In Search of the Trojan War (13 page)

Schliemann now thought – going back on his previous dig – that Troy II, the burned city, was after all ‘perfectly identical with Homer’s Troy’. Dörpfeld had been able to distinguish the circuit wall of Troy II, identify two of its gates, and show that it had been a fortified prehistoric palace-residence with megaron-type buildings and formidable ramparts, parts of which are still standing today. Schliemann jumped at this and at the end of 1882 pronounced:

I have proved that in remote antiquity there was in the plain of Troy a large city, destroyed of old by a fearful catastrophe … this city answers perfectly to the Homeric description of the site of sacred Ilios. … My work at Troy is now ended forever. … How it has been performed I now leave finally to the judgement of candid readers and honest students. …

More than ten years had passed since Schliemann’s siege of Troy had begun in earnest.

No more than on previous occasions, however, was Schliemann’s work at Troy finished. This time his detractors drove him back. From 1883 an army captain, Ernst Bötticher, had been producing pamphlets claiming that Hisarlik was not a city at all, but a necropolis, a city of the dead, and that, worse, Schliemann and Dörpfeld had misled the public by withholding and faking evidence. The charge was preposterous (though interesting, as such allegations are emerging once more), but Schliemann felt he had to acquit himself by digging a new sector of Hisarlik with independent witnesses. As early as January 1887 he was writing to Calvert about preparations for his last great campaign, which lasted from autumn 1889 to August 1890, and it was then, with Schliemann tired and ill, that the crucial discovery was made.

Near the western border of the mound, 25 yards
outside
the great ramp of Troy II, the excavators uncovered a large building closely resembling the megaron (the royal hall) found at Tiryns. Here Dörpfeld’s assistant Brückner found the peculiar Grey Minyan pottery of the mysterious sixth city which Schliemann had never been able to identify for certain; but here too he found pottery with the unmistakable Mycenaean shapes and decorations so familiar to them from Mycenae and Tiryns, especially the now well-known stirrup jars. In retrospect this discovery was truly sensational and epoch-making. In fact (for those who believed that the event happened at all) this would be seen as the long-awaited sign that Hisarlik was indeed Troy. For Schliemann the discovery must have been tremendously exciting, and yet a great shock, for it forced him to reconsider all that he had thought and
published about the Homeric city; indeed it called into question the validity of all the conclusions he had reached about the chronology of the seven cities, and of course his identification of Priam’s Troy. His ‘Lydian’ city had been the one in touch with Mycenaean Greece; the burned city of Troy II,
his
city of Priam, was not merely earlier but 1000 years earlier!

For a sick man it must have been a staggering blow to face the collapse of the whole intellectual structure he had built up with so much toil, discomfort and expenditure in ‘this pestilential plain’. But he took it with fortitude and, typically, resolved to continue his excavations in 1891 on a still more ambitious scale in a determined effort to discover the truth. In any plea for a more balanced appreciation of Schliemann it is surely greatly to his credit that he continued to wrestle with the problems of this complex site for twenty years, trying to solve them by excavation, often in great physical hardship: after all, the needs of fame and status had long been satisfied. So 1891 was to be the final attempt. Schliemann never lived to fulfil his plans. At Christmas 1890, while Dörpfeld was at his desk penning the last words of their joint report on the new discoveries, Schliemann died miserably in Naples, collapsing in the street with a stroke and carried speechless and apparently penniless into a hotel foyer on the Piazza Umberto where, by one of those quirks of history, the Polish novelist Sienkiewicz observed a scene which, if Schliemann had told it of himself, we would doubtless have accused him of fabricating. Homer’s Troy – and with it the Trojan War – eluded his perturbed spirit to the last.

That evening, a dying man was brought into the hotel. His head bowed down to his chest, eyes closed, arms hanging limp, and his face ashen, he was carried in by four people. … The manager of the hotel approached me and asked, ‘Do you know, Sir, who that sick man is?’ ‘No.’ ‘That is the great Schliemann!’ Poor ‘great Schliemann’! He had excavated Troy and Mycenae, earned immortality for himself, and – was dying …

Letters from Africa
(1901)

WILHELM DÖRPFELD: HOMER’S TROY FOUND?

Just over two years after Schliemann’s death, in spring 1893, Wilhelm Dörpfeld returned to Troy; he was now in charge of the excavations, which were paid for by Sophie Schliemann and by the Kaiser. The dig of 1893–4 is one of the landmarks in archaeology. Acting on the assumption that the house found in 1890 lay inside a Bronze-Age city which lay far
outside
Schliemann’s city, Dörpfeld opened up the southern side of Hisarlik in a great curve around the hill, and immediately struck walls far more magnificent than anything Schliemann had found. Over those two seasons he uncovered 300 yards of the city wall, sometimes buried under as much as 50 feet of earth and debris and overlain by the ruins of later cities. In the north-east corner there was an impressive angular watchtower, still standing 25 feet above the rock; originally it had been at least 30 feet tall with a vertical superstructure of brick or stone as high again. Sticking up like the prow of an old battleship, this must have dominated the plain of the Dumrek Su. Built of well-dressed blocks of limestone, this bastion was astonishingly like later classical work, which helps explain why Schliemann had demolished similar walling on the northern side. The city wall itself was beautifully made in sections, each of which ended in a distinctive offset, and each of which had a pronounced batter – perhaps, thought Dörpfeld, the ‘batter’ or ‘angle’ of the wall mentioned in Homer when Patroclus tries to scale the face of the wall. There was a gate on the east, protected by a long overlapping wall, near to which was the base of a large square tower built of beautifully fitted limestone blocks. On the south was an important gate with another massive tower fronted by stone bases – presumably where idols of the gods were displayed; on the western side, immediately below the house discovered in 1890, Dörpfeld found that one inferior section of the previous circuit had not been replaced by the city’s builders, and even the most cynical critic did not blame him for pointing out that Homer describes one section of the wall being weaker than the rest, ‘where the city is easiest to attack’.

Inside the city Dörpfeld found the remains of five large, noble houses whose ground plans could be recovered, and others that were more badly damaged, and from this he was able to deduce that the city had risen in concentric terraces with the front outer faces of the houses slightly wider than their backs, as if to achieve an effect of perspective narrowing towards the summit; this impression was reinforced by a beautiful house whose outer face reproduced the offsets of the city wall. Certainly, thought Dörpfeld, a master architect had planned the city and his scheme had been followed in the gradual replacement of almost the whole circuit: the latest additions to the beautiful walls were the great north-eastern bastion and the towers on the south and south-east, whose masonry is of the highest quality. Everywhere he found Mycenaean pottery: in its last phase this city, Troy VI, clearly had close contacts with the Mycenaean world. It had lasted, so Dörpfeld thought, from around 1500 to 1000 BC, near enough to the traditional date of the Trojan War in the twelfth century BC, and it had ended in violence: in many places debris was heaped up, walls had fallen, and there had been a ‘great fire’. Surely, this was the city reflected in the epic – a ‘well-built’ city with wide streets, beautiful walls and great gates just as the
Iliad
had told. Even the weak wall and the ‘angle’ fitted. This, at last, must be the Troy of the Trojan War.

Our master Schliemann would never have believed, or even dared to hope, that the walls of Sacred Ilios of which Homer sang, and the dwellings of Priam and his companions, had been preserved to so great an extent as was actually the case. … The long dispute over the existence of Troy and over its site is at an end. The Trojans have triumphed … Schliemann has been vindicated … the countless books which in both ancient and modern times have been published against Troy have become meaningless. The appearance of the citadel must have been known to the singers of the
Iliad
, though perhaps only the singers of the older layers of the
Iliad
actually saw the citadel of Troy.

Troja und Ilion
, 1902

The academic world was full of passionate philhellenes and lovers of Homer who were all too ready to agree. The English Homerist Walter Leaf wrote in
Homer and History
:

A fortress was found to have stood on the very spot where Homeric tradition placed it, a fortress which had been sacked and almost levelled by enemies. … From it follows the historical reality of the Trojan War. … We shall therefore not hesitate, starting from the fact that the Trojan War was a real war fought out in the place, and at least generally in the manner, described in Homer, to draw the further conclusion that some at least of the heroes whom Homer names as having played a prominent part in that war were real persons named by Homer’s names, who did actually fight in that war.

