In Search of the Trojan War (17 page)

CARL BLEGEN
,
Troy
, Vol. IV, 1958

Blegen’s attention focused on the successor to Troy VI, which he called VIIa. After the earthquake the inhabitants had patched up the place: they were the same people, and there had been no change of population. The main circuit of the walls still stood, although the superstructure had been damaged. But a dramatic change had come over the city. The wide streets now contained a network of shanties crammed together, with storage jars sunk into their floors – some honeycombed with as many as twenty or thirty in a space covering only a few square feet. Where before there had been elegant free-standing buildings, only around a couple of dozen in the entire citadel, now there were gloomy little bungalows partitioned off, one-roomed, barely furnished ‘multiple tenancies’, squashed up against the walls in what had been the spacious circular terraces and wide walks. The implications of this in terms of the social history of Troy were not fully examined by Blegen: he came to a simple conclusion, that a much larger population had had to be
temporarily
sheltered
inside the walls. Normally taciturn archaeologists were prepared to talk of an atmosphere of retrenchment and fear, of – dare we say it – a siege mentality. Some of the finds had a contemporary resonance. Right inside the main gate Blegen found what he thought was a bakery adjoining a public saloon or shop which he called the ‘snack bar’, and where he thought bread and wine had been dispensed to harassed Homeric heroes as they staggered back from the front line with battle shock. Blegen inferred a war economy like the soup kitchens during the Blitz of London, the images of his own day. Other signs betokened growing isolation, as if the city had been cut off: there were no imported luxuries, and few (if any) sherds from imported pots – mainly poor local imitations of Mycenaean wares.

Whatever the townspeople were frightened of seemed to have destroyed them, or so Blegen thought. Everywhere their city was marked by the ravages of fire, buried in masses of burned mudbrick, charred wood and debris: ‘The effect,’ said Blegen, ‘was one of utter desolation.’ There was little doubt that it had come from the hand of man. In the doorway of a house were found parts of a human skeleton covered in burnt timbers, stones and debris from the houses which had collapsed on the victims; in places the heaped ashes and wreckage were 5 feet deep. In the street outside the snack bar was part of a skull; remnants of another skull were found further to the west. In the burned rubbish covering a house outside the eastern citadel wall was the jawbone of a human skull, the rest of the skull crushed by a stone. An arrowhead found west of the main street, Blegen thought, ‘might have been discharged by an invading Achaean’.

The destruction by fire, the traces of bodies, the arrowhead – put them together with the overcrowded conditions, the soup kitchen, the storage jars, and there you have it: a threatened community desperately laying in supplies to withstand a siege, and then the evidence of their final destruction. Was this the archaeological proof – so long sought – that the Trojan War had actually taken place? All now depended on the date. It was obvious that it was roughly right, but was it before or after the
fall of the great palaces on the mainland in around 1200? Clearly Agamemnon would not have sailed to sack Troy
after
Mycenae had been sacked and started its decline. In particular, and scholars have often forgotten this, Troy VIIa had to be destroyed before the end of Pylos, which Blegen started excavating in 1939 –
after
the dig at Troy, but before its publication: clearly old King Nestor could not depart for Troy from a palace already in ashes and which, as the archaeologists had immediately seen in 1939, was never reoccupied. Consciously or subconsciously, this must have been in Blegen’s mind as he attempted to show that the Trojan War really existed in archaeological fact.

From the Mycenaean pottery present in the ruins of Troy VI and VIIa Blegen concluded that the city was sacked very soon after the earthquake which he thought had damaged Troy VI: ‘no more than half a century or perhaps even a single generation,’ he said in his final report, and in ‘the middle rather than a late stage of the [thirteenth] century.’ Later he was tempted to suggest a date not later than 1240 BC and even to push it back to nearer 1270, near enough the traditional date of the Trojan War, and right in ‘the period when the Mycenaean palaces on the Greek mainland seem to have been highly prosperous and wealthy and most likely to have been able to join together in an ambitious overseas military expedition’. Everything seemed to fit.

