never tried to attack the Greeks from the sea, even though the Greeks would have been vulnerable from that direction because their ships were beached and raised on props. In book 2 of The Iliad, their ships are described as rotting from years of disuse.

Hisarlik is just three miles from the entrance to the Dardanelles, with the Black Sea beyond. That would be an excellent strategic position for a city whose strength and wealth were based on sea power and trade by sea. But Troy was not such a city. Its allies were all in Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey. None were from the Aegean islands. Apparently, its trade was with the interior, over land routes.

Troy had no harbor, just a beach. When the Greeks arrived, they pulled their ships onto the beach rather than anchor them. A city in an ideal position to control the Dardanelles would build a port nearby, with docks and anchorage, and, if necessary, would dredge a harbor. The Trojans did not do that. Hence, I suspect that they were not in that strategic position. They were somewhere else, where the sea was south of them.

The geography mentioned in the Iliad includes Mount Ida and two rivers, Scamander and Simois. Over the course of three thousand years, rivers may change course or dry up. Mountains don’t move. According to The Iliad, Mount Ida abutted Troy, to the north of it, opposite the Scaean Gate. That mountain is twenty miles southeast of Hisarlik, near the coast of the Edremit Gulf. Its peak is 5800 feet high. Its drainage is to the south into the gulf. Mount Ida covers a large area. The national park that includes much but not all of the mountain extends over 82 square miles.

Just south of Mount Ida, beaches extend along the coastline of the Edremit Gulf. The island of Lesbos is south from there.

The Importance of Mount Ida in the Defense of Troy

I’m not an archaeologist. Like Schliemann, all I know about this subject is what I’ve read in The Iliad in English translation. But to write an historical novel set there and then, I need a location for Troy that makes my story plausible.

The city that once stood at Hisarlik could easily have been surrounded, cut off from supplies and forced to submit. But the Greeks didn’t surround and besiege Troy. Rather, they repeatedly faced the Trojan army on the plain between the city and the beach. If Mount Ida, covering over eighty square miles, had abutted Troy to its north, the mountain would have served as an extension of the city’s defenses, making the city impossible to surround and enabling the Trojans to hold out for ten years.

We know from the example of Thermopylae the importance of terrain in ancient warfare. When both sides have no guns (just sword, arrow, and spear), a few warriors can hold off many on a narrow passage or mountain trail. The defenders have a huge advantage.

In addition, Mount Ida would have been a reliable source for fresh water and would also have served as pasturage for goats, sheep, and cattle. Multiple paths through the mountain forest would have enabled Troy to stay in contact with allies for reinforcements, food, and other supplies. Paris was rescued by Priam’s head herdsman and served as a shepherd on Mount Ida.

Chariots, the most fearsome weapon of the time, worked well on flat open ground, like that between Troy and the beach. But they were useless in forested mountain terrain. Neither army in the Trojan War used cavalry, nor is there any mention of reconnaissance by horseback. Odysseus and Diomedes conducted their spying on foot. At that time, the gear necessary for riders to reliably control horses had not yet been developed.

Thebe, the birthplace of Hector’s wife Andromache, and Lyrnessus, birthplace of Achilles’ trophy slave Briseis, both may have been southeast of Mount Ida at the northeastern end of the Gulf of Endremit. If Troy were south of Ida, near the beaches of the Gulf, it would have been close to those towns, both of which were sacked by Achilles early in the war. Homer refers to “Troy where the soil is rich” (III 257), which sounds not at all like Hisarlik but accurately describes the Plain of Thebe, which in ancient times was renowned for its fertile food-producing fields. (The Wikiipedia article on Thebe cites Herodotus, Xenophon, Polybius and Livy for that description).

So what was the city three miles from the Dardanelles that became the ruins at Hisarlik? Perhaps Dardanus, a close ally of Troy, which was located in that vicinity and for which the Dardanelles were named. Homer distinguished between the Dardenoi and the Trojans. But the royal houses were linked by way of a common ancestor named Dardanus. Aeneas was a Dardanian and a second cousin to Priam’s children. The city of Dardanus was older than Troy, which was built just a few generations before the war. Having a common culture with Troy, it would likely have been constructed in a similar way.

I wish I could talk to Schliemann about this …

PS —

A reader asked if I’ve ever been to Hisarlik. I haven’t and would like to go.

I’d also like to go to the eastern end of the Gulf of Edremit, near Mount Ida, and stumble upon the real site of Troy.

For now, I’m enjoying rereading The Iliad and savoring the related references, such as Agamemnon’s repeated prayer — “Father Zeus watching over us from Ida” (III 276, 320).

PPS —

Why should I care?

The first draft of my Cassandra novel began, “The walled and well-armed city of Troy lay near the northeast corner of the Aegean Sea, near the entrance to the Black Sea, through which vital grain shipments from Scythian lands flowed to Greece. And the fate of that strategic city depended on the delayed menstruation of a girl nearly sixteen years old.”

Now that paragraph reads, “Through alliances, a previously insignificant city in the shadow of Mount Ida, on the Edremit Gulf, was rapidly becoming a major power. Such were the benefits of the king having dozens of marriageable daughters. But now one of the most important of those alliances was in jeopardy because of the delayed menstruation of a girl nearly sixteen years old.”