Did the Trojan War Really Happen?

The Trojan War and the events ensuing thereafter are the subject of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two foundational epics of all Greek and, by extension, western literature. This one war has had more words written about it than probably any other war in the history of humanity. It has been immortalized through songs, poems, novels, and paintings. Yet, here is a startling question: did it ever really happen at all? We know Troy was a real city, but that does not mean the Trojan War itself really happened and very few Homeric scholars would try to argue that the Iliad or the Odyssey in any way resemble historical narratives—yet many laypeople still view them this way.

The real city of Troy

One thing that is certain is that the city of Troy was a real city that existed during the Bronze Age. We know this because the archaeological remains of the city have been extensively excavated by numerous archaeologists over the past century and a half since the site was first identified at Hisarlik in modern-day Turkey in 1865 by the English archaeologist Frank Calvert (lived 1828–1908).

ABOVE: Map retrieved from Wikimedia Commons showing the location of the ancient city of Troy with respect to the Hittite Empire, the major power in Anatolia at the time

Most of the major initial excavations at Hisarlik were conducted by a team led by the German businessman and amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (lived 1822 – 1890) between 1871 and 1890. Schliemann identified nine distinct layers of the ancient city. Unfortunately, Schliemann was reckless in his mad rush to find the lowest layer and, in the process, destroyed most of the upper layers through aggressive tactics, including the extensive use of dynamite.

Later archaeologists since Schliemann’s time have concluded that, of the nine layers he excavated, the destruction of Troy VIIb dates to around the same time that the Trojan War is said to have taken place. The destruction of Troy VIIb appears to have been by fire, which is consistent with an invasion. Therefore, if anything resembling the Trojan War really did take place, Troy VIIb is the best candidate for the city of the Trojan War.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the walls of the acropolis of Troy VII

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a portion of the walls of Troy VII

ABOVE: Archaeological plan retrieved from Wikimedia Commons showing the layout of the citadel of the actual ancient city of Troy

A little injection of healthy skepticism

For most people, this settles it. People just point to the fact that Troy was a real ancient city that existed around the time the Trojan War is supposed to have happened as “proof” that the Trojan War really happened. Unfortunately, here I am going to have to slightly deflate everyone’s hopes that there really was a Trojan War by injecting a little healthy skepticism.

You see, this popular tactic of saying “Troy was a real city, so the Trojan War must have been real” is a bit like pointing to Notre Dame cathedral in Paris as “proof” that Victor Hugo’s famous novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a work of actual history. Quite simply, Troy’s mere existence as a city does not prove that the most famous story associated with it is in any way historical. We must all remember that there is such a thing as historical fiction and fictional stories can become attached to real-world locations.

ABOVE: The existence of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris does not prove the existence of Quasimodo, just like the existence of Troy as a real ancient city does not prove that the Trojan War as described in ancient Greek literary sources was a real historical event.

Many also point to the destruction of Troy VIIb by fire as “proof” that the city was really destroyed by Greek invaders. The problem here is that a fire does not necessarily mean “Greek invaders.” Accidental city-fires have been common throughout history and they were especially common in the ancient world, when fire was the only reliable source of light and heat. We only need to remember the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, the Great Fire of London in September 1666, or the Great Chicago Fire in October 1871 to realize that the same thing might have just as easily happened to Troy VIIb.

Furthermore, even if the destruction of Troy VIIb was indeed the result of the city being sacked by invading forces, we do not have enough evidence to conclude that these invaders were Greeks. They could have been Greeks, but we do not have any conclusive evidence to indicate that they were. It is also worth noting that the Mycenaean palaces of mainland Greece were all burned around the same time as Troy VIIb, meaning that Troy VIIb and the Mycenaean palaces may have simply been destroyed by the same wave of invaders.

The (un)reliability of the Iliad and the Odyssey as historical sources

In the absence of conclusive archaeological evidence for the Trojan War, some authors have tried to appeal to our earliest surviving sources that describe the war: the Iliad and the Odyssey, arguing that, because the archaeological evidence is inconclusive, we should treat these sources as factual accounts.

There are several major problems with this tactic, however. For one thing, the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, date to around the eighth century BC or thereabouts, but the Trojan War is supposed to have happened in the early twelfth century BC. That means that the Iliad and the Odyssey date to roughly 400 years after the events they purport to describe. While oral traditions can survive for hundreds of years, they cannot do so without major distortion—often distortion beyond all recognition.

Some aspects of the society portrayed in the Iliad and the Odyssey display genuine folk remembrances of the Bronze Age. For instance, the names Achilleus (i.e. Achilles) and Agamemnon seem to have been real names that were used during the Mycenaean Period. Another example comes from the fact that the Homeric heroes are accurately described as fighting using primarily bronze weapons, rather than iron weapons as were used during the eighth century BC.

