In Search of the Trojan War (1985): Season 1, Episode 2 - The Legend Under Siege - full transcript
This is the house in Athens of
the German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann.
He died in 1890, exhausted
by his passionate and obsessive quest
to find truth in the ancient legend
of the Trojan War.
But he never solved the riddle.
Was the search an illusion,
invention of the bards?
Had the city never existed at all?
Schliemann had begun the search.
Now others would follow -
his assistant, Wilhelm Dörpfeld...
...the Briton, Arthur Evans...
...the American, Carl Blegen,
as the new science of archaeology
attempted to bring to life
"the age of the heroes".
(CRASH OF THUNDER)
Once upon a time, there was a town called Troy.
So said the Greek poet Homer,
who lived around 700 BC.
Troy, he said, was a great and wealthy city
which stood near the Dardanelles.
On a visit to Greece, the prince of Troy, Paris,
eloped with the wife of the king of Sparta, Helen.
The Greeks gathered a thousand ships
to take her back.
Their leader was Agamemnon,
king of Mycenae, rich in gold.
After 10 years of war, the city was sacked
when it was entered
by the famous trick of the wooden horse.
That was the story. But was it just a story?
At Mycenae, in 1876,
Heinrich Schliemann set out to prove it.
There he found the tombs
of rich Bronze Age kings,
literally laden with gold,
just as Homer had said...
...armed to the teeth with weapons of bronze.
At Tiryns, near Mycenae,
behind the mighty walls
of which Homer had sung,
Schliemann uncovered remains
of a Bronze Age palace
resembling those described by the poet.
Here were even wall paintings
showing images of people
who had lived at the time the war was thought
to have taken place, around 1200 BC.
But 300 miles across the Aegean Sea,
mystery still surrounded Troy itself.
Schliemann claimed he had found it
at a little hill called Hisarlik,
in what is now north-western Turkey.
There he had excavated
a small prehistoric citadel.
But could this tiny place, only 100 yards across,
really have been the splendid city
of Homer's story?
Schliemann's proof,
the so-called jewels of Helen,
with which he had bedecked his Greek wife,
were soon shown to be 1,000 years too early.
The search, however, continued.
In Manchester, my search turned
to Schliemann's loyal assistant,
the architect Wilhelm Dörpfeld.
He was determined to take up Schliemann's
torch and prove the doubters wrong.
Archaeology is a romantic science.
It attempts to bring back lost time, and that's
especially evident in this romantic story.
It's true, above all, of the second
great figure in our search, Dörpfeld.
If anything, he was a greater romantic
than Schliemann himself.
He spent much of his later life
living on the Greek island of Levkas,
attempting to prove it was Homer's Ithaca,
the home of King Odysseus.
He's buried there. Like Schliemann,
he remained a lover of Greece to the end.
He, as he put it himself,
"was inspired by the master, Schliemann."
He would endeavour to bring
Schliemann's unfulfilled dreams to reality,
to prove the truth of Homer's vision of Troy.
What the two shared was
the same driving imagination.
The difference perhaps,
as Dörpfeld admitted, was sheer luck.
For Schliemann, even in his childhood dreams,
could hardly have dared imagine
what Dörpfeld would now find.
The site of Hisarlik, we now know,
was extraordinarily complicated,
with nine cities superimposed
on top of each other.
But we can strip off its layers
with the help of modern technology.
Before we go to Hisarlik at Dörpfeld's side,
let's not forget what he didn't know
about the site, and what he knew or could deduce.
Schliemann had established
the basic stratification, the levels of the site.
Dörpfeld knew there was a Roman city
on the top, these yellow lines.
He knew there was a Greek city
underneath it, Ilion,
visited by Alexander the Great.
He knew there was an intermediate settlement,
which Schliemann called the sixth city,
which they couldn't date precisely.
He knew that deep in the prehistoric layers
there was the city
Schliemann had thought Homer's Troy.
But when the two of them had dug
together outside this site, in 1890,
they discovered a building and wall
associated with Mycenaean pottery.
In other words, it was this bit, if any,
that was connected with the Trojan War.
Dörpfeld next put the clues together.
Part of a house demolished by Schliemann.
Fragments of a circuit wall
Schliemann had hit earlier.
And part of a northern circuit wall that
Schliemann had demolished 20 years before.
Only an architect, perhaps,
could have seen that and put them together.
When Dörpfeld put them together,
something like that
must have appeared in his mind's eye.
The question was, what would there be there,
and how much of it would still be standing?
In 1893, paid for by Sophie Schliemann
and the German kaiser,
Dörpfeld went back to Hisarlik to find out.
Under 50 feet of earth and debris
and the ruins of later cities,
in a great sweep around the south
and east of Schliemann's city,
Dörpfeld uncovered the tremendous walls
of late Bronze Age Troy,
including this marvellous angular watchtower,
which is now hidden from public view,
which could have been
the great tower of Ilium itself.
It's beautifully built out of dressed limestone,
so well done it looks like later classical work.
It helps you understand why Schliemann
demolished things like this.
It still stands 25 feet high. It must have been
at least 30 feet high of limestone
and then above it a brick superstructure.
It must have dominated the plain,
jutting out like the prow of an old battleship.
Out of the soil came beautiful walls
which are shown as they were first seen
in Dörpfeld's photographs.
Immediately they seemed to recall
the city in Homer's "Iliad".
Homer calls the city well-built
and here indeed were walls which made
those of Mycenae look crude, even barbaric.
Dörpfeld uncovered the bases
of what had once been imposing towers
and again Homer describes
Troy's fine towers and gates.
One of them the Scaean Gate,
flanked by the great tower of Ilios.
Dörpfeld found that the defences
had a curious slope.
In the "Iliad", Homer says
that three times the Greek hero Patroclus
tried with his bare hands
to clamber up the angle of Troy's wall.
The place was still small,
its 700-yard circuit less than Mycenae,
but its fine masonry and elegant architecture
showed it had once been
the most beautiful fortress in the Aegean.
Dörpfeld was elated. "The long argument
over Troy is over," he wrote.
"The actual remains of the city
of Priam and Hector have come to light.
"Schliemann has been vindicated.
The Trojans have triumphed!""
Dörpfeld hadn't proved it was called Troy,
but he had proved there was
a late Bronze Age citadel here,
with Mycenaean contacts,
in the right place by the Dardanelles
with uncanny resemblance
to what the bardic tradition of Homer said.
But what was his evidence
that it had been destroyed by war?
He says, "Signs of a great fire
were evident in many places.
"The upper parts of the walls
and towers had been toppled.
"The inner buildings had been levelled.
"Evidently," he said, "the city had been destroyed
by the hand of an enemy.
"Durch Feindeshand zerstört."
Dörpfeld's dig on Hisarlik makes him
the most important of its excavators.
But his great book, "Troy and Ilion"
was never translated out of German.
Indeed, even before it went to press in 1900,
the finds which it announced
up here by the Dardanelles
were to be totally eclipsed
by sensational discoveries in Crete,
where a revolution in archaeology
was about to take place,
single-handedly achieved
by an Englishman of genius, Arthur Evans.
Evans would destroy Schliemann
and Dörpfeld's romantic vision
of a Homeric Bronze Age.
Evans was born in 1851
into an atmosphere of Victorian industry,
a family firm which later provided him
with the fortune he spent on archaeology.
His father, John,
owned a big paper mill in Hertfordshire
but John Evans was also
a leading prehistoric scholar of the day,
correspondent of Heinrich Schliemann.
The young Evans grew up
fascinated by history and by writing.
Unlike the self-taught Schliemann,
Evans had a classical education,
public school and Oxford.
And he returned to Oxford
to devote himself to his passion, archaeology.
Oxford in the 1880s was a ferment of new ideas
about geology and pre-history,
provoked by the evolutionary theories
of Charles Darwin,
a friend of Evans's father.
The discovery of new cultures,
a by-product of their imperialism,
seized the late-Victorian imagination,
shaping their belief
in the evolutionary development
from the so-called primitive societies
to the higher civilisations.
Such ideas formed Evans's view of historical
progress long before he went to Greece
to try to solve the enigma
which had eluded Schliemann -
why had Mycenaean civilisation
left no trace of writing?
The climactic year for Arthur Evans was 1893,
when the course of his life was determined.
It was also a tragic year for him.
His wife died. He was a still youthful 41.
But that February, in Athens,
Evans was rummaging in the flea market
when he came across a number of these.
Three or four-sided incised
and drilled seal stones.
He was told they came from Crete.
With his eye for microscopic detail,
he thought he could distinguish signs
of a hieroglyphic system of writing.
Such systems were known
in the ancient Near East, like Egypt,
but the idea of writing like this
in prehistoric Europe
would seem far-fetched
to most scholars at that time.
The idea had been floated
by Schliemann, among others.
He and a number of people thought that in Crete
they might find the first example
of the adoption of writing in the West.
So it was to Crete that Evans turned
to find his answers.
And there, one can only say, destiny awaited him.
Crete was steeped in legend.
Here had been the seat of King Minos,
who had ruled the Aegean with his navy
long before the Trojan War.
It was the site of the labyrinth,
lair of a monstrous half-man, half-bull,
the Minotaur.
Here Daedalus had fashioned the wings
with which Icarus had escaped from Crete
only to fly too near the sun.
From here, according to Homer,
King Idomeneus sailed to Troy
with his 80 black ships.
(SHIP'S HORN BLOWS)
Evans first arrived in Crete in March 1894,
"Feeling the worse for a bad
24-hour voyage from Piraeus," he wrote.
He had come, he said grandly,
"to find the origin of Greek civilisation
"and with it the origin
of all great culture that has ever been."
Crete is a continent in miniature,
a stepping stone between Europe,
the Near East and Africa.
Its people are descended from prehistoric folk -
Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Turks.
All have left their mark
on the landscape and the faces of the island.
But where would Evans's search
for writing lead now?
On his very first day
he wandered around the market in Iráklion.
There he found more seal stones.
"A clue was in my hands," he wrote,
"and I resolved to follow it,
"if possible to the innermost recesses
of the labyrinth itself."
For the seal stones had indeed come
from the site of the legendary labyrinth,
a then insignificant hill
now known to the world as Knossos.
The paths of history and myth
had begun to converge.
Knossos.
The hill Evans saw was very different
from the one we see today.
After his excavation, Evans decided
to partially reconstruct the palace.
To an extent, what there is now is his.
But what did he see
when he first put spade to soil in March 1900?
His finds were nothing less than a revelation.
Only inches below the surface
he found a throne room 3,500 years old.
It was in an unbelievable state of preservation,
fragments of painting still hanging on the walls.
In the store rooms, rows of jars still contained
grain, dried beans and lentils.
It was obvious to Evans what the palace was.
It was, of course, Mycenaean.
A Cretan palace which had been
conquered by Mycenaean mainlanders
and finally destroyed around 1200 BC.
The interpretation and the date
fitted Homer's picture
of a Greek king, Idomeneus,
on the throne of Knossos
at the time of the Trojan War.
The palace resembled those
in mainland Greece,
paintings like those at Tiryns.
Stone rosettes like those
on the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae.
Above all, stirrup jars,
as Evans wrote, "The most common form
of Mycenaean pottery."
But who were these so-called Mycenaeans?
The answer clearly lay in Evans' key find.
Only days into the dig
he had turned up strange baked-clay tablets.
They were inscribed
with an unknown system of writing.
Confident he would soon decipher their script,
Evans persuaded the Oxford University Press
to cast a type fount for his new language.
He was convinced he had found the missing link
between the cultures of the Near East
and of early Greece,
one of the great languages of the ancient world.
Like his other finds, he called it Mycenaean.
But within months,
he completely changed his mind.
It was not Mycenaean, but Minoan.
Evans took the name
from the legendary King Minos.
Minos came to stand for the Minoan culture
which Evans thought had ruled mainland
Greece, including Schliemann's Mycenae.
The bull of Minos had replaced
the mask of Agamemnon
as the symbol of the Aegean Bronze Age.
The palace of Minos, Evans thought,
had been the centre of an empire
which had dominated the Aegean
just as the legend had it.
Its people were sophisticated,
controlled, but fun-loving,
devotees of outdoor sports
like the strange bull-leaping
depicted on the frescos.
For Evans, the Minoans were lovers
of the natural world,
their rituals and festivals presenting
the image of a lost Golden Age.
Presided over by their bull-masked king
who issued Europe's first law code
from the throne of the Palace of Minos.
Evans identified intensely with that vision.
Perhaps that's why he felt impelled
to reconstruct the palace -
literally to make the vision concrete.
I'm sure most people who come to Knossos
must at some point wonder
about these reconstructions of Sir Arthur Evans
and the psychology behind them.
Did he do it for the general public or to gratify
some inner need to make it all more tangible?
Schliemann's driving obsession, his inner demon,
is so near to the surface, so naïve.
With Evans it seems different,
but he was just as much a man of his time.
It was a troubled time, the 1890s
and the early years of the 20th century.
A lot of creative people were dismayed
by what they saw as the rising tide
of industrialism and imperialism.
It wasn't just artists like Gauguin rushing off
to Tahiti to find the lost innocence of the world.
It was intellectuals too, like H G Wells.
I think Arthur Evans found his lost innocence here.
His sister said that he was a romantic
who needed to escape from the present
and that he found this new civilisation
so wonderfully to his taste,
and here at Knossos he was able to create
a world where his mind and eye could dwell,
a world where he could escape the painfulness
of the present where he found no peace.
So there was no room for Homer
in Evans's view of the Aegean Bronze Age.
The benevolent imperialists
from Knossos were the history makers,
the new Victorians.
Across the Aegean in the 15th century BC,
King Minos ruled the waves,
master and civiliser of what
Schliemann had thought Homeric Greece.
The valleys of Mycenae were farmed
by Cretan colonists,
nabobs in a Minoan raj.
The great building achievements,
like the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae,
were the work of Cretans,
perhaps even of the architect Daedalus himself.
After the fall of Knossos in around 1400 BC,
Evans thought Mycenae was left
a decadent backwater.
From here no imperial expedition
could ever have set sail.
The Trojan War was a mere fairy tale.
(BELL TOLLS)
In the academic world, Evans's ideas
became the Establishment view.
He himself appeared a stern figure
who brooked no argument.
But his godson, James Candy,
who lived with him before the First War
knew a different side of the great man.
This is the place. By Jove,
you're going to see a view here!
Wait till we get up to these doors.
And then I'm going to just push it open
and you go straight in.
Look at that!
- Isn't that lovely?
- It's wonderful.
- I used to come here and giggle.
- What an extraordinary place!
Here Evans built an artificial lake
and a house to share with his wife.
Her early death shattered that hope
but when not in Knossos, the childless
Evans retreated to this private world,
The house, with its Minoan fantasies,
is gone now,
though the gardens Evans planted remain.
Here, the boy Candy knew him in a way
his fellow scholars never did.
- He grew his fingernail?
- The others were all right.
That one was his personal excavator!
Because, you see, he'd look at things,
as he was myopic,
he'd look at things - rare coins or pottery -
he would...
- Marvellous.
- Marvellous!
What sort of man was he?
I'm wondering if he was a bit of a romantic.
In his academic work he seems rather severe.
There were two sides to him.
In fact, his contemporaries,
when they came down to stay here,
saw Sir Arthur, they said,
"This is not the Sir Arthur that I know
at Knossos or the Athenaeum
or the British Museum or the Ashmolean."
- He frightened them.
- Frightened them to death!
- His reputation was as a tyrant.
- Yes, very autocratic!
So he really shared his real thoughts with you?
He was happy when he was with children.
(CANDY) He loved playing charades,
dressing up,
because he had a beautiful collection
of Balkan shawls and covers and so on,
on his sofas and that sort of thing.
The boys had yellow little ribbons put on
and the girls had blue.
You had to match up with them.
And then you'd dance. But he would lead
the little girl onto the floor of the hall.
It went rather like a labyrinth, all the way round,
so you had to follow it.
But, in time, you came to the middle.
And there would Sir Arthur be,
on top of the Minotaur.
And, of course, these children
would come up and he'd go "Rahhhrr!"
Like that, and throw the child
up in the air and catch it!
Then put it down. "Next one!"
Make the noise of a bull.
That went on till...
There were about 20 or 30 children.
And, of course, one or two,
"Ooh, I don't like the bull!"
And the others thought
that was absolutely marvellous!
Did he talk to you about his Cretan discoveries?
Did he help you imagine what he'd found,
what the Minoans were like?
- Did he see them as real people?
- Yes.
- How did he paint it?
- As real people in a simplified form.
He didn't say this was a certain...
2000 BC, and all the technical side.
He brought them alive to you.
I mean, his description
of lying in the villa Ariadne,
in the big earthquake, when everybody
was screaming and rushing around,
he lay there and he was most intrigued
because under the bed, the great rumblings,
as he said in the letter to me,
he said, "It was the bull bellowing."
- Wonderful.
- Yeah.
(CANDY) That's what fascinated me
and still fascinates me,
that he was two people.
Evans stood over the field
for 50 years like a giant.
"The Palace of Minos" is perhaps the greatest
work of archaeological scholarship ever.
No man has ever dominated a field like he did.
But major problems were unresolved,
especially the writing,
which had led him to Knossos in the first place.
He'd put his thoughts down on paper
in 1909 in "Scripta Minoa"
but the mysterious tablets,
"the Minoan writing", as he called it, Linear B,
still remained untranslated.
"The one thing they could not be,"
he asserted time and again, "was Greek."
But opponents felt Mycenae had always
been independent of Crete
and that in the 13th century
it had ruled the Aegean
and headed a confederacy
which could have attacked Troy.
Chief among the opponents
was an American, Carl Blegen.
With the young and confident Americans,
Aegean archaeology enters the age of film.
After the authoritarian Germans
and the old-school Britons,
the New World would bring
a fresh and more scientific eye
to the Old World's greatest story.
And coming out of the Depression,
it must have seemed a swell party.
Blegen was born in 1886
and trained as an archaeologist
when Evans was at his most influential
A quiet mid-Westerner, he evolved
his own ideas about Evans' Minoan theory.
Looking at the same evidence as Evans,
Blegen saw something very different.
Finds of pottery from mainland Greece
all over the eastern Mediterranean
suggested to him that the backwater of Mycenae
had actually dominated the Aegean
in the 14th and 13th centuries,
Evans's "age of decadence".
Blegen found a friend and an ally
in an English scholar, Alan Wace.
By 1930, the two had a system
of Mycenaean pottery
which could give accurate dates.
They were sure now
that Homer's picture of an imperial Mycenae
was basically right.
And that, of course,
led them back to Troy itself.
Was the story true?
Was Hisarlik really Troy?
"Athens, 9th July 1931.
"Dear guv,"" Blegen wrote to Wace.
"Troy is a splendid site and one could
still do a good bit of digging there.
"I wish we could get up an expedition.
"I could raise the money
if there were any prospect of a permit.
"But I don't think there's any chance of that."
But in 1932, with Dörpfeld's help,
Blegen's chance came -
to dig areas left untouched
by the Germans 40 years before.
The searchers were again on Homer's trail.
(RINGING)
As Hitler was poised
to come to power in Germany,
the third exploration of Hisarlik began.
Blegen filmed it,
one of the first digs to be so recorded.
He re-examined all nine levels of the hill,
stretching long before and long after
the time of the Trojan War.
It was nothing less than
a cross-section of human history.
But Homer was never far
from Blegen's thoughts.
Had Dörpfeld's city of the fine angled walls
really witnessed the events of the "Iliad"?
Now there came yet another twist
to this already extraordinary story.
Blegen decided that the heaped walls
of Dörpfeld's city
had not been toppled by Agamemnon's army
but by a tremendous natural catastrophe.
An earthquake.
To understand where that left Homer's tale,
we need to look at what he found
above the earthquake -
the city built on the debris of Dörpfeld's Troy.
Blegen excavated in four main areas.
Here, around the east gate.
On the north where he uncovered part
of the circuit wall demolished by Schliemann.
On the west he found the footings
of an immense bastion
which went down 23 feet below ground level,
forming a counterpoint to the bastion
uncovered by Dörpfeld.
Here by the south gate, Blegen found
the foundations of a colonnaded house,
which he called the pillar house, 30 yards long,
with the remains of the main street going past it.
This great city, however, Blegen decided,
had been destroyed by an earthquake.
End of the line for Homer's story? Well, not quite.
Blegen's attention focused
on the successor city, Troy VIIa,
where a remarkable change had come
over the character of the settlement.
These grand houses
with the wide spaces between them
seem to have been superseded
by a network of tenements,
immediately obvious to the eye.
What had happened?
After the earthquake, the survivors had cleared
the debris and rebuilt where they could.
But all over the hill,
Blegen detected signs that all was not well.
When you walked up the main street,
you saw the evidence immediately.
In here, the Americans found
three not particularly well-built rooms
of which, this, the largest, was a bakery.
They found grinders
for pounding the grain into flour.
They found fireplaces,
improvised ovens for baking the bread.
And in that corner, a series of bins made
out of wood and brick for the storage of loaves,
such as you can see in the Mediterranean today.
Carl Blegen also thought that liquid
was stored and dispensed here.
He thought this was the slop tray
with a drain out into the street.
Being a bakery, you would expect
surplus water would have to be got rid of.
But Carl Blegen thought that it was wine
and that wine was dispensed here.
The interpretation he gave
to the suite of buildings
was that bread and wine were sold
in that kiosk straight onto the street.
Sold to thirsty and harassed heroes
as they staggered back
after a hard day's fighting in the Trojan plain.
In considering that vivid image,
remember it is the product of an archaeologist
working in the middle years of this century.
The model is the soup kitchens of the cities
of Europe in the Second World War.
A suitably contemporary image
for this 20th-century version of the tale of Troy.
Blegen thought he had found a Troy
which had suffered two catastrophes -
the first by an earthquake,
the second soon after by the hand of man.
Everything seemed to fit.
At its height, before the earthquake,
the city had two dozen fine houses
widely spaced.
Now those spaces were blocked
with shanties, gloomy bungalows,
one-roomed and partitioned pre-fabs
squashed together.
The underfloors of the houses were
honeycombed with sunken storage jars,
covered with flagstones,
to keep grain, beans, smoked meat.
The normally taciturn Blegen was prepared
to talk of a war economy, rations.
Dare we say it? Well, he did. "A siege mentality."
"It was as if those last carefree summers
before the second war,
"the sharpness of the light,
the gaiety, the gentle horseplay,
"had found an unconscious response in the tale
"in the last calm before Troy was attacked.
"'A dream of calm', the poet Aeschylus said,
which came to Troy
with the delicate adornment of riches,
"'desire that stings the heart.'
"Smoke marks even now the conquered city.
"Whirlwinds of doom are still alive.
"The embers dying with the city
send forth rich gusts of wealth.
"I hear the cries of the vanquished,
"people thrown on the bodies
of husbands and brothers,
"children lying in their aged parents' arms,
"voices no longer free bewailing
the deaths of their loved ones.
"We executed payment
for their presumptuous robbery.
"They raped our queen. We raped their city.
"And we were right."
The city was destroyed by fire
possibly within even a generation of being rebuilt.
In the street, the debris was
as much as five feet thick
of charred wood, bricks, rubble and ashes.
In the entrance to the snack bar were fragments
of a human skull, perhaps the proprietor.
Nearby, the remains of two skeletons,
covered by rubble
which had showered down on them
from the houses lining the street.
In this western alley,
near part of a human jaw bone,
was found this arrow head
which Carl Blegen identified as being
of a Mediterranean type.
He thought it had been fired
by one of the Greek attackers.
Outside, below the wall,
lay, unburied, a skeleton,
perhaps of one of those Greeks,
whose head had been crushed by a terrible blow.
For the city had this time
not been destroyed by earthquake
but by an invading army which had
sacked and burned it before departing.
The circumstances fitted Homer's story perfectly.
The date, Blegen thought,
was smack on - about 1240 BC.
So for him there was no longer any doubt.
The siege of Troy was a fact.
Imagination is a very important quality
for an archaeologist to possess.
But did one arrow head make a war?
Did sunken storage jars
and a soup kitchen prove a siege?
Could this huddle of shanties
really have been Homer's city?
Still looking for answers, I turned to a man
who had actually dug with Blegen at Troy.
In Athens I voiced my doubts
to Jerome Sperling.
Can any archaeologist dig at Hisarlik
with a mind free of Homer?
Had Blegen, like Schliemann and Dörpfeld,
gone there to find what he wanted to find?
Jerome's reply was strangely ambiguous.
To me it doesn't have
any great significance, this criticism.
Everybody's Troy is different
from everybody else's Troy.
It depends upon what you make
of the poetry you've read
or how much you know
of the archaeology and care about it.
And how you use your own imagination.
The placing of those great storage jars
under the floors of VIIa,
and that passage that was newly filled
with these buildings,
that doesn't mean that the Trojans knew
there was gonna be an expedition against them
or that they foresaw Agamemnon's coming
with such an expedition.
But it means, in very simple terms,
that they didn't want to have
their country places raided
so that they would lose their annual crops.
It's as simple as that.
Didn't you ever stand on that dig
and look at the skeleton you found
and the snack bar behind the gate,
didn't you ever think it was the Greeks
that did this, as Homer said?
I wouldn't say yes or no.
I don't see a need to identify Agamemnon
as being the person there at the end of Troy VIIa.
I mean, I'm thrilled by...
I'm overpowered by Homeric poetry.
I think everyone is who reads it carefully.
It's an overpowering experience.
But that doesn't have to make it historical.
Poetic truth comes in the people he talks about -
their hopes and despair and problems and conflict.
That's where the truth of it is.
But in archaeology
truth depends on interpretation.
Blegen, however, never had any doubts
that the plundered and ravaged Hisarlik
had finally given up its secrets.
If the events of the "Iliad" were true,
it confirmed the idea that Mycenae
was at its height in the 13th century BC,
contrary to Evans's whole view
of the late Bronze Age.
The solution to the impasse,
Blegen knew, must lie in the Linear B tablets.
To Evans's great disappointment,
decipherment of his "Minoan language"
had proved impossible.
Scholars were fascinated by the problem
but Evans had published too small a sample
to give them a real chance of solving it.
Blegen decided to look for a mainland archive,
an unexcavated palace.
He headed for the Western Peloponnese,
for sandy Pylos.
Somewhere on that lovely coast, Homer says,
was the palace of Agamemnon's ally,
King Nestor.
Locals led Blegen to a hill called
Ano Englianos, high above the sea.
There, on the very first morning,
he found his archive.
Clay tablets, hundreds of them,
in the same Linear B script
as Evans had found at Knossos.
The palace Blegen uncovered
had been untouched since 1200 BC.
Again, we have his record on film.
In the royal hall,
the central circular hearth was intact,
where a king had feasted
at the time of the Trojan War.
The store rooms were packed
with the shattered wealth of the heroic age.
The palace was evidently of the same culture
as Evans's palace at Knossos.
The tablets proved it was.
But in what language were they written?
The mystery of the Mycenaeans
was nearing its solution.
It was now possible, at last,
to publish a mass of Linear B texts.
This paved the way for the decipherment.
In summer 1952,
a radio broadcast announced what would
soon be billed as "the Everest of archaeology".
It was made by a gifted English amateur,
33-year-old architect Michael Ventris.
(RADIO) This is the BBC Home Service.
(VENTRIS) During the last few weeks,
I've concluded
that the Knossos and Pylos tablets
must, after all, be written in Greek.
A difficult and archaic Greek,
seeing that it's 500 years older than Homer
and written in an abbreviated form,
but Greek nevertheless.
(WOOD) For Blegen,
the decipherment of Linear B
must have been the crowning moment
of his career.
For Evans it would have been
a traumatic revelation,
but the old man had died in 1941, 90 years old,
and never learned the truth
about his Palace of Minos.
James Candy remembers those last days.
(CANDY) I was married
and up to my eyes in work.
But at times I'd come up here on my own
and I'd look into the big drawing room.
There he was, sitting in his chair
with a rug over him
and the black cat beside him.
- On his own?
- Entirely on his own.
Do you think Knossos not broke him, but...
It must have been a fantastic expenditure
both in money and energy.
- Did it exhaust him?
- It did. And financially.
- Really?
- Oh, yes. Yes.
So by the end he couldn't really afford
to keep up this wonderful...
As he said to me that one evening,
"I ought not to be living here, Jimmy."
I said, "Why not, Sir Arthur?"
He said, "You know,
"I've spent all my money on Knossos."
And so he had.
So Evans's ancient Minoan civilisation,
which had so enriched
the culture of early Greece,
had indeed been conquered
by the mainland Mycenaeans.
Knossos had been ruled
by the bronze-clad Greeks.
Homer had been vindicated.
We began this stage of our search
with the quest for writing.
Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans
found it impossible to believe
that the heroic world
that they had uncovered was illiterate.
Evans found the writing but died
before it was revealed it was Greek
and that a Greek king had sat here
on the throne of Minos at Knossos.
Had Schliemann known that,
he would have seen it as the final vindication
of his faith in Homer's version
of the Bronze Age and the Trojan War.
The decipherment of Linear B has led
to many new questions about Homer
and those are the questions we cannot put off.
Who was Homer?
Does his story go back to real events?
And is it possible it was transmitted orally
over 500 years after the destruction
of these great palaces?
Those are the questions we'll turn to next week.
the German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann.
He died in 1890, exhausted
by his passionate and obsessive quest
to find truth in the ancient legend
of the Trojan War.
But he never solved the riddle.
Was the search an illusion,
invention of the bards?
Had the city never existed at all?
Schliemann had begun the search.
Now others would follow -
his assistant, Wilhelm Dörpfeld...
...the Briton, Arthur Evans...
...the American, Carl Blegen,
as the new science of archaeology
attempted to bring to life
"the age of the heroes".
(CRASH OF THUNDER)
Once upon a time, there was a town called Troy.
So said the Greek poet Homer,
who lived around 700 BC.
Troy, he said, was a great and wealthy city
which stood near the Dardanelles.
On a visit to Greece, the prince of Troy, Paris,
eloped with the wife of the king of Sparta, Helen.
The Greeks gathered a thousand ships
to take her back.
Their leader was Agamemnon,
king of Mycenae, rich in gold.
After 10 years of war, the city was sacked
when it was entered
by the famous trick of the wooden horse.
That was the story. But was it just a story?
At Mycenae, in 1876,
Heinrich Schliemann set out to prove it.
There he found the tombs
of rich Bronze Age kings,
literally laden with gold,
just as Homer had said...
...armed to the teeth with weapons of bronze.
At Tiryns, near Mycenae,
behind the mighty walls
of which Homer had sung,
Schliemann uncovered remains
of a Bronze Age palace
resembling those described by the poet.
Here were even wall paintings
showing images of people
who had lived at the time the war was thought
to have taken place, around 1200 BC.
But 300 miles across the Aegean Sea,
mystery still surrounded Troy itself.
Schliemann claimed he had found it
at a little hill called Hisarlik,
in what is now north-western Turkey.
There he had excavated
a small prehistoric citadel.
But could this tiny place, only 100 yards across,
really have been the splendid city
of Homer's story?
Schliemann's proof,
the so-called jewels of Helen,
with which he had bedecked his Greek wife,
were soon shown to be 1,000 years too early.
The search, however, continued.
In Manchester, my search turned
to Schliemann's loyal assistant,
the architect Wilhelm Dörpfeld.
He was determined to take up Schliemann's
torch and prove the doubters wrong.
Archaeology is a romantic science.
It attempts to bring back lost time, and that's
especially evident in this romantic story.
It's true, above all, of the second
great figure in our search, Dörpfeld.
If anything, he was a greater romantic
than Schliemann himself.
He spent much of his later life
living on the Greek island of Levkas,
attempting to prove it was Homer's Ithaca,
the home of King Odysseus.
He's buried there. Like Schliemann,
he remained a lover of Greece to the end.
He, as he put it himself,
"was inspired by the master, Schliemann."
He would endeavour to bring
Schliemann's unfulfilled dreams to reality,
to prove the truth of Homer's vision of Troy.
What the two shared was
the same driving imagination.
The difference perhaps,
as Dörpfeld admitted, was sheer luck.
For Schliemann, even in his childhood dreams,
could hardly have dared imagine
what Dörpfeld would now find.
The site of Hisarlik, we now know,
was extraordinarily complicated,
with nine cities superimposed
on top of each other.
But we can strip off its layers
with the help of modern technology.
Before we go to Hisarlik at Dörpfeld's side,
let's not forget what he didn't know
about the site, and what he knew or could deduce.
Schliemann had established
the basic stratification, the levels of the site.
Dörpfeld knew there was a Roman city
on the top, these yellow lines.
He knew there was a Greek city
underneath it, Ilion,
visited by Alexander the Great.
He knew there was an intermediate settlement,
which Schliemann called the sixth city,
which they couldn't date precisely.
He knew that deep in the prehistoric layers
there was the city
Schliemann had thought Homer's Troy.
But when the two of them had dug
together outside this site, in 1890,
they discovered a building and wall
associated with Mycenaean pottery.
In other words, it was this bit, if any,
that was connected with the Trojan War.
Dörpfeld next put the clues together.
Part of a house demolished by Schliemann.
Fragments of a circuit wall
Schliemann had hit earlier.
And part of a northern circuit wall that
Schliemann had demolished 20 years before.
Only an architect, perhaps,
could have seen that and put them together.
When Dörpfeld put them together,
something like that
must have appeared in his mind's eye.
The question was, what would there be there,
and how much of it would still be standing?
In 1893, paid for by Sophie Schliemann
and the German kaiser,
Dörpfeld went back to Hisarlik to find out.
Under 50 feet of earth and debris
and the ruins of later cities,
in a great sweep around the south
and east of Schliemann's city,
Dörpfeld uncovered the tremendous walls
of late Bronze Age Troy,
including this marvellous angular watchtower,
which is now hidden from public view,
which could have been
the great tower of Ilium itself.
It's beautifully built out of dressed limestone,
so well done it looks like later classical work.
It helps you understand why Schliemann
demolished things like this.
It still stands 25 feet high. It must have been
at least 30 feet high of limestone
and then above it a brick superstructure.
It must have dominated the plain,
jutting out like the prow of an old battleship.
Out of the soil came beautiful walls
which are shown as they were first seen
in Dörpfeld's photographs.
Immediately they seemed to recall
the city in Homer's "Iliad".
Homer calls the city well-built
and here indeed were walls which made
those of Mycenae look crude, even barbaric.
Dörpfeld uncovered the bases
of what had once been imposing towers
and again Homer describes
Troy's fine towers and gates.
One of them the Scaean Gate,
flanked by the great tower of Ilios.
Dörpfeld found that the defences
had a curious slope.
In the "Iliad", Homer says
that three times the Greek hero Patroclus
tried with his bare hands
to clamber up the angle of Troy's wall.
The place was still small,
its 700-yard circuit less than Mycenae,
but its fine masonry and elegant architecture
showed it had once been
the most beautiful fortress in the Aegean.
Dörpfeld was elated. "The long argument
over Troy is over," he wrote.
"The actual remains of the city
of Priam and Hector have come to light.
"Schliemann has been vindicated.
The Trojans have triumphed!""
Dörpfeld hadn't proved it was called Troy,
but he had proved there was
a late Bronze Age citadel here,
with Mycenaean contacts,
in the right place by the Dardanelles
with uncanny resemblance
to what the bardic tradition of Homer said.
But what was his evidence
that it had been destroyed by war?
He says, "Signs of a great fire
were evident in many places.
"The upper parts of the walls
and towers had been toppled.
"The inner buildings had been levelled.
"Evidently," he said, "the city had been destroyed
by the hand of an enemy.
"Durch Feindeshand zerstört."
Dörpfeld's dig on Hisarlik makes him
the most important of its excavators.
But his great book, "Troy and Ilion"
was never translated out of German.
Indeed, even before it went to press in 1900,
the finds which it announced
up here by the Dardanelles
were to be totally eclipsed
by sensational discoveries in Crete,
where a revolution in archaeology
was about to take place,
single-handedly achieved
by an Englishman of genius, Arthur Evans.
Evans would destroy Schliemann
and Dörpfeld's romantic vision
of a Homeric Bronze Age.
Evans was born in 1851
into an atmosphere of Victorian industry,
a family firm which later provided him
with the fortune he spent on archaeology.
His father, John,
owned a big paper mill in Hertfordshire
but John Evans was also
a leading prehistoric scholar of the day,
correspondent of Heinrich Schliemann.
The young Evans grew up
fascinated by history and by writing.
