Open Veils · Answer
Did the Trojan war happen?
The Trojan War almost certainly encodes real Bronze Age conflict, but the Homeric version is a composite of multiple events stretched across centuries of oral tradition. Hisarlık (Troy VIIa) shows violent destruction around 1180 BC, squarely in the Late Bronze Age collapse window. Hittite cuneiform records name 'Wilusa' and 'Ahhiyawa' — cognates for Ilios and Achaea — placing Greeks and Trojans in documented diplomatic tension. The war Homer described was likely real in skeleton; the gods, ten-year siege, and wooden horse are the oral tradition's editorial layer.
Evidence
- Heinrich Schliemann's 1870s excavations at Hisarlık established Troy as a real, multi-layered settlement near the Dardanelles — a strategically vital chokepoint controlling Black Sea trade routes.
- The Hittite archive at Boğazköy contains letters referencing 'Wilusa' (Ilios/Troy) and its king 'Alaksandu' — a name cognate with Alexandros, Paris's Trojan name — in diplomatic correspondence with the Hittite Great King.
- Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson have both noted that the Bronze Age collapse around 1200–1150 BC — which erased Mycenae, Ugarit, and Hattusa simultaneously — provides the traumatic civilizational backdrop from which epic oral tradition crystallized.
- Classicist Martin West and mythographer Walter Burkert both argued independently that the Iliad preserves genuine Mycenaean-era formulae and material details — bronze weapons, boar's-tusk helmets, ship catalogs — that no post-Bronze Age poet could have invented.
- Excavator Manfred Korfmann's decades of work at the site, continued by his team after his death, revealed a lower city far larger than previously imagined, capable of supporting a population that would justify a major military expedition.