Perhaps the most famous example of an accurate folk memory of the Mycenaean Period preserved in the Homeric epics, however, comes from the Iliad 10.260–265, which describes Odysseus wearing an unusual helmet fashioned from boars’ tusks. Here is the passage in the original Greek:

“Μηριόνης δ’ Ὀδυσῆϊ δίδου βιὸν ἠδὲ φαρέτρην
 καὶ ξίφος, ἀμφὶ δέ οἱ κυνέην κεφαλῆφιν ἔθηκε
 ῥινοῦ ποιητήν: πολέσιν δ’ ἔντοσθεν ἱμᾶσιν
 ἐντέτατο στερεῶς: ἔκτοσθε δὲ λευκοὶ ὀδόντες
 ἀργιόδοντος ὑὸς θαμέες ἔχον ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα
 εὖ καὶ ἐπισταμένως: μέσσῃ δ’ ἐνὶ πῖλος ἀρήρει.”

Here is the same passage, as translated into English by A. T. Murray:

“And Meriones gave to Odysseus a bow and a quiver
and a sword, and about his head he set a helm
wrought of hide, and with many a tight-stretched thong
was it made stiff within, while without the white teeth
of a boar of gleaming tusks were set thick on this side
and that, well and cunningly, and within was fixed a lining of felt.”

Helmets such as the one described here in this passage were not worn in the eighth century BC when the Iliad is believed to have been composed, but they were commonly worn by aristocratic warriors during the Mycenaean Period and numerous examples of portions of such helmets have been preserved:

ABOVE: Fourteenth-century BC Mycenaean Greek boars’ tusk helmet from Mycenae

ABOVE: Boars’ tusk helmet from Herakleion Archaeological Museum on Krete

While supporters of the historicity of the Trojan War love to focus on these things that the Homeric poems clearly got right, they ignore the many other things that the Homeric poems clearly got wrong. The Homeric poems contain many anachronisms characteristic of the time in which they were composed rather than the time period in which they are supposed to have been set.

Often times, accurate elements of Mycenaean warfare anachronistically coexist alongside elements of later Iron Age warfare. For instance, the heroes in the poems are sometimes described carrying large, figure-eight-shaped shields like the ones used by the early Mycenaeans, but other times they are described as carrying smaller, round shields like the ones used by the later Mycenaeans and by the people of the eighth century BC.

ABOVE: Fresco from Mycenae of a large Mycenaean shield, shaped like a figure eight

Similarly, the heroes in the Iliad and the Odyssey practice cremation, as people did in the eighth century BC, rather than inhumation, as the Mycenaeans did during the Bronze Age. The world of the Homeric poems also contains many fictional elements; for instance, Iliad 22.145–56 describes Hektor taking his final stand against Achilleus near two springs that flow from the river Skamandros past the city of Troy, one of which flows steaming hot and the other icy cold.

No evidence to support the existence of either of these springs has ever been uncovered. In fact, as I discuss in this article I wrote in September 2019, it was the absence of these springs which led Schliemann to doubt that Hisarlik was really the site of Troy before he started excavating. Frank Calvert, however, managed to convince him that perhaps the springs had dried up. Now we know that it is highly unlikely that the springs ever existed.

Sometimes the author of the Iliad tries to make his account seem authentic by deliberately including archaic elements, but he misunderstands these elements and portrays them inaccurately—sometimes in perplexing and even laughable ways. This is a phenomenon known as “false archaism.” The most infamous example of false archaism in the Iliad is the poem’s portrayal of how chariots were used in warfare.

The author of the Iliad apparently knew that chariots had been used in warfare at some point in the distant past, but he seems to have had no idea how they were actually used. In the Iliad, chariots are portrayed as merely a means of transportation to carry warriors to the battlefield. The warriors do not actually fight in their chariots. Instead, they ride in their chariots to battle and then climb down off their chariots in order to fight on foot, much like modern golfers who use golf carts to get to the next hole but then climb out of their carts in order to golf.

The problem is that this is not how chariots were really used in Bronze Age warfare. In real-life Bronze Age warfare, warriors who had chariots actually fought in those chariots; they did not just use like them like golf carts to get around the battlefield. Because the Iliad was composed in a time when chariots were mostly only used for chariot races and were not used in battle, the author of the Iliad apparently misunderstood how chariots were used. Because of all these factors, we simply cannot view the Homeric poems as accurate historical accounts of the Bronze Age.

ABOVE: Mycenaean fresco of a warrior in a chariot from Pylos, dating to around the middle of the fourteenth century BC.

