In Search of the Trojan War (1985): Season 1, Episode 4 - The Women of Troy - full transcript

To this lonely hillside, high above
the Valley of Sparta in southern Greece,

pilgrims still come one day a year
to make their offerings.

They light their candles to a Christian saint,

but his altar stands
on a far more ancient pagan shrine.

For this place was once dedicated
to the face that launched a thousand ships.

Helen of Troy.

(CRASH OF THUNDER)

According to legend, it was because of Helen

that the heroes sailed from Greece
to attack the city on the shore of Asia.

Their leader was the most powerful
of their kings: Agamemnon of Mycenae.

Helen, queen of Sparta, had been
abducted by Paris, the prince of Troy,



and the Greeks wanted revenge.

But after 10 years of war, they could only
take Troy by a trick, by the wooden horse.

They demolished the city, slaughtered its men

and took the women back
as concubines or menials.

Ever since, those women have stood
as an image of the fate of the conquered in war.

The two most famous facts in the legend
are also the most incredible:

that a woman caused the war and that
it was brought to an end by a wooden horse.

Can there be any truth in such fairy tales?

So far in our search, we have found
a city did indeed exist

where Greek tradition said Troy had stood,

near the mouth of the Dardanelles
in what is now Turkey.

There was a finely built royal fortress
here on its windy ridge.

The Greek bards of Homer's day believed
that 500 years before their time,

this wealthy place was sacked by an army
which had come from Greece.



For the bards, the incontestable,
central fact of the tale

was the fateful overseas expedition
to Troy from Golden Mycenae.

Mycenae, in the Peloponnese,
southern Greece.

The most powerful citadel in Greece
in the Bronze Age,

it has given its name
to the whole culture: Mycenaean.

The bards of Homer's day
said that for three generations

Mycenae was the centre
of a loose confederacy of allies,

a kind of empire.

But could a historical Agamemnon
have been a great king

who commanded lesser kings to war?

Could he have led an imperial expedition
from this tiny place

to devastate the shores of Asia Minor?

In the 13th century BC,
you approached Mycenae

by a paved road from the sea at Tiryns.

Road systems are often signs of imperial power

and even today you can see traces
of the roads and their massive bridges

which centred on Mycenae.

As you walked up the valley,
you came to the first of a series of royal tombs,

their facades once decorated with coloured
marble imported from other parts of Greece.

These treasuries, built for kings of Mycenae
in the generations before the Trojan War,

made a great impression on the first excavator
of Mycenae, Heinrich Schliemann.

The Treasury of Atreus is one of the most
stupendous monuments of the Bronze Age.

Nearly 50 feet in diameter,

44 feet to the top of that beehive shape.

The perfectly joined courses of stone,

a single block weighing 120 tonnes at the lintel.

When it was constructed,
its interior walls studded with decorations,

bronze rosettes and spirals.

It had been obvious to early travellers,
and it was obvious to Schliemann,

that the society which
could construct such a masterpiece,

which could lavish such skill and ingenuity
on a tomb for a single king,

must've been not only tremendously powerful

but fantastically rich in artistic achievement.

Once crammed with treasure,
the tomb chamber is now wrecked,

but we can imagine its walls adorned
with beautifully carved slabs of alabaster.

The royal tombs of Mycenae show that
several generations of great kings ruled here.

500 yards away up the valley on its hill

is the royal citadel itself,
the residence of Agamemnon.

The so-called cyclopean
fortifications of Mycenae

were built around 1300 BC,

a generation or two
before the time of the Trojan War.

Also part of this building programme
was the famous Lion Gate.

This was the main gate of Mycenae
at the height of its power

and one's first impression
is of being almost overwhelmed

by the sheer monumental force
of the masonry and sculpture.

It's a prehistoric masterpiece of architecture.

The emblem shows two lions with their paws
on an altar on either side of a column.

On top of the column,
the representation of a building structure,

presumably Mycenae itself.

In other words, this is the coat of arms
of Agamemnon's family,

the earliest in Western art.

Just inside the Lion Gate, to the right,

you come upon one of the most interesting
features of the later citadel of Mycenae

and one that gives a fascinating insight
into the psychology

of the kings who ruled in the 13th century,

the kings who ruled at the time
to which tradition assigns the Trojan War.

This is the great grave circle excavated
so sensationally by Heinrich Schliemann.

It lay originally outside the walls of the citadel,

but at just this time, a new,
enclosing cyclopean wall was constructed

in order to bring this grave circle
within the walls of the fortress itself.

The whole area was extensively refurbished
in order to become an object of show.

A new supporting terrace was built
for this side of the circle,

these elaborate standing stones were erected
to form an ornate enclosure

and the grave markers themselves,
bearing the emblems of the dead kings,

were repositioned.

It's almost like the Westminster Abbey
of the Mycenaean royal family.

Graves which were already ancient
to Agamemnon, if he existed,

have now become the focus
for veneration and for cult.

The Mycenaean royal family itself
in the mid-13th century

is showing an acute awareness of history,
of dynasty and of pedigree.

At the time of the Trojan War,

the king of Mycenae saw himself
as the inheritor of a great tradition

reaching back 300 years to the kings
buried in the shaft graves.

And from the top, a truly royal setting.

The plain of Argos stretching below you.

The mountains of Arcadia and the Peloponnese,

some still touched by snow,
even at the start of May,

and, over there, Argos on its high mound
and the gulf of the sea beyond it.

What a view! Who's to say
that Mycenaean builders didn't choose

the finest positions for their royal patrons?

And, surely, their royal patrons
must have enjoyed this.

These are the royal apartments.
Spacious columned halls,

floored with soft stucco, gypsum surrounds.

This is the throne room itself,

the door pins for the entrance,

the central hearth,
the wooden columns framing it.

Here Mycenaean kings feasted
their guests or their royal kinsmen

after the boar hunts and the lion hunts.

Here, perhaps, they heard bards
singing of their deeds in Mycenaean Greek,

and around them the walls glowed with frescoes

depicting their deeds
and the deeds of their ancestors.

The king of Mycenae
would seem to have surpassed

the other kings in Greece
in the 13th century BC.

But is it possible that, as Homer says,

such a wealthy and powerful king could have
ruined himself in a war for a woman?

For a woman, perhaps, of the kind
portrayed on the walls of the Greek palaces.

Homer's story was that Agamemnon persuaded
his allies to go to Troy to fight for Helen

because other kings of Greece who had been
suitors for her hand had sworn to recover her.

George Mylonas, present excavator of Mycenae.

Agamemnon became the leader
of this common expedition

not because everybody that wanted Helen
gave an offer to her father

that he was going to defend her,

but because Agamemnon
was the most mighty leader of the period.

Therefore even the people
that had an opinion there

indicated that for this common enterprise

they chose the best man,
and that was Agamemnon.

Not because he was an emperor
or anything like that.

Another thing, all these roads that we traced,

they go up to a certain point.

If it was an empire, you would expect those roads
to go beyond that point that was limited.

So you don't believe
in an empire in the modern sense?

No, I don't believe in an empire. I believe
that Mycenae was a very important state.

I believe it had a tremendous
commercial activity.

I believe that it communicated to the sea
by means of Tiryns.

I believe that Tiryns was
a dependency of Mycenae,

that the king of Mycenae had one of his sons,
maybe, out there as a prince.

No ruler would have allowed another person
to build such an important place

that might have become
the source of the beginning of an attack.

You must remember that the people
that lived there, that formed this state,

lived outside the walls,
scattered all over the area.

The plain of Argos could have supported
half a million people in the Bronze Age.

It's ringed by huge fortresses,
the biggest of which is Tiryns.

Tiryns of the Great Walls, as Homer calls it,

from which, legend said,
King Diomedes led 80 black ships to Troy.

Tiryns was perhaps the main port of the Argolid.

From the plain, the industrial powerhouse
of the Mycenaean world,

trade goods flowed
across the eastern Mediterranean.

Factories here produced thousands of stirrup
jars in which oil or perfume were exported.

In return, the Greeks imported raw materials
such as tin and copper

to make the bronze weapons
on which their power rested.

By the 13th century BC, the same
palace civilisation is found all over Greece.

It has been called the age of imperial Mycenae.

If we use the word "imperial" of Mycenae,
we need to be careful.

Homer says Agamemnon was king
of southern Greece and many islands.

When you look at a map with Mycenaean red
stretching across the Aegean, it seems plausible.

But this is a map of Mycenaean contacts
and settlements, and it shouldn't delude us.

We need to know the internal
political geography of mainland Greece.

A lot more is known about that than in the days
of Schliemann and Dörpfeld and even Blegen.

It would appear that mainland Greece was
divided into six or seven powerful city states,

much bigger than later classical ones,

with a high degree of prosperity, large populations

and massive military technology,
much aimed against each other.

Two of these we know about because
of the Linear B tablets - Knossos and Pylos.

There we have clear pictures

of highly centralised states dominating
their areas of central Crete and Mycenaea.

It gives us a plausible model,
at least to work with.

We have here a series of city states,
sometimes friends, sometimes enemies,

who could at times acknowledge
the leadership of the most powerful.

For the kings of the palaces of
Mycenaean Greece worshipped the same gods.

They spoke the same language,
recorded on identical Linear B clay tablets.

They shared the same artists,
architects and stonemasons

and the same taste in decoration.

There was constant exchange between them
of luxury goods and raw materials,

whether expensive ornamental stone
or oil or perfume in mass-produced stirrup jars.

But if this loose confederacy
cooperated so closely in time of peace,

could they not have done so in time of war?

Empires, of course, only exist by war.

They live on aggression and exploitation.

We can see this in our own history.

Retrospectively, we, like Homer, admire
the Victorian values of the empire-builders

and forget their mode of operation.

These are the vaults of what was one of
the oldest private banks in Liverpool, Heywoods.

They were built in 1799.

These are the accounts of a Liverpool family
who owned estates in Jamaica at that time.

They itemise not money
or stocks and shares, but people.

Eleanor, a nurse, aged 42, healthy.

Charlotte, a field hand, aged 37, sickly.

Mary, unemployed, aged three and a half.

They're African slaves, originally from Angola
or the mouth of the Congo River.

It's astonishing to think
that only 150 years or so ago,

this is what lay behind
the glittering facade of the British Empire.

Well, it's a remarkable fact that records exactly
like this exist for Bronze Age Greece,

and they may point us not only to the Trojan War,

but towards the real-life women
who may be the basis of the legend

of the carrying-off of Helen of Troy herself.

The crucial evidence turned up
in Carl Blegen's excavation

at the Palace of Pylos in Mycenaea
in the 1950s.

Pylos in Homer's story is the home
of Agamemnon's trusty old ally, King Nestor.

Here, Blegen found the foundations
of a 13th century BC palace.

Even the painted hearth
of the throne room was intact

Here, for the first time, the full detail
of a Mycenaean royal hall could be recovered,

the very room Homer imagines
so vividly in the "Odyssey".

This is the throne room of Pylos,
just as it was found by the excavators.

From these burnt stumps, you can't get a real idea
of what a blaze of colour this must have been,

the ceiling painted with glazed roundels
and decoration,

the walls covered with frescoes
with griffins and mythological creatures

and the floor above all else
absolutely shining with colour.

Most of it's been covered now
to protect it from the feet of the many visitors,

but you can make out here that it was
originally covered with painted stucco

with criss-cross lines all over it

making about 100 squares of colour
with different designs in all of them -

linear designs, wavy designs,

shell designs, fish, octopus...

So the whole floor was a blaze
of blues, reds, whites and blacks.

In the middle was the royal hearth. Opposite
the throne over there, where King Nestor sat.

Here's the hearth where the great fire burned.
You can still see the painted design around it.

In the story in Homer, when Telemachos arrives
in the room, the young blades of Nestor's court

are nonchalantly kebabing beef on the fire
and drinking red wine with their king.

And here, a noble guest
would have received the gifts

appropriate to the hearth of a great royal palace.

But Blegen's most remarkable evidence
concerned the lives not of the rich

but of the thousands below stairs.

In the archive room, he found hundreds
of Linear B tablets written in Bronze Age Greek

which itemised the lives of the workers,
and especially women workers.

Associated with several groups
was a word, "linon", flax,

from which our word, "linen", comes.

Near Pylos, at the village of Koukounara

where flax was grown commercially
until only 30 years ago,

it is still possible to touch on their lives.

This little stream is called Linaria, "flax river",

and here, for hundreds, probably
thousands of years, women have come -

for it is women who perform
this back-breaking task -

come to the banks here to crush
and break up the fibres of the flax stalk,

before laying it out for a week to rot
in the warm, shallow water of the river,

then drying it, combing it and spinning it
so it can be woven.

But in the Bronze Age,
they must have used it most of all for rope

and for sails, the sails of ships
perhaps that wafted Nestor to Troy.

Troy seems a long way from this idyllic place

but it's this very place that gives us
a direct human contact

with the ordinary people
who lived and died all that time ago.

It's the flax women themselves
who are the contact,

because the tablets from the palace say

that the women who worked the flax in this region
and on this very river 3,000 years ago

were women from the coast of Asia Minor,
the coast below Troy,

from Miletus, Halicarnassus and Cnidus.

They must have been slaves.

The tablets speak of rations
for groups of 500 women,

living perhaps on great estates
where they worked the state industry, flax.

They were kept together.
The tablets speak of 21 women from Cnidus

with their 12 girls and 10 boys,

not like American slave plantations,
where the families were broken up.

That, to my mind, is the strongest connection
with the period of the Trojan War.

That is a real, direct contact.

A truer and more eloquent testimony

than trade routes to the thought world
of Agamemnon and the sackers of cities.

The surviving tablets list
1,700 foreign women and children

on the flax plantations around Pylos.

The women came from places
widely scattered over the Aegean.

From Cnidus, far to the south.

From Zephyrus and Miletus,
where Greek colonists actually settled.

From Lemnos in the north,
an island in sight of Troy.

But most of them are simply called
women of Asia,

which originally meant
the area south of Troy itself.

If this is the correct interpretation of the tablets,
it's crucial evidence in our search.

Dr John Chadwick, who participated
in the decipherment of the Linear B tablets,

is an expert in the Pylos Archive.

It is very much as if you tried to reconstruct
the administration of present-day England

by going through half a dozen
waste-paper baskets in Whitehall

and drawing your conclusions from that.

With that first statement,
I would go and say from this

the existence of personal slavery
seems to be very questionable.

There are only a few cases
where we know of slaves

belonging to important people.

It is not a slave-owning society
in the classical sense at all.

There is one exception to this,

and that is in the royal establishments.

At Pylos, we know there were
about 500 women of menial status.

They've got their children with them
but they have no husbands.

Almost certainly, they are slaves

and, for the most part, they're employed
as what we would call industrial workers.

If you compare it with Homer,
it's an incredibly bureaucratic society.

- It's not heroic at all!
- It's not heroic in that sense.

It is a bureaucratic administration

and everything is carefully
recorded and docketed.

You cannot spend anything, you can't issue
anything from the stores without filling in a chit.

But it's possible that Mycenaean kings
or sons of kings

could have ranged far and wide
on predatory forays,

even buying or seizing slaves?

That is quite possible.

Certainly, we can be sure Pylos had a fleet.

It was certainly mobilising its fleet,

at the time when the tablets we have
were written, for its own defence.

So there is no reason why,
in more favourable times,

they should not have been engaged
in expeditions overseas.

We know some of these women
I've just mentioned

are specifically called booty.

They come from some kind of piratical
or warlike operation.

We also have groups of women whose titles

indicate an origin
on the east of the Aegean, from Anatolia.

Again, we don't know why
they're called by these titles,

but it does suggest that Pylos had
wide-ranging contacts across the Aegean.

So Homer was right.

The heroes fought not only for the cities
and their loot but for their women.

The seizure of women could have led to war.

So could Helen have been a real person?

The next stage of the search was to go to Sparta,

where Helen supposedly lived
with her husband Menelaus,

brother of Agamemnon of Mycenae.

You would have made this journey
by sea in the Bronze Age,

for in Greek history the sea,
not the land, has been the unifier.

This road through the Taygetos
was only blasted through in the 1970s.

Before then, you had a 12-hour mule trek.

The mountains determined
the political geography of Mycenaean Greece.

Any unity can only have been
nominal and fragile.

On a steep hill above the plain of Sparta
stands a monument.

The classical shrine commemorating
Helen and her husband,

It's called the Menelaion.

From at least the 8th century BC, pilgrims
came here and left offerings to the couple

in the belief that they had really existed.

A century ago, Schliemann
came here and found nothing.

New excavations have located part of the palace,
if second-rate, which could've been Helen's.

Does the archaeology give any support
to the idea of the Spartan Helen

and her husband from Mycenae?

The Mycenaean site's spread over
these three hills,

with their magnificent views over the valley
and the Taygetos Mountains.

There's a Mycenaean building even on this hill
under the church of Profitis Ilias.