Here then, in the extreme northwestern corner of Asia Minor – exactly where Greek tradition, folk memory and the epic poems place the site of Ilios – we have the physical remains of a fortified stronghold, obviously the capital of a region. As shown by persuasive archaeological evidence, it was besieged and captured by enemies and destroyed by fire, no doubt after being thoroughly pillaged, just as Hellenic poetry and folk-tale describe the destruction of King Priam’s Troy. … It is settlement VIIa, then, that must be recognised as
the actual Troy
, the ill-fated stronghold, the siege and capture of which caught the fancy and imagination of contemporary troubadours and bards who transmitted orally to their successors their songs about the heroes who fought in the war. … It can no longer be doubted,
when one surveys the state of our knowledge today, that there really was
an actual historical Trojan War
in which a coalition of Achaeans, or Mycenaeans, under a king whose overlordship was recognised, fought against the people of Troy and their allies. (My italics.)

Troy and the Trojans
(1963)

Of course it all boils down to what archaeology can or cannot prove. Blegen’s arguments are essentially no different from those used by Dörpfeld and Leaf (
see here
), and like them Blegen went so far as to assert that his finds demonstrated that ‘a good many of the individual heroes who are mentioned in the poems were drawn from real personalities’. The response to Blegen’s thesis was inevitably a grateful, even joyful, one among the majority of classical scholars. As one put it, ‘The Sack of Troy is a historical fact, the Siege a probability.’ And indeed here at last was clear evidence of a sacking. The few dissenters were dismissed as sourpusses when they pointed out that one arrowhead does not make a war (it was perhaps not even Greek); that sunken pithoi were found throughout the Middle- and Late-Bronze-Age layers on Hisarlik (they can still be seen today in Anatolia); that ‘snack bars’ are found by the gates of other ancient sites (Pompeii, for instance);and that Blegen’s pottery dating was questionable. And an even more critical question was
never
asked as Blegen looked at VIIa and found Homer – was the fall of Troy VI
really
due to an earthquake at all? For the moment, though, the definitive nature of Blegen’s report, and the lack of any further major area of Hisarlik to dig, made it seem unlikely that we would ever be better informed.

THE PALACE OF NESTOR AT PYLOS

The travellers now came to Pylos, the stately citadel of Neleus, where they found the people on the sea-beach, sacrificing jet-black bulls to Poseidon, Lord of the Earth.

HOMER
,
Odyssey

Despite the publicity surrounding the ‘finding’ of the Trojan War, Blegen’s dig at Troy was of more significance to Anatolian archaeologists than to Aegean scholarship. If it had seemed to confirm the truth of Homer’s tale, it still could not solve the really important questions of Aegean archaeology which were still unanswered: how had mainland civilisation developed? What was the relation of Minoan to Mycenaean civilisation? Most important, when had the Greeks first arrived in the Balkans?
Were
the Mycenaeans Greeks, as Wace and Blegen had proposed, and as Schliemann had believed before them? The scholarly controversy between the supporters and the opponents of Evans’ Minoan theories was so bitter that there was no prospect of agreement without a new corpus of material to go on, evidence to which no doubt attached.

Accordingly Blegen determined to find an untouched mainland palace from the Bronze Age which could be excavated using modern techniques. As with Schliemann, Homer was the guide. But which Homeric palace was the best bet? Tiryns had been excavated before scientific archaeological techniques had been developed. The palace at Mycenae had been largely destroyed, though what was left had been elucidated by Tsountas and Wace. The Menelaion site had not excited great hopes for the palace of Helen and Menelaos. All traces of the palaces at Orchomenos and Argos seemed to have been destroyed by later building. Iolkos lay under a modern town. Only one of Homer’s great mainland palaces suggested itself: the palace of old King Nestor at ‘sandy Pylos’, the seat of one of Agamemnon’s chief allies who had led ‘eighty black ships’ to Troy. Pylos, however, presented a major difficulty which had defeated all previous searchers: no one knew precisely where Bronze-Age Pylos had stood – only that it was in the general area of Messenia in the south-western Peloponnese. Unlike Mycenae and Knossos, there was no site pointed out. Tradition had unaccountably lost all memory of the great palace of Nestor, if it had existed: so much so that its location was a famous conundrum even in antiquity when a proverb ran, ‘There is a Pylos before a Pylos, and another
one before that.’ In fact several places had borne the name, and no one was sure whether modern Pylos, by the wonderful natural harbour of Navarino, where the Turks were defeated by an allied fleet in 1823, was even roughly right. Schliemann’s collaborator Wilhelm Dörpfeld had put the considerable weight of his name behind a much more northerly location. Blegen was not convinced, and had clues to back up his hope of finding an undisturbed Mycenaean palace. In 1912 and 1926 the Greek archaeologist Kourouniotis had discovered two tholos tombs in the hilly country north of Navarino – both had been robbed in antiquity but still contained Mycenaean pottery; in the neighbourhood were signs of more graves. Blegen, who had first searched the area in the 1920s, believed the tombs were royal ones and that a palace must have stood nearby in which the kings of the region had lived.