The Tawagalawa letter

There is, however, another, stranger element to our story—a complication to this investigation that I have not yet addressed: the Hittites. The Hittites were an ancient people whose empire thrived in eastern Anatolia during the late Bronze Age from around 1600 BC to around 1178 BC. They spoke Hittite, which is possibly the earliest-attested Indo-European language. The main Hittite capital was the city of Ḫattuša, which was located about two hundred kilometers east of Ankara, the present-day capital of Turkey.

The Hittites were well aware of the existence of both the Mycenaean Greeks and the city of Troy. The Hittite name for the Mycenaean Greeks is Aḫḫiyawā, which is believed to be related to the later Greek name Ἀχαιοί (Achaioí), one of several different names used in the Iliad to refer to the Greeks. Meanwhile, the Hittite name for the city of Troy is Wilusa, which is believed to be etymologically related to the Greek name for the city of Troy used in the Iliad, Ϝίλιος (Wílios).

There are a number of surviving Hittite texts that make reference to the Mycenaean Greeks and to the city of Troy, including a few that seem to be of relevance to the question of the historicity of the Trojan War. Of particular interest to this subject is a document known as the “Tawagalawa letter.” This letter was written in the Hittite language by an unnamed Hittite king, who has commonly been identified as Ḫattušili III (ruled c. 1265 – c. 1240 BC), to an unnamed “king of the Aḫḫiyawā.” The letter most likely dates to around 1250 BC or thereabouts.

Although the letter is primarily about Ḫattušili III’s efforts to bring an end to the rebellious activities of the Hittite renegade Piyamaradu, in it, Ḫattušili III makes a brief reference to an earlier conflict between the Aḫḫiyawā and the Hittites over the city of Wilusa. In the letter, Ḫattušili III tells the king of the Aḫḫiyawā to write, as translated by Gary M. Beckman:

“The King of Hatti has persuaded me [i.e. the king of the Aḫḫiyawā] about the matter of the land of Wilusa concerning which he and I were hostile to one another, and we have now made peace. Now(?) hostility is not appropriate between us.”

It is easy for people to try to read this as some kind of “proof” of the historicity of the Trojan War, but we must remember several things:

1. The wording in the letter is extremely vague and we should be very careful about trying to read anything into it based on our own twenty-first-century familiarity with the story of the Trojan War.
2. All the letter says is that there was some kind of hostile incident. This does not in any way translate to mean that there was a ten-year-long siege of Troy by the Greek armies led by a real king Agamemnon to avenge the capture of Helen by Paris, the prince of Troy.
3. The letter predates the destruction of Troy VIIb by at least several decades.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Tawagalawa letter, which is believed to have been written by the Hittite king Ḫattušili III. The letter famously alludes to some kind of hostile incident involving the Aḫḫiyawā (i.e. Achaians) and the city of Wilusa (i.e. Troy).

Conclusions

The Trojan War was probably not a real historical event, or at least not in the way it is described in ancient Greek literary sources. As the classical scholar John Chadwick concludes in the chapter “Homer the Pseudohistorian” in his book The Mycenaean World, “…oral tradition could perfectly well preserve facts for many centuries, but… it has a habit of distorting the truth and introducing serious errors into the account… We cannot therefore accept the Homeric story as historical as it stands; much of it is unverifiable, but we must estimate Homer’s credibility by testing his account where we have evidence.”

I think it is reasonable to infer from Hittite records that the Mycenaeans often went on raiding expeditions along the coast of Asia Minor and they probably at least occasionally pillaged Trojan lands. This is all I think we can say with more-or-less any degree of surety. It is perhaps possible that the Mycenaeans may have ultimately been responsible in some way or another for the burning of Troy VIIb, but we cannot know whether this is true.

A major problem here is the question of whether or not what I have just described qualifies as a real “Trojan War.” Sure, at least some of the Mycenaeans may have been in martial conflict with the Trojans, but we have absolutely no evidence to support any of the most familiar parts of the Trojan War saga.

We have no evidence for the historical existence of Agamemnon, Odysseus, Helen, Achilles, King Priam, Hektor, Patroklos, or the Trojan Horse. Indeed, we do not have any evidence of any of the events described in any of the Homeric epics other than the Mycenaeans having occasional conflicts with Troy and of Troy being burned by someone.

Perhaps further evidence will eventually be uncovered that will increase our understanding of this subject and lead scholars to accept more of the stories associated with the Trojan War as historical, but, for now, this is all we have and all we can have. In the meantime, we should treasure the Homeric epics and other works of Greek literature about the Trojan War for their literary value, rather than pretending that they are really historical narratives of actual events.

ABOVE: The Burning of Troy, painted in c. 1759/62 by the German painter Johann Georg Trautmann (1713–1769)