Unlike the self-taught Schliemann,
Evans had a classical education,
public school and Oxford.
And he returned to Oxford
to devote himself to his passion, archaeology.
Oxford in the 1880s was a ferment of new ideas
about geology and pre-history,
provoked by the evolutionary theories
of Charles Darwin,
a friend of Evans's father.
The discovery of new cultures,
a by-product of their imperialism,
seized the late-Victorian imagination,
shaping their belief
in the evolutionary development
from the so-called primitive societies
to the higher civilisations.
Such ideas formed Evans's view of historical
progress long before he went to Greece
to try to solve the enigma
which had eluded Schliemann -
why had Mycenaean civilisation
left no trace of writing?
The climactic year for Arthur Evans was 1893,
when the course of his life was determined.
It was also a tragic year for him.
His wife died. He was a still youthful 41.
But that February, in Athens,
Evans was rummaging in the flea market
when he came across a number of these.
Three or four-sided incised
and drilled seal stones.
He was told they came from Crete.
With his eye for microscopic detail,
he thought he could distinguish signs
of a hieroglyphic system of writing.
Such systems were known
in the ancient Near East, like Egypt,
but the idea of writing like this
in prehistoric Europe
would seem far-fetched
to most scholars at that time.
The idea had been floated
by Schliemann, among others.
He and a number of people thought that in Crete
they might find the first example
of the adoption of writing in the West.
So it was to Crete that Evans turned
to find his answers.
And there, one can only say, destiny awaited him.
Crete was steeped in legend.
Here had been the seat of King Minos,
who had ruled the Aegean with his navy
long before the Trojan War.
It was the site of the labyrinth,
lair of a monstrous half-man, half-bull,
the Minotaur.
Here Daedalus had fashioned the wings
with which Icarus had escaped from Crete
only to fly too near the sun.
From here, according to Homer,
King Idomeneus sailed to Troy
with his 80 black ships.
(SHIP'S HORN BLOWS)
Evans first arrived in Crete in March 1894,
"Feeling the worse for a bad
24-hour voyage from Piraeus," he wrote.
He had come, he said grandly,
"to find the origin of Greek civilisation
"and with it the origin
of all great culture that has ever been."
Crete is a continent in miniature,
a stepping stone between Europe,
the Near East and Africa.
Its people are descended from prehistoric folk -
Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Turks.
All have left their mark
on the landscape and the faces of the island.
But where would Evans's search
for writing lead now?
On his very first day
he wandered around the market in Iráklion.
There he found more seal stones.
"A clue was in my hands," he wrote,
"and I resolved to follow it,
"if possible to the innermost recesses
of the labyrinth itself."
For the seal stones had indeed come
from the site of the legendary labyrinth,
a then insignificant hill
now known to the world as Knossos.
The paths of history and myth
had begun to converge.
Knossos.
The hill Evans saw was very different
from the one we see today.
After his excavation, Evans decided
to partially reconstruct the palace.
To an extent, what there is now is his.
But what did he see
when he first put spade to soil in March 1900?
His finds were nothing less than a revelation.
Only inches below the surface
he found a throne room 3,500 years old.
It was in an unbelievable state of preservation,
fragments of painting still hanging on the walls.
In the store rooms, rows of jars still contained
grain, dried beans and lentils.
It was obvious to Evans what the palace was.
It was, of course, Mycenaean.
A Cretan palace which had been
conquered by Mycenaean mainlanders
and finally destroyed around 1200 BC.
The interpretation and the date
fitted Homer's picture
of a Greek king, Idomeneus,
on the throne of Knossos
at the time of the Trojan War.
The palace resembled those
in mainland Greece,
paintings like those at Tiryns.
Stone rosettes like those
on the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae.
Above all, stirrup jars,
as Evans wrote, "The most common form
of Mycenaean pottery."
But who were these so-called Mycenaeans?
The answer clearly lay in Evans' key find.
Only days into the dig
he had turned up strange baked-clay tablets.
They were inscribed
with an unknown system of writing.
Confident he would soon decipher their script,
Evans persuaded the Oxford University Press
to cast a type fount for his new language.
He was convinced he had found the missing link
between the cultures of the Near East
and of early Greece,
one of the great languages of the ancient world.
Like his other finds, he called it Mycenaean.
But within months,
he completely changed his mind.
It was not Mycenaean, but Minoan.
Evans took the name
from the legendary King Minos.
Minos came to stand for the Minoan culture
which Evans thought had ruled mainland
Greece, including Schliemann's Mycenae.
The bull of Minos had replaced
the mask of Agamemnon
as the symbol of the Aegean Bronze Age.
The palace of Minos, Evans thought,
had been the centre of an empire
which had dominated the Aegean
just as the legend had it.
Its people were sophisticated,
controlled, but fun-loving,
devotees of outdoor sports
like the strange bull-leaping
depicted on the frescos.
For Evans, the Minoans were lovers
of the natural world,
their rituals and festivals presenting
the image of a lost Golden Age.
Presided over by their bull-masked king
who issued Europe's first law code
from the throne of the Palace of Minos.
Evans identified intensely with that vision.
Perhaps that's why he felt impelled
to reconstruct the palace -
literally to make the vision concrete.
I'm sure most people who come to Knossos
must at some point wonder
about these reconstructions of Sir Arthur Evans
and the psychology behind them.
Did he do it for the general public or to gratify
some inner need to make it all more tangible?
Schliemann's driving obsession, his inner demon,
is so near to the surface, so naïve.
With Evans it seems different,
but he was just as much a man of his time.
It was a troubled time, the 1890s
and the early years of the 20th century.
A lot of creative people were dismayed
by what they saw as the rising tide
of industrialism and imperialism.
It wasn't just artists like Gauguin rushing off
to Tahiti to find the lost innocence of the world.
It was intellectuals too, like H G Wells.
I think Arthur Evans found his lost innocence here.
His sister said that he was a romantic
who needed to escape from the present
and that he found this new civilisation
so wonderfully to his taste,
and here at Knossos he was able to create
a world where his mind and eye could dwell,
a world where he could escape the painfulness
of the present where he found no peace.
So there was no room for Homer
in Evans's view of the Aegean Bronze Age.
The benevolent imperialists
from Knossos were the history makers,
the new Victorians.
Across the Aegean in the 15th century BC,
King Minos ruled the waves,
master and civiliser of what
Schliemann had thought Homeric Greece.
The valleys of Mycenae were farmed
by Cretan colonists,
nabobs in a Minoan raj.
The great building achievements,
like the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae,
were the work of Cretans,
perhaps even of the architect Daedalus himself.
After the fall of Knossos in around 1400 BC,
Evans thought Mycenae was left
a decadent backwater.
From here no imperial expedition
could ever have set sail.
The Trojan War was a mere fairy tale.
(BELL TOLLS)
In the academic world, Evans's ideas
became the Establishment view.
He himself appeared a stern figure
who brooked no argument.
But his godson, James Candy,
who lived with him before the First War
knew a different side of the great man.
This is the place. By Jove,
you're going to see a view here!
Wait till we get up to these doors.
And then I'm going to just push it open
and you go straight in.
Look at that!
- Isn't that lovely?
- It's wonderful.
- I used to come here and giggle.
- What an extraordinary place!
Here Evans built an artificial lake
and a house to share with his wife.
Her early death shattered that hope
but when not in Knossos, the childless
Evans retreated to this private world,
The house, with its Minoan fantasies,
is gone now,
though the gardens Evans planted remain.