In 1939 he and Kourouniotis combed the area north-east of the bay with the help of local residents who knew where ancient remains existed, or had been found within living memory. Over ten days eight sites were discovered which on the basis of surface pottery seemed to be Mycenaean, but the key site turned out to be perhaps the obvious one, the one where, as Blegen later said, ‘if you were a Mycenaean king, you would build a palace.’ The place is 6 miles from the sandy beaches of Navarino Bay, but it commands a magnificent view over the whole of the bay and all the ranges of hills which surround it, with a spectacular vista along the whole backbone of the Aigaleon range towards the north and north-east. Here, on the most dominating position of all, a hill called Ano Englianos, ancient remains had been disturbed in the 1890s when the road to Chora had been built. In an olive grove on the steep-sided hill, amazingly, two masses of hard, concrete-like debris stuck out of the ground, exactly like those found by Kalokairinos at Knossos: calcined stumps of wall fused by the action of rainwater on fire-powdered gypsum.

And so that spring, as the world was poised to go to war, Blegen began his dig among the olive trees on Ano Englianos. He wrote:

The first trench was laid out early on April 4, and by mid morning even the rosiest expectations had been surpassed: substantial stone walls, more than one metre thick, had been exposed to view; fragments of plaster retaining vestiges of painted decoration had been recovered; a cement-like lime floor had been reached; and five clay tablets bearing inscribed signs of the Linear B script had come virtually undamaged, though lime-coated, out of the soil, the first of their kind to be found in mainland Greece. It was at once obvious that a palatial building occupied the hill.

In a chamber at the end of that first trench Blegen came across the archive room with 600 tablets and fragments in the same language as Evans had found at Knossos. In the following month (the dig ended on 10 May) exploration showed that the palace at Ano Englianos was of a size comparable to the known mainland palaces and the presence of the archive suggested strongly that it had been the centre of its region, and very likely the centre of a kingdom of Messenia. Blegen himself had no doubt, publishing his finds under the title
The Palace of King Nestor at Pylos
(though he later asserted that he had not gone to Messenia with ‘any preconceived idea about whose palace it might turn out to be, if actually found’).

In its material culture the palace was in every way similar to those found at Mycenae and Tiryns, and to the last palace at Knossos. There was the same megaron (royal hall) as at Tiryns and Mycenae, its central hearth still in place with its painted decoration; there were storerooms full of the crockery of a Bronze-Age palace, thousands of drinking cups, jars and containers; magazines containing the wealth of the palace, oil, wine and grain; its frescoes bore scenes of chariots, warriors in boar’s-tusk helmets fighting roughly clad mountain people; there were griffins depicted in the royal apartments exactly as at Knossos; there was even a painting of a bard playing the lyre. In all respects the palaces seemed to belong to one world, and the presence of the Linear B showed that they did, though it would only be after the Second World War that tablets were found at
Mycenae, and in the 1980s at Tiryns. In 1939 the question immediately arose: was Pylos a Cretan colony, ruled by a Minoan expatriate aristocracy, as Evans’ theories might have indicated – foreign nabobs who used the Cretan Linear script for their bureaucracy, like the British in India? Did the Pylians use Cretan scribes? Or was Pylos typical of mainland civilisation, using the language of the mainland, and hence was Knossos in its last phase ruled by mainlanders? These ideas were already current in the 1920s and 1930s, as we have seen, and Pylos was to prove decisive against Evans’ view. Here, unlike Knossos, there could be no argument about the chronology: with improved knowledge of pottery styles, it could be shown that Pylos had been destroyed in around 1200 BC or a few years later: 200 years after Evans’ date for the destruction at Knossos. There could no longer be much doubt that Knossos had finally been part of the Mycenaean world, and modern research has shown it to be possible that the Knossos archive also dates from around 1200 BC, contrary to Evans’ view. These problems were greatly clarified when in 1952 the unknown script of Linear B was deciphered, an event which has been called, with some exaggeration, the ‘Everest of archaeology’.