It's never been excavated
but here there's the column base,

presumably from a mansion or even a palace
that stood on this site.

It seems that this, the Menelaion,
was the capital site

of the kingdom of Sparta
during the 15th and 14th centuries.

But at that time
it was abandoned for about 100 years.

And then, in around
the very generation of the Trojan War,

a new palace was erected on that flat plateau
to the right of the later shrine.

That palace had everything in common
in its material culture

with the palaces at Mycenae and at Pylos.

It is, on the face of it, very tempting to think

that this must've been the palace
of Menelaus and Helen.

But we don't really know what we mean
by royal families at this time.

I suspect they were like
the Saudi royal family today

or the great African kings' families,
where there were many royal wives,

royal sons, brothers and queen mothers,
all of whom had palaces.

But this was the biggest palace at this time

and surely has the best qualifications
to be the palace of Menelaus.

If it was, then the rebuilding
fits rather well with the legend.

The legend says it was not a Spartan
who was king at the time of the Trojan War

but a foreigner, an outsider from the dynasty
of Mycenae who had come here.

So is it not possible
that the rebuilding of the palace

was by Menelaus himself,
in order to provide a new palace

on an ancient site for his new wife Helen?

And long after Christianity
had replaced ancient paganism,

the holy aura of the hill remained.

Even today, pilgrims come here,
the aged and the sick,

to keep their vigil once a year with the saint,

and perhaps his shadowy predecessor,
whoever she was.

So Helen remains a tantalising
and ambiguous image.

Whether she left for love or, as Homer has it

she was seized forcibly by Paris of Troy,

when, he says, the Trojans took her
with her women to the island of Krani.

And that seems a suitably Homeric way
to leave mainland Greece for the moment,

because it was on Krani that Helen of Troy
and Paris spent their first night of passion

after her abduction from Sparta.

When, as Homer says, Paris "carried her off
in his seagoing ships

"from lovely Laconia and we spent the night
in bed in each other's arms

"on the island of Krani."

So they sailed overseas to Troy,

to be followed by a Greek armada of 1,000 ships,

bringing ruin upon the city and, as Homer says,

"pains a thousandfold upon the Greeks."

The story of Paris and Helen
is usually dismissed as romantic fiction,

but some scholars think
an abduction could have a place

in the motives for a war
against the city of King Priam.

Professor John Luce of Trinity College, Dublin.

It was a general attempt to cause
such difficulties for Priam's kingdom

that they would capitulate
to the Greek demands.

And I would even go so far as to say that one
of those demands was for the return of Helen.

In the conditions of fighting in...

Well, I was going to say, heroic ages,
but I view the background as more medieval

in the sense that it is a world
of pageantry, of kings and nobles,

of knights whose honour is all-important.

And I can give you a good parallel
from the history of my own country,

as the Normans first came into Ireland.

They were asked to do so by a local king
called MacMurrough Kavanagh

whose wife had left him and he wanted help
to get her back, you see.

So, historically, there's nothing out of key,
to my mind,

with the abduction by a Trojan
of a Greek princess.

Obviously, the spheres
of the Trojans and the Greeks

were closely intermeshed in terms of trade -
they had been for 100, 150 years before.

A lot of coming and going between the two areas.

And this could be a cause. I don't...

In a complex situation, it's oversimplification
to say it's the only cause.

It might have been something
that Agamemnon was glad to take up

this personal quarrel on behalf of his brother.

- As an excuse for war.
- An excuse for war,

which would lead to aggrandisement, to plunder,

to a further expansion of Mycenaean power
on the Anatolian mainland.

But you wouldn't rule out the possibility
that Helen existed?

Not a bit, no!

Helen's story is seductive,
though, in the end, we cannot prove she existed.

There may have been
more pressing economic motives

which led the Mycenaean military
on overseas expeditions

to Asia Minor in the 13th century BC.

The massive building projects
at Mycenae and Tiryns

came at the end of a long and stable period
of economic growth

but despite the outward show,

the 13th century BC seems to have been
a period of growing economic decline.

The king of Mycenae
and his confederacy of allies

had troubles at home.

There was overpopulation,
their trade routes were under threat,

the factories in the Argolid
were on half production.

The kings needed treasure, loot and slaves
to keep their army loyal

They needed foreign war.
It was in the nature of their rule.

Economic necessity,
or the world's most beautiful woman?

The motive hardly mattered.

Already in our search, we have seen
that the Greek bards of the 8th century BC

had traditions which connected
heroic Greece with Troy.

But is there archaeological evidence at Troy
to back up their story?

Hisarlik, north-western Turkey.

Here, Greek bardic traditions
said Troy had stood.

Even before Homer's day, this overgrown
and obscure ruin by the Dardanelles

had become the focus
of the Greeks' national epic.

Here, their bards said, had been a city
of fine walls with strong gates and towers.

A beautiful city,
standing high above the windy plain.

A city whose kings were rich and civilised
Oriental potentates,

famous for their fine horses.

Over the last 100 years, three generations
of excavators have dug here.

They've brought to life the city
which stood here at the heyday of Mycenae

in the years after 1300 BC.

The city's fine walls, remembered by the bards,
were found by Wilhelm Dörpfeld in 1893,

Its well-built towers included
an imposing watchtower.

With 500 years of stability behind it,

this city is the one remembered
in Greek tradition as Troy,

though no one has yet been able to prove
the events in the "Iliad" happened here.

The last excavator of Hisarlik

discovered the city
had extensive outside contacts

which were suddenly severed towards 1250 BC.

In his finds of pottery,
Carl Blegen found evidence

of a trade with Cyprus and Syria.

But remarkably - and perhaps
this was a clue to its wealth -

the oldest trading connections of the city

were with none other than Mycenae itself.

One of the intriguing things about Troy,

when you consider the Homeric story
of a Greek expedition to sack the city,

is that Troy, of all the places
on the Anatolian coast,

seems to have had the closest relationship
with Mycenae, judging by the pottery.

Troy in its heyday of Troy VI imported
vast amounts of Mycenaean pottery.

Hundreds of vases were discovered on site.

And especially the ubiquitous stirrup jar
that we've already seen

at Tiryns and Mycenae
and on the coast of Anatolia.

What Troy gave in return
is almost impossible to say.

Perhaps it was textiles,
it may have been fish,

or, as Homer says,
maybe they bred and exported horses.

But whatever the reason for their wealth,
this place, at its height, was a wealthy city.

The people who lived in this citadel were able
to build grand houses, like this one.

This long, rectangular building - you can
make out its lines - with two central columns.

That one's lost the top level.
The ceiling would've been about 10 feet high.

The lower storey built of stone,
the upper one perhaps of wattle and plaster,

mud brick or timber,
rather like buildings in Anatolia today.

But this would've been a princely dwelling
for one of the chief citizens of Bronze Age Troy.

Maybe a royal kinsman like Hector himself.

We should imagine 20 or 30 of these houses,
with the royal palace on the hill.

But unlike the palaces at Pylos and Mycenae,

we cannot now transport ourselves
to the halls of the house of Priam,

the palace to which Helen was taken.

Unfortunately, all surviving
trace of it was destroyed

when Heinrich Schliemann gouged out
the centre of the site in the 1870s.

All that remains is the walls
and the outer row of houses.

But, by comparison
with other cities in Anatolia,

it is possible to deduce what the city
of Hector and Priam probably looked like.

James Mellaart of the University of London.

I'd like to know what the palace was like.
There's enough room.

There's enough room for the sort of palace
you would have had

both in western Anatolia or in the Aegean.

So you'd imagine the palace area
crammed with buildings and storerooms?

Yes, obviously taking up what remains...

or what is at the moment the blank
on the plans of Troy.

And then, presumably,
the houses which have been found

are those of palace officials,

the normal Near-Eastern pattern, people
connected with the palace administration.

- Or royal kinsmen.
- Yes, or whatever it is.

That's what you'd expect. Presumably,
the rest of the population lives outside the walls.

What about its wealth? The Greek epic says
horse-breeding was the source of Troy's wealth.

- Do you think that's plausible?
- It's a very plausible source of local wealth.

Not Troy so much,
but the plains directly to the east

are still horse-breeding territory today in Turkey.

The other thing,
from the thousands of spindle whirls,

it's clear that one facet
of the economy of Troy is wool.

That's exactly what you would expect.

Of course, the one other thing,
if one goes by some of our Pylos texts,

slaves, of course, the export of slaves,
especially trained slaves,

is always... produces a lucrative trade.

That gives a plausible reason for the Trojan War.
You think there was a Trojan War?

