Troy which country

Towards the end of the Late Bronze Age, Wilusa was a small vassal state a state without independence of the mighty Hittite Empire of Anatolia.

From Hattusa, Troy must have seemed a distant backwater. Yet its wealth and dominant position undoubtedly made it a prize. This is all such tantalising evidence. Although it falls far short of proof, it builds up the picture of a feasible background for a Trojan War, in the interconnected but combative Late Bronze Age world. Troy fell into ruin at the end of the Bronze Age, around BC, as did all the centres of power of the Mediterranean world, for reasons that are not completely understood.

The site was never completely abandoned, and its ruins must have remained visible for some centuries, probably up to the time of Homer, if the poet lived in the late 8th or early 7th centuries BC as thought. The name Ilion is used by Homer interchangeably with Troy, and it is possible the inhabitants had always called their city something like Ilion, right back to its days as Wilusa. Greek leaders and Roman emperors endowed it with wealth and privileges, including fine civic buildings.

The Troy of the Greek and Roman periods was not otherwise a particularly important place, but it nonetheless flourished until the end of the ancient world in the 6th century AD , and perhaps even beyond — there is some evidence for Byzantine settlement on the site as late as the 13th century AD.

Troy can therefore be said to have had a lifespan of more than 4, years. It seems completely astonishing that the site of Troy could later have been lost, but it was. Over time, its remains crumbled away to become part of a low hill in a flat landscape that was only sparsely populated. The hill did not seem to be anything special. These were in fact mostly not Bronze Age but created at different dates in the Greek and Roman periods, mostly for burials.

These mounds were very visible in the landscape, and so gave early visitors looking for the heroes the sense that they had found their graves. But the city of Troy, or Ilion, had been lost from view. The search for Troy became a major preoccupation for travellers, topographers, writers and scholars in the 18th and early 19th centuries when ancient Greece and its myths captivated public imagination in Europe.

But it was not a simple matter and became a subject of heated debate. He based this on the evidence of coins and inscriptions he found there.

However only later in the 19th century would it dawn that Hissarlik was the site not just of Ilion, but also of legendary Troy, which was underneath the Classical remains. Frank Calvert lived in the Troad and owned land next to the mound of Hissarlik. An amateur but skilled archaeologist, he was convinced that there would be a good place to dig.

So when Schliemann visited in , with Homer in one hand and a spade in the other, determined to make his name in archaeology, Calvert found him easy to persuade. His interpretation that the finds were evidence of the Trojan War was questioned at the time and, perhaps sadly for romantics everywhere, it is no longer accepted. But of course, Homer was a poet and not a historian. It remains immensely difficult to link the Iliad specifically to the archaeology of Troy. They would soon unearth an extraordinary lost ancient city with a 4, year-old history.

It would become one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time. Over the past century and half, around 50 archaeological campaigns have been conducted at Troy.

The hill of Hisarlik has been built upon, erased, and built upon again in a continuous cycle that lasted millennia. Therefore we cannot accurately speak of Troy as one single city. Instead, the ruins of Troy actually comprise as many as nine different settlements stacked on top of one another, dating from B. On the interactive map on the home page, the levels are represented by different colors. Click on the layers to glimpse various archaeological features belonging to each time period and witness how the site changed and evolved over subsequent eras.

Was there a real Trojan War? This is one of the most highly discussed topics in Bronze Age archaeology. While there is no conclusive proof that the Trojan War actually took place, there are some intriguing clues that parts of the story may have been based, at least partially, on real events. The best evidence may not be found at Troy itself, but in Hittite historical documents. During the second millennium B. Over the past century, archaeologists have uncovered hundreds of clay tablets in the Hittite capital of Hattusa which record official government and administrative business.

Several tablets, dating to between and B. Most scholars now believe this is a direct reference to Troy. In fact, the Iliad takes its name from this word. One of the kings of Wilusa is also recorded as having the name Alaksandu. Homer sometimes refers to the Trojan prince Paris as Alexandros, another striking parallel.

Hittite documents also mention a group of people called the Ahhiyawans that came from across the Aegean Sea and were frequently in conflict with the cities along the Anatolian coast.

While this evidence is far from conclusive, it does at least suggest that during the alleged time of the Trojan War, Greeks had a military presence in western Anatolia, that a city called Troy existed there, and that one of its royal rulers was named Alexandros. As far as we know today, the citadel was unparalleled in its region and in all of southeastern Europe," he writes in the book chapter.

The extent of the residential area is a topic of debate among scholars with some arguing that Korfmann is overestimating its extent. A key problem with identifying this city as Homer's Troy is the way it ended. Cracks in its walls suggest that it was hit by an earthquake around B.

While the city was attacked in B. By this time, Greece's Mycenaean civilization had collapsed, its great palaces reduced to ruins. Additionally, at Troy archaeologists have found ceramics and bronze axes from southeast Europe, suggesting that that people may have moved into the city from there.

The city was abandoned around B. The Greeks called the reoccupied city "Ilion. The "new settlers had no doubt that the place they were preparing to occupy was the fabled setting of the Trojan War," Bryce writes, and in later times its inhabitants took advantage of this to draw in political support and ancient tourists. For its first few centuries, Ilion was a modest settlement. While many scholars believe that the people who resettled Troy after B. In , research published by a team of scholars in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology revealed that the amphora at Troy that was thought to have been imported from Greece was actually locally made and that much of the other pottery found at Troy after 1, B.

This led the team to suggest that many of the people who reoccupied Troy may not have been Greek colonists but rather people who already lived in the area. Xerxes, the Persian king on his way to conquer Greece, stopped to pay homage to Troy and, most notably, Alexander the Great would do the same in the fourth century B.

When "Alexander went up there after his victory at the Granicus River he adorned the temple with votive offerings, gave the village the title of city, and ordered those in charge to improve it with buildings, and that he adjudged it free and exempt from tribute; and that later, after the overthrow of the Persians, he sent down a kindly letter to the place, promising to make a great city of it Jones, through Perseus Digital Library.

Troy's special status would continue into the period of Roman rule. The Romans believed that Aeneas, one of Troy's heroes, was an ancestor of Romulus and Remus, Rome's legendary founders.

The city's inhabitants took advantage of this mythology, with it becoming a "popular destination for pilgrims and tourists," Bryce writes. He notes that in this phase of Troy's existence, when it became a popular tourism location, the city became larger than at any time before, including when the Trojan War was said to have taken place. However, as the Middle Ages took hold, Troy fell into decline.

By the 13th century, the city had been reduced to that of a modest farming community. Recent DNA research revealed the story of a woman who died years ago of an infection that occurred while she was pregnant.

A new museum is being constructed at Troy and the Turkish government has put forward repatriation requests for artifacts that were illegally removed from Troy in the 20th century to be returned to Turkey. A collection of gold jewelry in the Penn Museum that research reveals was taken from Troy in the 20th century has been returned to Turkey after lengthy negotiations, said C.

Brian Rose, a professor of archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, in an article published in in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies.