AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Lost cities11/15/2023 Illustration: G Dagli Orti/De Agostini/Getty Images Until then, excavations in Hisarlik had revealed only an insignificant town, but Korfmann and his team discovered a lower city that covered 75 acres: 15 times larger than was previously thought.Ī reconstruction of the Homeric city of Troy. The historicity of the Trojan War and the fall of the city at the hands of the Greeks (the narrative of the Iliad) was still questionable until the groundbreaking work of archaeologist Manfred Korfmann in the 1990s. However, since there aren’t any contemporary texts that describe Troy, and as Schliemann managed to ruin the remains of what could well have been King Priam’s city, we actually know very little about it. There were found to be nine major phases of construction before the city’s major destruction, in approximately 1180 BC. The city of Troy started as a simple settlement in around 3000 BC, growing and thriving on trade, agriculture and fishing. “He found Troy, but he also destroyed Troy.” A grand Bronze Age city He got Priam’s palace and then threw it away,” Cline says. “If you look on excavation maps, there’s a gap in the middle where it says ‘Palace removed by Schliemann’. Schliemann dug through – and decimated – layers and layers of Bronze Age Troy (1700-1200 BC), until he reached what is now known as Troy II: a city more than 1,000 years older than the Troy of the Iliad. In the process, however, “he threw away the thing he was going to look for,” says Cline. Soon he claimed to have found the “burnt city” of Homer’s Troy, and among it King Priam’s treasure – some of which he later famously gave his wife to wear. In April 1870, Schliemann began to dig at Hisarlik. He was, however, prone to falsifying his excavation journals, which might also put the veracity of that childhood dream in doubt. How the amateur archaeologist Schliemann managed to find Troy and kick off the field of Aegean prehistory is nothing short of astounding. It is now generally believed that the sixth and seventh construction phases (the late Bronze Age cities referred to as Troy VI and Troy VIIa) could be King Priam’s city, as described in the Iliad. The Hisarlik site contains layer upon layer of ancient settlement, from the first circa 3000 BC to the last around 500 BC. Indeed, there was likely not just one city here, but at least 10. Within this meadowed hill may lie 4,000 years of Trojan history. Now Troy’s location is widely believed to be the site of Hisarlik in Turkey: essentially a mound of 30 metres or so in height, with the remnants of stone walls and lonely structures scattered in the grassland. It decayed into insignificance by 500BC, and was lost until two centuries ago. Reputedly razed after a battle in around 1200 BC, the city was later reinhabited by both the Greeks and Romans and renamed Ilios/Ilium. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, the fifth-century BC historian Thucydides describes the Trojan war as “notable beyond all previous wars”.īut the precise location – and even the very existence – of Troy has been a source of dispute throughout the ages. In reality, it was said the city witnessed one of the greatest battles in Greek history.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |