In Search of the Trojan War (1985): Season 1, Episode 6 - In Search of the Trojan War - full transcript

In this place, tradition said there once stood

the most famous
and the most tragic city in the world.

The city of Troy.

For 3,000 years, travellers have come here
searching for truth behind the tale.

And out of it, every generation
has made a new version in its own image.

But as we enter the final stage of our search,

can the archaeology of Troy
be squared with the legend?

(CRASH OF THUNDER)

Troy was a real place.

It stood on a hill now called Hisarlik
near the Dardanelles in what is today Turkey.

So far, we have found that the Trojan War
may indeed have happened,



that this city may have been sacked
towards 1250 BC

in a clash between two great powers of the day,
the Hittites and the Mycenaean Greeks.

Soon afterwards, both empires fell apart
and sank into a so-called dark age.

In the Aegean world, once-important places
like Troy became the haunt of squatters.

But it is only by looking
at this wider historical picture,

the aftermath of the age of heroes,

that we can hope to pin down
the archaeology of Troy itself.

Was the place remembered by legend
the city of fine walls

found by Wilhelm Dörpfeld,
which fell towards 1250 BC,

or was it, as is still generally believed today,

the city of shanties excavated by Carl Blegen,

built on the ruins of Dörpfeld's city?

According to archaeologists,
the time gap between them

could be as little as 10 years, or as much as 80.



But as we know from our own time,
a world can change in 80 years,

the period, say, from the Boer War
to the Falklands.

What happened
when the Greek heroic age ended

and did mysterious newcomers to our tale,
the sea peoples,

play a role in a historical sack of Troy?

Homer says that after the Trojan War,

the victorious Great King Agamemnon
returned home to disaster.

The legends said he was assassinated here
by his wife, Clytemnestra,

murdered in his bath,
to be replaced as king by a rival kinsman.

Agamemnon was perhaps buried
in one of the great beehive tombs

known as treasuries,
surrounded by the loot of Asia.

But the heroic age of Mycenae
was interred with him.

According to tradition, no other king from his city
claimed the great kingship of Greece.

The archaeology of Mycenae
could support the idea

that the heroes of Troy came back
to a time of growing troubles.

By 1200 BC, the city seems
to have declined rapidly.

An air of defensiveness can be seen

in the last building project undertaken
by the rulers of the city.

This is a flight of 54 steps.

They go down about 40 feet
below the level of the last platform.

Again, if I don't fall over,
this is a Mycenaean corbel vault

covered with a thick layer of some kind
of plaster, two or three inches thick.

I can feel the damp seeping through there.

Now...

Why it was covered with plaster...
we'll see just down here.

(STONE SPLASHES IN WATER)

It's a water system.

This is siege technology such as is found
all over the Near East at this time.

It's to ensure the water supply
during a long siege.

The sackers of Troy were now
themselves beset.

No longer secure,
even from their nearest neighbours.

Mycenaean Greece
had never been a unified country.

It was a collection of independent city states.

Mycenae...

Nestor's Pylos.

Sparta, the kingdom of Menelaus and Helen.

Orchomenos... Thebes, the city of Oedipus.

Iolkos, the home of Jason and the Argonauts.

At times, some of them may have combined in
a loose confederation under the most powerful,

but now their fragile unity broke apart.

This is the plain of Kopais,
near Orchomenos in central Greece.

It was once a huge lake.

In the 13th century BC,

in the greatest engineering achievement
of the Mycenaean age,

massive dykes were built to drain the lake,

creating the biggest single source of grain

for the dangerously booming population
of late Bronze Age Greece.

This is one of the retaining walls
of one of the dykes.

A three-yard thick cyclopean wall.

20 yards of fill, another cyclopean wall

and then a 60-yard channel of water.

And 30 miles of channels.

This enabled the people of Orchomenos
to control the seasonal flow of the rivers

and to cultivate perhaps
25 or 30 square miles of land

which had been lake.

The drainage installations here
were protected by a string of forts

centring on the immense fortress of Gla.

Here, the harvest was collected for distribution
behind a mile of cyclopean walls.

These great buildings were erected
by the king of Orchomenos.

Along with Mycenae, Orchomenos was
the only city described by Homer as rich in gold.

According to the "Iliad", its king had been
an ally of Agamemnon and Troy.

Now, bardic tradition says that Orchomenos
fell out with her powerful neighbour, Thebes.

The war that followed was
a catastrophic blow for central Greece,

for the dykes were smashed
and the plain flooded.

Orchomenos itself was sacked and burned,

Worse was to follow.

For if the legends are right, the war now drew in
the city states of the Peloponnese.

They did not know it yet,
but the kings of heroic Greece

were on the brink of a dark age.

At the Isthmus of Corinth,
so often the frontline in Greek history,

a long wall was hastily thrown up,
anticipating attack from central Greece.

Perhaps from Thebes.

Thebes rivalled Mycenae in its material wealth

and in its legendary saga
of tragedy and bloodshed.

Here, the ill-fated Oedipus
had solved the riddle of the Sphynx

and married his mother
after killing his father, Laius.

Now Thebes too was attacked and burned
by forces from the Peloponnese

in an expedition remembered in the epic tale
of "The Seven Against Thebes".

And now, in the cellars of Thebes,

the walls of the Mycenaean palace itself
have begun to emerge.

Seen by modern eyes for the first time

since they were levelled by the Achaeans
after the plundering of the palace

and the enslavement of its women.

This taboo place lay covered
by a thick layer of debris

in which, astonishingly, the treasures
of the palace of Oedipus lay untouched.

With them, we come face to face
with the sack of a city in Mycenaean times.

The storeroom contents spilled out, as at Troy.

Jewellery of agate, jasper and amethyst.

Gold adornments which had once bedecked
the women of Thebes.

A hoard of precious cylinder seals
from Babylon,

made in the coveted blue stone, lapis lazuli.

And the ivory legs from a throne panoply,

carved in the shape of bound papyrus stalks,

perhaps from the throne of Oedipus himself,

incinerated by the blaze.

But even so thorough a destruction

was not enough for the conquerors.

For it seems that a curse
was placed upon the ruins.

A much later traveller,
the classical writer Pausanias,

says that even in his day,
the area of the palace

was in some way viewed as holy ground,
not to be built on or trodden on.

And, extraordinary as it may seem,

when archaeologists first started
to dig in Thebes in modern times,

in the early years of this century,
in Pindar Street, right above us,

and when they first found the remains
of the Palace of Cadmus,

they discovered that they had not been built on
for over 1,000 years after the sack of Thebes.

Archaeological finds strongly suggest

that Orchomenos, Gla and Thebes
were destroyed towards 1220 BC.

But other evidence,
the Linear B clay tablets found at Pylos,

suggest that at this very moment,

other parts of Greece
were threatened by attack from outside.

Thus, the watchers are guarding the coasts.

Command of Maleus at Owitona.

50 men to go to Oikhalia.

Command of Nedwatas.

20 men of Kyparissia at Aruwote.

Rowers to go to Pleuron.

The Pylos tablets
seem to speak of preparations.

Troops are being moved,
strategic sites garrisoned,

lookouts posted, the home guard is on standby.

Bronze is being requisitioned,
Just as we commandeered aluminium

for our Spitfires in the Second World War.

Pylos had no fortifications.

The kings here had lived in their painted palace,
confident in their military might.

But now they were on their own.

The palace was burned down,
the king's treasures looted,

the women and children enslaved,

The fate of Troy was now handed out to Pylos.

The last act of its king was to order sacrifices,
perhaps human.

"Perform the rituals at the shrine of Zeus
and bring the gifts.

"To Zeus, one gold bowl, one man.

"To Hera, one gold bowl, one woman."

The tablet on which this was written
trails away to a scrawl,

as if the writer was butchered
at his writing bench.

Pylos was never again lived in
by men or women.

It's a dramatic tale, if we've read it right.

But with such fragmentary
and ambiguous evidence,

the only certainty as yet
is that the palace was destroyed.

In fact, the Mycenaean Greek world
was going through a complex decline.

Overpopulation, local natural disasters,

agricultural failure,
even the over-exploitation of the workers

may all have played their part.

But one by one, the great palaces,
most of whom Homer says went to Troy,

vanished now like blips off a radar screen.

Orchomenos: burned.

Thebes: burned and abandoned.

Pylos: burned and abandoned for ever.

The Menelaion at Sparta: gone for ever.

Iolkos: burned.

But there was no one cause,
and not all went under.

Mycenae continued to exist, although shattered
by an earthquake in around 1200 BC.

But the biggest surprise is at Tiryns.

For now, perhaps, Homer's Tiryns
of the great walls overtook Mycenae

as the most populous and powerful
city state in the Argolid.

The German dig at Tiryns,
which is going on at this moment,

has shown that after 1200 BC,
Tiryns grew in size.

A substantial walled lower town,
now being excavated,

was filled with buildings.

Outside the citadel walls, a huge shanty area

with a grid of streets received
a great influx of new people.

Apparently, refugees settled
on a permanent basis,

swelling Tiryns' population by many thousands.

Tiryns was only finally abandoned,
along with Mycenae,

a little after 1100 BC.

Its people, the first Mycenaeans
ever seen by modern eyes,

on Schliemann's frescoes,
were among the last to disappear.

(DISTANT THUNDER)

So the end of the heroic age came
not with a bang but a whimper.

Tradition said that three generations
after the Trojan War,

Greece was entered by waves
of Greek-speaking newcomers called Dorians.

Perhaps peasants who lived on the fringes
of the sophisticated world of the palaces.

By 1100 BC, the glory had gone.

The last palaces,
like Mycenae, were abandoned.

Their bureaucracies vanished
and, with them, literacy itself.

It would be oral tradition alone
over the succeeding 400 years

which would carry down to Homer.

Dim traditions maintained by the illiterate
successors of the Mycenaeans

of the wars of Troy and Thebes
which had destroyed that godlike race of heroes.

But it was not only the Mycenaean world
which was sinking around 1200 BC.

The crisis affected the whole Bronze Age
culture of the eastern Mediterranean.

In Anatolia too, at their capital Boghazkoy,

the Hittites were increasingly nervous.

Hittite diplomats had watched the disintegration
of the Greek body politic.

They have no record of a Greek Great King
after about 1230 BC.

The last appearance of his name is crossed out
before the clay was dry.

By then, the Hittites had troubles of their own.

(THUNDER)

The emperor Hattusilis III had died in 1235.

His son, Tudhalias, already middle-aged,

was left to hold the empire together
and keep all his subject kings loyal.

He still proudly called himself King of the World,

but he was faced with attacks and desertions
on all sides.

He responded by constructing huge defences

whose footings can still be seen today.

60-feet high city walls with massive towers.

A last-ditch barrier against the barbarians.

Poor old Tudhalias.
The last of the really Great Kings of the empire

and architect of the final magnificent phase
here at Hattusas.

Tudhalias died about 1210 BC.

His sons followed him,
Arnuvandas and Supilonumas,

optimistically named after the Great Kings
of the past, but they're mere shadows to us.

They are the last Hittite kings of which we have
any record and their reigns were short.

Perhaps we can see
the way the wind was blowing

in the last phase of the architecture
here at Hattusas.

For in Tudhalias's day,
these immense fortifications were completed,

enclosing a square mile of city.

Inside the city, also,
a string of forts were erected

on the crags across that natural amphitheatre,

standing over it like grim sentinels.

As at Mycenae, great effort
was made to secure the water supply

by tunnelling secret passages
deep under the city.

Their world was threatened, then,

but whether that threat came
from external enemies

or from their own people living in the hills
above them, we don't yet know.

The last tablets from the Hittite archive
give no hint of trouble.

But out on the fringes of the Hittite empire,

panic-stricken messages
were flying back and forth,

speaking of a state of emergency
remarkably like that at Pylos.

"Enemy ships have come.

"Some of my towns have been burned.

"They have done evil things.

"My fleet is away.

"Seven ships have appeared offshore.

"Now, if there are more, please tell me
and of what kind.

"Write to me. I must have warning."

Boghazkoy was burned down
in around 1180 BC.

The Hittite empire fell
as completely as any in history.

But who were these mysterious
raiders from the sea?

Egypt.

Thebes of 100 Gates.

The oldest and most stable power
in the Near East.

The Egyptians knew the Greeks and the Hittites.

Egyptian ambassadors
had gone from here to visit Mycenae.

The Egyptians kept detailed historical records
throughout this period.

Records written not merely on clay tablets

but on papyrus and on the walls
of their great temples.

They give us first-hand evidence of a shattering
series of events around 1200 BC

which seem to have convulsed the world
of the eastern Mediterranean.

"The foreign peoples made a conspiracy
in their islands.

"All at once, they were on the move,
scattered in war.

"No one country could stand before their arms.

"Arzawa, Cyprus, Karkemis, the Hittites.

"All were cut off."

And on the contemporary Harris Papyrus
in the British Museum,

we learn the strange names of these invaders.

The Danuma, from the islands.

The Tjekkeru, the Pulisati.

The Sherden, the Weshesh of the sea.

The Egyptians have also left us images
of these enemies who so frightened them.

The faces of the peoples of the sea.

Egyptologist Ken Kitchen
at the University of Liverpool

believes the Egyptian accounts
of the sea peoples' attacks

in 1210-1180 BC are first-hand
diplomatic evidence for the crisis.

(KITCHEN) Diplomacy didn't stop
just because we don't have the documents.

Diplomacy would go on in a hum-drum way.

Exchange of presents - yawn -
exchange of envoy from so-and-so.

The ordinary way of life
at the Court of St James today.

It's the same
at the Court of Egypt of Ramses then.

Diplomacy would go on until the network
was cut by the invading hoards.

When Hatti fell, when the capital went down
in flames, if that's what happened,

diplomats from other countries
would flee to save their skins.

The Egyptian diplomats wouldn't stay to be
roasted alive. The message would come fast...

(WOOD) So it'd be like fleeing
the embassy in Saigon?

Yes, like people fleeing in modern conflicts.

Whether it's from events in western Asia
or the Near East or anywhere else.

Or Central America. If a regime's in trouble,
the country's breaking up,

the diplomats will get out
if there's nowhere to be safe.

And the message will come home,
literally and metaphorically.

This state's in trouble.

You can expect no more relations
with Hatti or Arzawa.

The Egyptian authorities, the pharaoh, would be
on the alert for anything threatening Egypt.

The Egyptians were able
to repel the sea peoples

and settled many of their captives
as mercenaries.

But it is still not known where they originated,

only that they appeared to come
from the coasts of the Aegean and Anatolia,

over the great green sea.

Who were the sea peoples?

Nancy Sanders has made a special study.

These events happened
in such and such an order.

It looks as though perhaps
sea peoples were engaged

but that's supposing the sea peoples
came from outside.

The sea peoples may have been
the Mycenaeans, to some extent.

- (WOOD) Ah!
- So that...

By the time they get to Egypt,

you're dealing with possibly
displaced Mycenaeans

or Mycenaeans out on the make.

Can I pick you up on this intriguing idea

that the Mycenaeans
may have been among the sea peoples?

What would be our evidence for that?

It's partly a question of what happens

after the breakdown of social structure.

And there's plenty of evidence
the social structure did break down,

partly through over-specialisation,
farming techniques and so on.

What happens to a fighting aristocracy?

And... one of the things they do
is take to their boats

and go out as corsairs.

So rather like the Vikings, the sons of kings may
have gone off to try and carve new kingdoms?

Quite possible, but you're never
going to get evidence for this.

There is evidence, however,

that Mycenaeans migrated
all over the Mediterranean at this time.

So there's nothing unlikely in the idea
that the sea peoples did include migrant Greeks,

and even discharged
and displaced war veterans,

men like Odysseus of Ithaca,

whose 10-year wanderings
are recounted in Homer's "Odyssey".

"We came to the fair-flowing Nile.

"And, in the river, we moored our curved ship.

"And then we set about devastating
the fair fields of the people of Egypt.

"And then their people came out at dawn.

"And the plain was filled with soldiers,
and with chariots and flashing bronze.

"And they killed many of us
with their sharp bronze.

"And others they led back to their city alive
to work for them as forced labour."

So, ironically enough,
tiles from the Egyptian palaces

could show us the true faces
of Homer's sackers of cities.

But the sea peoples would then appear
to be only a symptom,

not the cause of the dissolution
of the Bronze Age Aegean world.

Colin Renfrew, professor of archaeology
at Cambridge.

I'm not very impressed by the level of discussion
and argument in this field.

I think there's been a simplistic approach,

where people have been looking
for one argument.

They've said we had a great dark age,
we had the end of the Aegean world

between 1200 and 1100 BC,
terrible things happened,

so were there plagues,
were there dramatic misfortunes?

I think one has to look for a slightly
more sophisticated explanation,

which we're used to in our own world, when
we've had economic recessions and disasters.

They don't arise from a single cause, usually.
They arise from a complexity of causes.

And I think one can look for
a slightly more complex explanation.

It may not be quite so graphic, sheets of fire
from the sky, but maybe a little more realistic.

I think it's quite clear
that many early state societies,

if you want to call them that, many early
civilisations were in fact rather unstable.

Many of them had population growth,
they over-specialised,

and when they came into some adversity,
it was quite easy for them to collapse.

It's useful to recognise the general phenomenon,
what I like to call systems collapse,

and if we establish this
as something that happens quite often,

we don't need some special,
mysterious explanation,

some weird invaders from the north
or some strange sea peoples or something.

We can look for more rational explanations
more akin to the explanations we use

when we're talking about
the recession or something.

Or the Arab oil crisis in the '70s.

That's right. In that case, you might say
the recent world recession is the result

of the Arab decision to increase the price of oil,
which produced the oil crisis.

But if we ask why did the Arabs
decide to increase the price of oil

and why did they do so then,

you find yourself in quite an elaborate analysis.

The truth is that events of this kind
do require careful analysis

and they're not to be explained away
by one mysterious horde of invaders.

So let us try to draw the evidence together.

Until about 1250 BC, the Greek and Hittite
empires were still in their heyday.

Then the power of both rapidly declined.

A political vacuum was created
in western Anatolia, the region of Troy.

Those parts sank into turmoil,
obscurity and confusion,

later remembered as the onset of a dark age.

Just before 1200 BC,
famine struck western Anatolia

and precipitated mass migration.

Many of the sea peoples
were probably migrants from those parts.

There, as in the aftermath
of the modern struggle in South-East Asia,

the old states and kingdoms were swept away.

By this time, the fragile influences

of the Greeks and Hittites on western Anatolia
had all but vanished.

Can the Trojan War story
be fitted into this picture?

Did it take place in the heyday of the empires
or in the black hole left by their collapse?

The evidence from
the Hittite archives and Homer

suggests strongly that it was a real war

and that it took place before 1250 BC,

when the Hittites still had alliances
in western Anatolia

which the Greek Great King
was trying to undermine.

Then, Troy was a rich city with wide contacts.

50 years later, by 1200 BC, it was too late.

Greek contacts with the area
had all but ceased

and many of their own palaces
had burned down.

But can the archaeology give us
a more precise date?

We must turn again to the ravaged hill
of Hisarlik.

The mound we call Troy was inhabited
for 5,000 years.

In that time, it accumulated 50 layers,
making up nine main cities.

It was sacked at least nine times
by hostile armies.

So, in one sense, what we're looking for
is nothing extraordinary

in the violent cross-section of human history
which is Hisarlik.

But we're looking for the fall of Homer's Troy

and that comes down to just two levels
separated by less than a century.

The Trojan War has to be
at one of two settlements on Hisarlik.

It's either Troy VIIa,
Carl Blegen's city of shanties,

a city which certainly suffered a siege.

Storage jars in the houses,
shanties in the streets

and then the devastation, the firestorm,
the unburied bodies in the streets,

but a city that bore only a passing resemblance

to the city described in Homer's epic the "Iliad".

Or it has to be Wilhelm Dörpfeld's Troy VI,
a city which in every way, as we've seen,

resembled Homer's Troy in the "Iliad",
with its wide streets, its fine walls and tiles,

but a city which, if Carl Blegen is right,
was destroyed by earthquake.

It has to be one of those two,
and it has to be within those few years.

The exact dating depends on finds
of imported Greek pottery

whose style can now be roughly dated
by the experts.

Most of the Greek pottery of Troy
is what is known as L.H. III A and III B.

It shows that Dörpfeld's city of the fine walls
fell towards 1250 BC.

But our search centres on the Greek pottery
called L.H. III C,

which was introduced after 1200 BC.

If any III C was found by Carl Blegen in his city,

Troy VIIa, then it must've fallen
after most of the palaces in Greece.

(SHIP'S HORN SOUNDS)

Istanbul. Here, the search proper
began all those months ago

on the trail of Heinrich Schliemann.

All archaeology is an act of destruction,
an experiment that can only be done once,

for once the finds are taken out of the ground,
their context is lost.

From then on, we rely on how archaeologists
interpret their finds.

But, inevitably, science moves on.

Blegen's finds are stored in the former
Imperial Museum in Istanbul.

With hindsight, was he right
about the date of the pottery

by which he interpreted the fall of his Troy, VIIa?

Or was he, too, seduced into making
his finds fit the legend?

Back home, the last available pieces
of the jigsaw puzzle were soon in my hands.

(BUZZER SOUNDS)

The next step was to seek an expert opinion
on the style of Blegen's pottery sherds.

Dr Elizabeth French of Manchester University.

Well, that one's an old friend.
I've held forth about it before.

It's fairly crucial because of this spiral here
next to the handle.

That's a feature that is particularly common
in L.H. III C.

And this Blegen didn't pick up at the point.

If you look at some of these pieces,
a piece like that,

where you've got another handle
and the tiny spiral next to it as a fill,

that is a later piece but it shows
the same characteristic of this early example.

- Very distinctive.
- Very distinctive.

And, to my knowledge, it doesn't happen earlier.

So I have always thought that this sherd,
unless it's an intrusion from above...

Now, of course, this is the terrible business
with sherds in debris levels.

It's very difficult to guarantee that they are pure.

You will always have things thrown up
from lower down as they disturb levels.

The site is constantly churned over.

Yes, they make mud bricks,
they dig into wall foundations, things of this sort.

But also, particularly in Turkey, you have gerbils.

Oh! I thought you were going to say
earthquakes, but gerbils...!

They make very large holes,
perfectly good sherd-sized holes.

It is perfectly possible for stuff
from upper layers to get further down.

So, you can never be totally sure.

Is this enough to make you suspect
that Blegen's Troy VIIa

actually fell too late for the Trojan War?

- It depends when you're putting the war.
- I'm putting it when the Mycenaean world

is still in some sort of heyday
and palaces like Pylos are still standing.

Pylos may have gone but don't forget that
the III C period is a very prosperous one.

At Tiryns, the new evidence from Tiryns shows
that Tiryns has its greatest extent at this period.

I almost suspect that Tiryns is the base
for the sea peoples.

- You won't buy that one?
- Hmm!

So, Mycenaean raiders could still have sacked
this city, only in the 12th century?

If they'd been raiders.
I don't actually see them as raiders.

I see them more as entrepreneurs, buccaneers,
possibly raiding in certain places.

But more like Drake's lot in the West Indies.

Being bad if they had to,
and being good in other places.

And we have a growing amount of evidence
that there were settlers

in the islands of the Aegean at this period.

This is where Troy, in fact, is a drop-out.

Troy doesn't seem to have settlers at this point
when the other islands and places do.

It would be for this reason that I would think
Troy had already been sacked.

It had been so heavily pasted
that it couldn't recover?

Well, that it didn't have contacts
with the Mycenaean world by this point.

But maybe I need to look at the sack of Troy VI,

the fall of Troy VI, which Blegen thought
was an earthquake.

Does that strike you
as a worthwhile line of enquiry?

Indeed, but how do you identify earthquakes
in the archaeological record?

Well, you're an archaeologist. How do you?

- Can you tell the difference?
- I don't know.

I'm not at all happy about an earthquake,
in many places.

The reason at Mycenae that they've postulated it

is they have dead bodies caught
by falling masonry. This is the supposition.

I don't recall that there is any of this at Troy.

A dozen pieces of L.H. III C were found
in Blegen's city of shanties,

enough to cast serious doubt on his dating.

His Troy must've fallen
well into the period of decline,

towards 1180 BC,
after the destruction of Pylos and Sparta.

So unless we wish to reduce Homer's story

to an inglorious foray
by Mycenaean pirates from Tiryns,

we're left with Dörpfeld's city of the fine walls

as the only candidate for Homer's story.

Troy VI, the city Blegen alleged
fell to an earthquake.

But was it an earthquake?

How do you distinguish an earthquake
from a man-made destruction

in the archaeological record?

I went to Cambridge to ask a man
who looks at Anatolian earthquakes as his job.

Dr James Jackson of Queens' College.

There's Blegen's earthquake damage,
the piles of rubble.

And underneath, now,
there's Carl Blegen's rubble

from his deliberate destruction
of the shanty city.

(JACKSON}) Yes, they don't look a lot different.
I don't know how you'd tell.

It's hard enough to tell the difference between
buildings demolished after an earthquake,

when they want to start clearing up

and you come along even a month or two later
when demolition has started

and trying to tell what had fallen down
in the earthquake,

which was very important if you want to see
how the buildings performed,

that is actually a problem, sometimes.

They may have some definitive observation
which decides it. I don't know.

They don't... They don't.

Blegen's definitive observation,
as far as I can tell,

was that he wants one of them to be
Homer's siege of Troy

and therefore the other one has to be...
There's no other reason for it.

It's perfectly reasonable that Troy has in its time
felt big earthquakes somewhere nearby

but how you prove that this particular case
was one, I don't know.

So there was never any real proof
for Blegen's assertion

that the fine walls of Troy VI
were felled by an earthquake.

The tradition in Homer was that
they were toppled by the hand of man,

by Agamemnon's army.

Was Homer right after all?

There was only one question left.

Did any of the excavators of Hisarlik -
Schliemann, Dörpfeld, Blegen -

find any hard evidence that the earthquake city
was actually sacked?

Of course, I admit I was only doing
what others had done before me:

trying to make the facts fit the legend.

But, surprisingly, Schliemann records
a number of Mycenaean weapons

which he found in the sixth city.

Axes and barbed arrowheads, like those found
by Dörpfeld and Blegen,

in the destruction level of Troy VI.

Unwittingly, of course, for Schliemann thought
them much later than the Mycenaean era.

He couldn't explain why he found
a Mycenaean lance head

and four axe-heads identical to those
he found at Mycenae.

Easy to let imagination get out of hand.

After all, the Trojans could've bought these
from Greek arms dealers.

But how do you explain the great fire
which Dörpfeld traced all over the city?

Even Blegen had to agree there was no doubt,
Troy VI was thoroughly burned.

Could those tumbled walls
not have been deliberately demolished

on that burning, baleful night?

Right down the ages, it was the tradition

that at the end, Troy's towers were deliberately
thrown down by the vengeful Greeks

in a scene imagined by every generation
of poets and artists

for over 3,000 years.

Dörpfeld's city, then,
would be Homer's Troy after all.

The Troy of the Trojan War.

The pottery suggests it fell
not long before 1250 BC,

and that fits the Hittite story
of a crisis in western Anatolia

when the Hittites clashed with the Greeks
over a city called Wilusa.