Here, the boy Candy knew him in a way
his fellow scholars never did.
- He grew his fingernail?
- The others were all right.
That one was his personal excavator!
Because, you see, he'd look at things,
as he was myopic,
he'd look at things - rare coins or pottery -
he would...
- Marvellous.
- Marvellous!
What sort of man was he?
I'm wondering if he was a bit of a romantic.
In his academic work he seems rather severe.
There were two sides to him.
In fact, his contemporaries,
when they came down to stay here,
saw Sir Arthur, they said,
"This is not the Sir Arthur that I know
at Knossos or the Athenaeum
or the British Museum or the Ashmolean."
- He frightened them.
- Frightened them to death!
- His reputation was as a tyrant.
- Yes, very autocratic!
So he really shared his real thoughts with you?
He was happy when he was with children.
(CANDY) He loved playing charades,
dressing up,
because he had a beautiful collection
of Balkan shawls and covers and so on,
on his sofas and that sort of thing.
The boys had yellow little ribbons put on
and the girls had blue.
You had to match up with them.
And then you'd dance. But he would lead
the little girl onto the floor of the hall.
It went rather like a labyrinth, all the way round,
so you had to follow it.
But, in time, you came to the middle.
And there would Sir Arthur be,
on top of the Minotaur.
And, of course, these children
would come up and he'd go "Rahhhrr!"
Like that, and throw the child
up in the air and catch it!
Then put it down. "Next one!"
Make the noise of a bull.
That went on till...
There were about 20 or 30 children.
And, of course, one or two,
"Ooh, I don't like the bull!"
And the others thought
that was absolutely marvellous!
Did he talk to you about his Cretan discoveries?
Did he help you imagine what he'd found,
what the Minoans were like?
- Did he see them as real people?
- Yes.
- How did he paint it?
- As real people in a simplified form.
He didn't say this was a certain...
2000 BC, and all the technical side.
He brought them alive to you.
I mean, his description
of lying in the villa Ariadne,
in the big earthquake, when everybody
was screaming and rushing around,
he lay there and he was most intrigued
because under the bed, the great rumblings,
as he said in the letter to me,
he said, "It was the bull bellowing."
- Wonderful.
- Yeah.
(CANDY) That's what fascinated me
and still fascinates me,
that he was two people.
Evans stood over the field
for 50 years like a giant.
"The Palace of Minos" is perhaps the greatest
work of archaeological scholarship ever.
No man has ever dominated a field like he did.
But major problems were unresolved,
especially the writing,
which had led him to Knossos in the first place.
He'd put his thoughts down on paper
in 1909 in "Scripta Minoa"
but the mysterious tablets,
"the Minoan writing", as he called it, Linear B,
still remained untranslated.
"The one thing they could not be,"
he asserted time and again, "was Greek."
But opponents felt Mycenae had always
been independent of Crete
and that in the 13th century
it had ruled the Aegean
and headed a confederacy
which could have attacked Troy.
Chief among the opponents
was an American, Carl Blegen.
With the young and confident Americans,
Aegean archaeology enters the age of film.
After the authoritarian Germans
and the old-school Britons,
the New World would bring
a fresh and more scientific eye
to the Old World's greatest story.
And coming out of the Depression,
it must have seemed a swell party.
Blegen was born in 1886
and trained as an archaeologist
when Evans was at his most influential
A quiet mid-Westerner, he evolved
his own ideas about Evans' Minoan theory.
Looking at the same evidence as Evans,
Blegen saw something very different.
Finds of pottery from mainland Greece
all over the eastern Mediterranean
suggested to him that the backwater of Mycenae
had actually dominated the Aegean
in the 14th and 13th centuries,
Evans's "age of decadence".
Blegen found a friend and an ally
in an English scholar, Alan Wace.
By 1930, the two had a system
of Mycenaean pottery
which could give accurate dates.
They were sure now
that Homer's picture of an imperial Mycenae
was basically right.
And that, of course,
led them back to Troy itself.
Was the story true?
Was Hisarlik really Troy?
"Athens, 9th July 1931.
"Dear guv,"" Blegen wrote to Wace.
"Troy is a splendid site and one could
still do a good bit of digging there.
"I wish we could get up an expedition.
"I could raise the money
if there were any prospect of a permit.
"But I don't think there's any chance of that."
But in 1932, with Dörpfeld's help,
Blegen's chance came -
to dig areas left untouched
by the Germans 40 years before.
The searchers were again on Homer's trail.
(RINGING)
As Hitler was poised
to come to power in Germany,
the third exploration of Hisarlik began.
Blegen filmed it,
one of the first digs to be so recorded.
He re-examined all nine levels of the hill,
stretching long before and long after
the time of the Trojan War.
It was nothing less than
a cross-section of human history.
But Homer was never far
from Blegen's thoughts.
Had Dörpfeld's city of the fine angled walls
really witnessed the events of the "Iliad"?
Now there came yet another twist
to this already extraordinary story.
Blegen decided that the heaped walls
of Dörpfeld's city
had not been toppled by Agamemnon's army
but by a tremendous natural catastrophe.
An earthquake.
To understand where that left Homer's tale,
we need to look at what he found
above the earthquake -
the city built on the debris of Dörpfeld's Troy.
Blegen excavated in four main areas.
Here, around the east gate.
On the north where he uncovered part
of the circuit wall demolished by Schliemann.
On the west he found the footings
of an immense bastion
which went down 23 feet below ground level,
forming a counterpoint to the bastion
uncovered by Dörpfeld.
Here by the south gate, Blegen found
the foundations of a colonnaded house,
which he called the pillar house, 30 yards long,
with the remains of the main street going past it.
This great city, however, Blegen decided,
had been destroyed by an earthquake.
End of the line for Homer's story? Well, not quite.
Blegen's attention focused
on the successor city, Troy VIIa,
where a remarkable change had come
over the character of the settlement.
These grand houses
with the wide spaces between them
seem to have been superseded
by a network of tenements,
immediately obvious to the eye.
What had happened?
After the earthquake, the survivors had cleared
the debris and rebuilt where they could.
But all over the hill,
Blegen detected signs that all was not well.
When you walked up the main street,
you saw the evidence immediately.
In here, the Americans found
three not particularly well-built rooms
of which, this, the largest, was a bakery.
They found grinders
for pounding the grain into flour.
They found fireplaces,
improvised ovens for baking the bread.
And in that corner, a series of bins made
out of wood and brick for the storage of loaves,
such as you can see in the Mediterranean today.
Carl Blegen also thought that liquid
was stored and dispensed here.
He thought this was the slop tray
with a drain out into the street.
Being a bakery, you would expect
surplus water would have to be got rid of.
But Carl Blegen thought that it was wine
and that wine was dispensed here.
The interpretation he gave
to the suite of buildings
was that bread and wine were sold
in that kiosk straight onto the street.
Sold to thirsty and harassed heroes
as they staggered back
after a hard day's fighting in the Trojan plain.
In considering that vivid image,
remember it is the product of an archaeologist
working in the middle years of this century.
The model is the soup kitchens of the cities
of Europe in the Second World War.
A suitably contemporary image
for this 20th-century version of the tale of Troy.
Blegen thought he had found a Troy
which had suffered two catastrophes -
the first by an earthquake,
the second soon after by the hand of man.
Everything seemed to fit.
At its height, before the earthquake,
the city had two dozen fine houses
widely spaced.
Now those spaces were blocked
with shanties, gloomy bungalows,
one-roomed and partitioned pre-fabs
squashed together.
