Scholars and historians have long obsessed over finding the ancient site of Troy. According to Homer’s Illiad, the legendary and doomed city was the scene of a ten-year conflict between the Mycenean Greeks and the Trojans.
In the nineteenth century, the mound of Hisarlik in Turkey became the focus of these explorations, when early archaeologists pinpointed the site as the most likely location of Troy. Setting aside their ancient texts, these scholars took up spades and trowels and began excavating for Troy.
What they discovered was not a single city but a series of incarnations, stretching from the Bronze Age to the Roman era. In this, the first of three articles dealing with the archaeology, history and legends of Hisarlik, we’ll look at the pioneers of archaeology on the site — and what they discovered.
The Mound of Hissarlik
Hisarlik’s name translates as “The fortress”. It is an artificial mound lying on the Kucuk Menderes River, 4.8km from the southern entrance to the Dardanelles along the Aegean coast of Turkey. The summit of the 200 x 150 metres mound looms 38.5 metres above the plane that surrounds it.
Hisarlik used to overlook the coast, although the alluvial activity of the nearby river means it now lies 5 km inland. But the settlement’s original coastal location gave it a commanding position. For Hisarlik lay at a coastal crossroads between Europe and the east. Crucially, it dominated a significant intersection of trade routes running between Asia Minor and the Balkans — and the Aegean and the Black Sea.
The mound — and the southern slopes of the plain below it — hides successive phases of Hisarlik’s history — from the Bronze Age to the end of the Roman Empire. Many of these phases are a testament to the city’s wealth, power and regional status — a status that the archaeology suggests others may have contested. However, none of this was immediately evident when looking at the mound, for Hisarlik kept its history buried deep for centuries after its final abandonment.
So what made scholars believe it was a likely location for Troy?
Locating Troy
Hisarlik was long known to have been Ilion, a Hellenistic Greek city and then a Roman town. However, the mound first came to be associated with Troy in the very early nineteenth century. It was then that scholars began to compare geographical descriptions in ancient sources such as Strabo and Herodotus with the geography of the Anatolian coast.
This association might have occurred sooner if not for the fact that Strabo had muddied the waters somewhat by describing Ilion and Troy as two separate cities. Strabo’s description led many scholars to regard a village named Pinarbasi, 10km south of Hisarlik/Ilion as the likely site of Troy.
But in 1801, a Cambridge mineralogist, Professor Edward Clarke and his assistant John Cripps made the connection between Hisarlik and Troy when they visited Hisarlik as part of a tour of Europe and Asia. Twenty years later, their theory was seized upon by Charles Maclaren, a Scottish newspaper publisher and amateur geologist. Maclaren had never visited Hisarlik. But he compared Clarke and Cripps’s description of the site with the descriptions in the ancient sources and found that the two had striking similarities.
The First Excavations
Henrich Schliemann has long taken the credit as the first person to excavate for Troy at
The first archaeological excavation of Hisarlik appears to have been conducted in 1856 by John Burton, a British naval officer. However, the first person to extensively explore Hisarlik was another Englishman, Frank Calvert, an ex-pat and amateur archaeologist.
Calvert was actively engaged in the search for Troy. Using Herodotus and Strabo as his guides, he visited each potential location, exploring and dismissing them in turn. However, when he reached Hisarlik, Calvert was convinced enough to purchase a large part of the mound.
Trial excavations carried out in the early 1860s convinced Calvert he was onto something — although he never reached the bronze Age levels of the mound. This failure was partly because of a lack of funds. So in 1865, Calvert presented his findings in London in an attempt to win the backing of the British Museum. He even
Calvert struggled onwards, but in 1868, his financial situation forced him to take a different course to ensure archaeological exploration at Hisarlik continued.
Calvert described how he made “in the interests of science a sacrifice of personal considerations.” Calvert had recently made the acquaintance of Henrich Schliemann who shared his belief Hisarlik was Homer’s Troy. So Calvert passed on the baton, describing how he urged “Dr Schliemann to carry out what had been for years my particular ambition.”
Schliemann and Beyond
Schliemann took up Calvert’s offer, and the rest is history. After acquiring a permit to dig, he began his excavations in 1870, uncovering a sequence of seven cities within the mound. The discovery of a hoard of exquisite gold jewellery in the second of the city phases convinced him he had found Troy.
However, excavations did not stop because Schliemman declared he had found Troy. In the 1890s his initial sequence of seven phases was extended to nine when his assistant Wilhelm Dorpfeld began investigating the plateau around the base of the site. This chronology expanded in the 1930s when Carl Blegen also re-evaluated Hisarlik.
Unlike Schliemann, who ruthlessly destroyed some phases in his quest for Priam’s Troy, Blegen took careful samples from each layer. By examining buildings, soils samples and pottery fragments, he established that the last two phases of Troy’s life related to the Greek and finally the Roman period.
Excavations of Hisarlik began again in 1988 when teams from the Universities of Tubingen and Cincinnati re-examined the site, under the direction of Manfred Korfmann who led excavations until his death in 2005. Korfmann’s archaeologists took samples from all phases of the mound — and the plateau and plain half a km to the south. This work built up a detailed picture of the first six phases of Hisarlik’s history.
Using geomorphological research, the archaeologists established the foundation date of Hisarlik. They also provided dating for all of Hisarlik’s subsequent phases.
The Chronology of Hisarlik
The established chronology for Hisarlik runs as follows:
The Bronze Age
Troy 1- 3000-2550 BC
Troy II 2550-2300 BC
Troy III 2300- 2200 BC
Troy IV 2200- 2000BC
Troy V -2000-1800 BC
Troy VI- 1800-1300 BC
Troy VIIa- 1300-1260 BC
Troy VIIb 1- 1260-1190 BC
Troy VIIb 2 – 1190-900 BC
The Hellenistic Period
Troy VIII 800-35 BC
Roman Period
Troy IX 85 BC- 500 AD
In Part 2, we will look more closely at these stages to discover an Anatolian city with a tantalising history — regardless of
Sources
Allen, Susan Heuck, “Finding the Walls of Troy”: Frank Calvert, Excavator. The American Journal of archaeology, Vol 99, No 3, (July 1995), pp 379-407.
Blegen, Carl W, (2005) Troy and the Trojans. London: The Folio Society
Gates, Charles, (2003) Ancient Cities. The Archaeology of Urban Life in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece and Rome. Routledge: London and New York.
Miszczak, Izabela, Gallipoli Peninsula and the Troad
Strabo, The Geography, (Vol V, Bk XIII, Ch 1) Loeb Classical Library