Look... Many of these things,
as we've already discussed, I mean...

We have no real evidence, we only have belief.

I would put it like that:

if the Trojan War was a figment
of Greek imagination,

it wouldn't have gone down very well.

I think there must be some core...
some historical core to it.

You wouldn't even rule out the possibility
that the seizure of a Mycenaean royal woman

by a Trojan prince could've been
the reason for the Trojan War?

The idea that they may have annoyed
the Mycenaeans

is by no means impossible.

People pointed out, of course,

that Homer's idea of Alexander or Paris of Troy...

...running off with one of the Mycenaean kings'
wives is far-fetched...

I would not say that stranger things
haven't happened in the Near East.

So was the city sacked,
and was it sacked by Greeks?

The excavator Carl Blegen found
the city had been destroyed twice

during the traditional period of the Trojan War.

The city of fine walls apparently fell
to an earthquake towards 1260 BC.

Tumbled walls and debris
lay heaped everywhere.

A shanty city built on its ruins

was burned by the hand of man
some decades later.

This, Blegen thought, was Homer's Troy.

But only the earthquake city fits
the description handed down by the bards.

Only this city comes within the heyday
of the Mycenaean world,

when an imperial expedition
might have sailed from Greece.

Can the legend be squared
with this archaeological contradiction?

The legend says the fall of Troy came about
in a most extraordinary way.

For 10 years, Homer says,
Troy could not be taken.

Its walls were too strong
to be broken down by human hands.

Then the Greeks built a wooden horse,
inside which they hid armed men.

Thinking the horse a gift for their gods,
the Trojans took it inside their walls.

That night, the Greeks descended
from the horse, opened Troy's gates

and the city was destroyed.

Since ancient times,
people have found it impossible

to believe in the literal truth of this tale.

But now a new and ingenious theory
has offered an explanation.

The horse is the image
of the most prominent god

in the Mycenaean pantheon: Poseidon.

According to the legend,
it was only through Poseidon's help

that the walls of Troy were brought down.

And Poseidon, the master of horses,
was the god of earthquakes.

(RUMBLING)

The supposed earthquake towards 1260 BC

threw down the tops of Troy's walls and towers.

According to the new theory - it is only theory -

the earthquake delivered Troy to the Greeks,

who seized this moment to sack
their enfeebled former friend,

plundering its fabled riches
and killing its menfolk.

So, in the strange folk tale of the wooden horse,

the bards were perhaps unknowingly
handing down

a garbled memory of the wrath of Poseidon.

As for the women of Troy,

the legend says their fate was the same
as all women captives

in so-called heroic warfare.

They were divided as chattels
among the victorious chiefs,

taken back to Greece to serve them
in their fields or in their beds.

Some perhaps to work
in the flax fields of Pylos,

where a generation or two later,
they are recorded as women of Asia.

"Some", says Homer, "to draw water at the spring
below the hill of Sparta,

"taking their orders from the woman
who had caused it all.

"Helen, who had returned to Sparta

"to rule as queen again."

Back in Mycenae, there's one last clue
to the Trojan enigma.

A clue which, perhaps, takes us closer

to the people who suffered and died
or were enslaved in Bronze Age wars.

This is a piece of grey handmade pottery.

It was made in the region of Troy
on the island of Lemnos.

It was found, along with many other pieces,

down there in the workers' hovels which
crouched below the great citadel of Mycenae.

Let the imagination play and is it not possible

that this was made by the same kind of women
that we met in the palace at Pylos?

Women brought over from Asia Minor as slaves,

from Cnidus, Miletus and Lemnos,

women whose memory, in this case,

will far outlive the physical existence
of their home.

The women of Troy.

That is just imagination, I stress.

There is so far in our search no concrete proof

that the Trojan War ever took place.

And the trouble is that, by their very nature,
Homer and archaeology cannot prove such a fact.

In order to do that,
you would need primary sources.

Narratives, documents, letters.

You may say it's impossible
that they could exist for the Bronze Age.

But astonishingly, they do.

In order to find them,
we must go far to the east,

into Asia Minor itself,
to the Hittite empire of Anatolia,

where, amazingly, diplomatic archives
have been discovered

which cover this very period

and which could show that a Mycenaean king
was campaigning on the mainland of Asia Minor,

and that perhaps the Trojan War
did indeed take place.

Next week, we will look at the Asian context
of the Trojan War.