The underfloors of the houses were
honeycombed with sunken storage jars,
covered with flagstones,
to keep grain, beans, smoked meat.
The normally taciturn Blegen was prepared
to talk of a war economy, rations.
Dare we say it? Well, he did. "A siege mentality."
"It was as if those last carefree summers
before the second war,
"the sharpness of the light,
the gaiety, the gentle horseplay,
"had found an unconscious response in the tale
"in the last calm before Troy was attacked.
"'A dream of calm', the poet Aeschylus said,
which came to Troy
with the delicate adornment of riches,
"'desire that stings the heart.'
"Smoke marks even now the conquered city.
"Whirlwinds of doom are still alive.
"The embers dying with the city
send forth rich gusts of wealth.
"I hear the cries of the vanquished,
"people thrown on the bodies
of husbands and brothers,
"children lying in their aged parents' arms,
"voices no longer free bewailing
the deaths of their loved ones.
"We executed payment
for their presumptuous robbery.
"They raped our queen. We raped their city.
"And we were right."
The city was destroyed by fire
possibly within even a generation of being rebuilt.
In the street, the debris was
as much as five feet thick
of charred wood, bricks, rubble and ashes.
In the entrance to the snack bar were fragments
of a human skull, perhaps the proprietor.
Nearby, the remains of two skeletons,
covered by rubble
which had showered down on them
from the houses lining the street.
In this western alley,
near part of a human jaw bone,
was found this arrow head
which Carl Blegen identified as being
of a Mediterranean type.
He thought it had been fired
by one of the Greek attackers.
Outside, below the wall,
lay, unburied, a skeleton,
perhaps of one of those Greeks,
whose head had been crushed by a terrible blow.
For the city had this time
not been destroyed by earthquake
but by an invading army which had
sacked and burned it before departing.
The circumstances fitted Homer's story perfectly.
The date, Blegen thought,
was smack on - about 1240 BC.
So for him there was no longer any doubt.
The siege of Troy was a fact.
Imagination is a very important quality
for an archaeologist to possess.
But did one arrow head make a war?
Did sunken storage jars
and a soup kitchen prove a siege?
Could this huddle of shanties
really have been Homer's city?
Still looking for answers, I turned to a man
who had actually dug with Blegen at Troy.
In Athens I voiced my doubts
to Jerome Sperling.
Can any archaeologist dig at Hisarlik
with a mind free of Homer?
Had Blegen, like Schliemann and Dörpfeld,
gone there to find what he wanted to find?
Jerome's reply was strangely ambiguous.
To me it doesn't have
any great significance, this criticism.
Everybody's Troy is different
from everybody else's Troy.
It depends upon what you make
of the poetry you've read
or how much you know
of the archaeology and care about it.
And how you use your own imagination.
The placing of those great storage jars
under the floors of VIIa,
and that passage that was newly filled
with these buildings,
that doesn't mean that the Trojans knew
there was gonna be an expedition against them
or that they foresaw Agamemnon's coming
with such an expedition.
But it means, in very simple terms,
that they didn't want to have
their country places raided
so that they would lose their annual crops.
It's as simple as that.
Didn't you ever stand on that dig
and look at the skeleton you found
and the snack bar behind the gate,
didn't you ever think it was the Greeks
that did this, as Homer said?
I wouldn't say yes or no.
I don't see a need to identify Agamemnon
as being the person there at the end of Troy VIIa.
I mean, I'm thrilled by...
I'm overpowered by Homeric poetry.
I think everyone is who reads it carefully.
It's an overpowering experience.
But that doesn't have to make it historical.
Poetic truth comes in the people he talks about -
their hopes and despair and problems and conflict.
That's where the truth of it is.
But in archaeology
truth depends on interpretation.
Blegen, however, never had any doubts
that the plundered and ravaged Hisarlik
had finally given up its secrets.
If the events of the "Iliad" were true,
it confirmed the idea that Mycenae
was at its height in the 13th century BC,
contrary to Evans's whole view
of the late Bronze Age.
The solution to the impasse,
Blegen knew, must lie in the Linear B tablets.
To Evans's great disappointment,
decipherment of his "Minoan language"
had proved impossible.
Scholars were fascinated by the problem
but Evans had published too small a sample
to give them a real chance of solving it.
Blegen decided to look for a mainland archive,
an unexcavated palace.
He headed for the Western Peloponnese,
for sandy Pylos.
Somewhere on that lovely coast, Homer says,
was the palace of Agamemnon's ally,
King Nestor.
Locals led Blegen to a hill called
Ano Englianos, high above the sea.
There, on the very first morning,
he found his archive.
Clay tablets, hundreds of them,
in the same Linear B script
as Evans had found at Knossos.
The palace Blegen uncovered
had been untouched since 1200 BC.
Again, we have his record on film.
In the royal hall,
the central circular hearth was intact,
where a king had feasted
at the time of the Trojan War.
The store rooms were packed
with the shattered wealth of the heroic age.
The palace was evidently of the same culture
as Evans's palace at Knossos.
The tablets proved it was.
But in what language were they written?
The mystery of the Mycenaeans
was nearing its solution.
It was now possible, at last,
to publish a mass of Linear B texts.
This paved the way for the decipherment.
In summer 1952,
a radio broadcast announced what would
soon be billed as "the Everest of archaeology".
It was made by a gifted English amateur,
33-year-old architect Michael Ventris.
(RADIO) This is the BBC Home Service.
(VENTRIS) During the last few weeks,
I've concluded
that the Knossos and Pylos tablets
must, after all, be written in Greek.
A difficult and archaic Greek,
seeing that it's 500 years older than Homer
and written in an abbreviated form,
but Greek nevertheless.
(WOOD) For Blegen,
the decipherment of Linear B
must have been the crowning moment
of his career.
For Evans it would have been
a traumatic revelation,
but the old man had died in 1941, 90 years old,
and never learned the truth
about his Palace of Minos.
James Candy remembers those last days.
(CANDY) I was married
and up to my eyes in work.
But at times I'd come up here on my own
and I'd look into the big drawing room.
There he was, sitting in his chair
with a rug over him
and the black cat beside him.
- On his own?
- Entirely on his own.
Do you think Knossos not broke him, but...
It must have been a fantastic expenditure
both in money and energy.
- Did it exhaust him?
- It did. And financially.
- Really?
- Oh, yes. Yes.
So by the end he couldn't really afford
to keep up this wonderful...
As he said to me that one evening,
"I ought not to be living here, Jimmy."
I said, "Why not, Sir Arthur?"
He said, "You know,
"I've spent all my money on Knossos."
And so he had.
So Evans's ancient Minoan civilisation,
which had so enriched
the culture of early Greece,
had indeed been conquered
by the mainland Mycenaeans.
Knossos had been ruled
by the bronze-clad Greeks.
Homer had been vindicated.
We began this stage of our search
with the quest for writing.
Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans
found it impossible to believe
that the heroic world
that they had uncovered was illiterate.
Evans found the writing but died
before it was revealed it was Greek
and that a Greek king had sat here
on the throne of Minos at Knossos.
Had Schliemann known that,
he would have seen it as the final vindication
of his faith in Homer's version
of the Bronze Age and the Trojan War.
The decipherment of Linear B has led
to many new questions about Homer
and those are the questions we cannot put off.
Who was Homer?
Does his story go back to real events?
And is it possible it was transmitted orally
over 500 years after the destruction
of these great palaces?
Those are the questions we'll turn to next week.