Perhaps it was then that Troy was sacked
and levelled by the Great King of Greece.

Afterwards, within decades,
an era of instability began

with famine, migrations and sea raiding.

For the survivors on Hisarlik,
life was a constant threat

Blegen's shanty city, Troy VIIa

lived through all that to be finally devastated
by sea raiders around 1180 BC.

80 years or so after the Trojan War.

Such ideas agree so well with Homer.

But of course, in the end,
they too are only speculation.

I, perhaps, like all those
who examined the question before me,

have only found what I wanted to find.

That has always been the attraction
of the search,

for there can never be a final word
on history's greatest riddle,

only the perceptions of each generation

which reinterprets Homer's tale
in the light of its own beliefs

and its own needs.

I expect by now you're thinking the Trojan War
has as many conclusions

as those novels they write these days where
they give you alternative endings for every taste.

And in a way it's true, as we've seen throughout,

that archaeology tells us
almost as much about ourselves

and how we want to see ourselves
as about those lost civilisations.

But, as we draw to an end of the search,

it's only fair I put my neck on the block and
say what I think happened, for what it's worth,

with as few ifs and buts as possible.

So here goes.

In the Bronze Age, on the shores
of the Dardanelles, there was a city.

Perhaps it was called Troy.

In its heyday, it was the most beautiful city
in the Aegean world,

with fine walls, elegant mansions

and surely a marvellous palace
on the top of the hill.

It was ruled by a vigorous and able royal family

and, confident and wealthy, it went its own way
for 500 years, safe behind its walls.

In the last days of its heyday, after 1300 BC,

its towers were built and this,
without any reasonable doubt,

is the city reflected in the poems of Homer,

the Greek poet who composed
the story of Troy 500 years on.

He tells of a city of wide streets, fine walls,

a horse-breeding city, a royal citadel.

This city, Troy VI, fell around 1250.

To an earthquake, the excavators said, but...

I don't think their evidence can tell us whether
this city was not levelled deliberately,

its walls pushed over by attackers.

In any case, how can archaeology
distinguish between

an earthquake and the sack of a city
if they both came at the same time?

Just look at what happened afterwards.

The place was rebuilt but in a very jerry-built
way, packed with shanties,

dismal tenements, a soup kitchen.

Something worse had happened to Troy VI
than a mere earthquake.

What it looks like is that the royal family
had been exterminated.

Troy VI had been sacked.

The chief candidates, the chief suspects,
surely are the Mycenaeans.

Those sackers of cities,
seizers of treasure and women,

who followed up their trading throughout
the Aegean world with aggression.

It is the Greek legend that the Mycenaeans
did indeed sack Troy.

That story, the tale of Agamemnon's
expedition to Troy,

as we've seen, goes back to the Bronze Age.

Elements in it must've been sung by Mycenaean
bards before the fall of their world.

And that, I suppose, means that I think
the Trojan War did happen,

which I didn't think when I set out on this search.

As for the sequel,
the poor successor city Troy VIIa

eked out its existence for a few decades

and then around the year 1180
was sacked by the sea peoples,

its shanties burned and the bodies left
unburied in the streets.

A sad end to the story.

Tying up the loose ends...

Did Agamemnon really exist?
I don't see any reason why not.

Why shouldn't the bards have preserved the
pedigrees of the last Great Kings of Mycenae?

So maybe Agamemnon did indeed ride through
this gate and up this street as a conqueror.

What about Achilles and Hector?
Well, their names are Bronze Age names,

but I suspect their roles in the story
are the inventions of that wonderful poet.

And what about the wooden horse?

Well, classical writers
thought the story so absurd,

they rationalised it as a siege engine,
one of those great battering rams

which held many men to sack a city.

But if it was an earthquake
that gave the Greeks the key to Troy,

is it not possible that in gratitude,

they left an idol in the image
of the earthquake god, Poseidon,

a wooden horse?

And I almost forgot.
What about Helen of Troy herself?

History's golden girl.

The face that launched a thousand ships.

Did she really exist?

Well, in the archaeological record,

love leaves no trace.