Of course the ‘proofs’ furnished by archaeology were actually very much more limited than Leaf’s declaration of faith would have us believe; such conclusions did not, could not, ‘follow’ from Dörpfeld’s discoveries, but of course these discoveries caused a sensation at the time. Leaf was only voicing the general view when he declared that this was the long-awaited proof that Hisarlik was Troy: ‘The discovery of the Mycenaean Troy was … the definitive epoch in the history of the Homeric question.’ And indeed, whatever the truth of that (there were doubters), a revolution had overtaken the history of the Bronze-Age Aegean in a very short time. George Grote’s
History of Greece
, 1846–56, perhaps still the greatest work of its kind, could show no authority for the Bronze Age in Greece, the ‘Heroic Age’; its myths were an unchronicled chasm unusable by the historian. Yet in 1884 the English scholar Sayce could write that ‘hardly ten years have passed since the veil of an impenetrable seemed to hang over the beginnings of Greek history’. Now, with Troy, Mycenae and Orchomenos, Schliemann’s energy and perseverance had begun the recovery of the lost past:

The heroes of the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
have become to us men of flesh and blood. … It is little wonder if so marvellous a recovery of the
past,
in which we had ceased to believe
, should have awakened many controversies and wrought a silent revolution in our conceptions of Greek history. (My italics.)

As for the ‘controversies’, and Schliemann’s many critics, Sayce continued,

It is little wonder if at first the discoverer who had so rudely shocked the settled prejudices of the historians should have met with a storm of indignant opposition or covert attack … [but] today no trained archaeologist in Greece or Western Europe doubts the main facts which Dr Schliemann’s excavations have established; we can never again return to the ideas of ten years ago.

For Walter Leaf, too, Schliemann was epoch-making in this branch of study,

… and it is not for epoch-making men to see the rounding off and completion of their task. That must be the labour of a generation at least. A man who can state to the world a completely new problem must be content to let the final solution of it wait for those that come after him.

Indeed today the work Schliemann began is still nowhere near completed, though a coherent picture has emerged.

However, pleasant as it is to give Schliemann credit where credit is due over 100 years on, when he is once more under a storm of opposition as a charlatan and a faker, in 1894 the Trojan question was not finished, as Dörpfeld thought it was. In fact, even before Dörpfeld’s finds at Hisarlik were published, they were overtaken by sensational discoveries at the site Schliemann had coveted for so long: Knossos.

THREE

THE COMING OF THE GREEKS

Out in the wine-dark sea there is a rich and lovely island called Crete, washed by the waves on every side, densely populated with ninety cities … one of the ninety cities is a great town called Knossos, and there for nine years King Minos ruled and enjoyed the friendship of almighty Zeus
.

HOMER,
Odyssey

CRETE: THE KNOSSOS STORY

CRETE HAS BEEN OF PARAMOUNT IMPORTANCE
throughout history, for it is a stepping-stone between Europe, Asia Minor and Africa. It is part of the chain of islands leading eastwards throughout Karpathos and Rhodes to south-west Anatolia (the Minoans were evidently of the same speech as the people of that region). North-westwards through Kythera, Crete has also had close connections for millennia with the southern Peloponnese (Crete was first inhabited by Greek speakers in around 1400 BC, and still is Greek). But looking southwards Crete is only 200 miles from the coast of Africa, and sponge fishermen from Kommos still go there to ply their trade: though European, Knossos is on the same latitude as Kairouan in central Tunisia, or Jablah in the Lebanon. The history of Crete has always reflected its geography: colonised in turn by Neolithic peoples, Minoans, Achaian Greeks, Dorians, Romans, Arabs, Byzantines, Venetians and Turks, it was the meeting place in the Late Bronze Age of mainlanders, Minoans, Anatolians and Egyptians.

The island, 160 miles long, is dominated by its great backbone of mountains, the White Mountains, Ida and Dicti, the highest rising to over 8000 feet and often covered with snow in early summer. In these inaccessible peaks, sanctuaries existed
from Neolithic times and gave rise to Minoan and early Greek cults of peculiar tenacity and old-fashionedness; here sacred caves were venerated for millennia, and in one, on Dicti, the birthplace of Zeus was said to be; here too a form of ‘Dionysiac’ ecstatic religion existed which, in the 1980s, became tangible with new archaeological evidence of human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism as late as the fifteenth century BC. The memory of these dark rituals survived vividly in later classical myths.