In Search of the Trojan War (25 page)

Direct evidence for their kingship can only be found in the archaeology. But the shaft graves, the architecture and later the Linear B tablets tell us much about noble and royal culture which can be paralleled elsewhere. Kings like Agamemnon expended an extraordinary amount of their income and wealth on royal graves and royal cult. They lavished great wealth and craftsmanship on weaponry and war gear. It may not be going too far to see the depictions of hunting and fighting on the beautiful inlaid daggers, on the frescoes and on the monumental standing stones, as revealing the typical preoccupations of the ruling class, whether we call it ‘heroic’ or not. This was a royal warrior élite with a wide gulf separating it from the common people. Now, like many other such kingships of which we have details – Celtic,
Germanic and Indian – the king doubtless needed to sustain his military following by generosity, that is, by gift-giving, food, hospitality and perhaps by grants of land (though the tablets leave us uncertain about land tenure). ‘Agamemnon’ would have had to feed his court and its officers, equip and reward his army – investing ample resources in time and treasure to the training of the military force which backed him, especially his horses and chariotry, the most expensive and time-consuming investment. To do all this, and to keep his army loyal, his friends happy and his enemies subdued, he needed to take land, slaves, women, treasure and booty. This required regular warfare, forays and piratical expeditions. From Thucydides onwards all commentators on the Trojan story have understood it in this light. Schliemann himself came to this conclusion at Mycenae in 1876:

The question naturally arises how the city obtained its gold at that remote period when there was no commerce as yet. It appears indeed that it cannot have obtained it in any other way than by powerful piratical expeditions to the Asiatic coast.

Of the commerce we will learn more in
Chapter 7
. Of the warfare we can assume it was the métier of all Bronze-Age kings. Regular summer hostings may have been the order of the day. The late-fourteenth-century-BC annals of the Hittite king Mursilis II mention ten campaigns in twenty-six years against the frontier Kaska peoples, leaving aside his major campaigns to the south in Syria, and westwards into Assuwa and Arzawa, where one campaign yielded 66,000 prisoners. Two Assyrian campaigns against the Hittites in the Euphrates gained 28,000 and 14,400 prisoners after the sack of scores of towns and villages. These are large figures, if we can trust them. But how big were ‘national’ armies of the period of the Trojan War? The biggest recorded army of the time is the Hittite force at Kadesh (1275–1274 BC), 2500 chariots and 37,000 infantry, but this was exceptional and included the retinues of sixteen allied states as well as the ‘feudal’ levies of the Hittite king, and mercenaries. Armies in the Aegean
world must have been far smaller. Estimates for the populations of Mycenaean kingdoms are only approximate, but that of Pylos can hardly have been less than 50,000, and estimates for the possible populations of the Argolid states (by food production from cultivatable land) have suggested maxima of 180,000 for Mycenae, 70,000 for Midea, 90,000 for Tiryns and 60,000 for Argos. The idea that anything near 10 per cent of a pre-industrial society could be mobilised for war is probably far-fetched, so we may assume that an army of a few hundred heavily armed men was a large one. One group of damaged Pylos tablets mentions over 400 rowers and at least 700 men as defensive troops, but it would be surprising if the king could muster more than a couple of thousand well-armed and trained troops for an offensive expedition. A Greek marauder in Lycia in around 1420 BC presented a threat to a Hittite army with a force of 100 chariots and perhaps 1000 troops; a rich city like Ugarit could man 150 ships (with mercenaries?) for an offensive campaign – perhaps 7000 fighting men. This last figure is of the order we would expect for a Mycenaean campaign against Troy, if it took place. But equally a mere seven ships could be a deadly threat to Ugarit when its own fleet was absent. This is the scale of Bronze-Age warfare – comparable, say, to the warfare of the Viking Age in Europe where, for instance, the garrisons of thirty fortified centres in Wessex totalled 26,671 men, with the mobile royal army probably numbering a few thousand at most. It is likely, then, that in the thirteenth century BC a few hundred heavily armed ‘bronze-clad’ warriors with their servants, horses, carts, chariots, spares and support staff constituted an army for an expedition against a hostile state. Clearly the main kingdoms of the Peloponnese alone could have raised a force of several thousands. The citadel on Hisarlik, however – if it was Troy – can hardly have raised more than a few hundred warriors on its own. Is it possible that the Mycenaean ‘empire’ would have attacked such a small place – and why? Is there in fact any evidence that the Mycenaean kingdoms might have campaigned in western Anatolia?

‘WOMEN OF ASIA’ AND THE SACKERS OF CITIES

In the Linear B tablets there is one remarkable body of evidence which has not been exploited in the search for the Trojan War. At Pylos in particular groups of women are recorded doing menial tasks such as grinding corn, preparing flax and spinning. Their ration quotas suggest that they are to be numbered in hundreds. Many are distinguished by ethnic adjectives, presumably denoting the places they came from, and though some of these are still not understood, several of the women come from the eastern Aegean – Cnidus, Miletus, Lemnos, Zephyrus (i.e. Halicarnassos), Chios and
Aswija
. The last name occurs at Pylos, Knossos and Mycenae, and seems to denote the area originally known as Asia, that is, Lydia (Assuwa in Hittite). At Pylos there is even an enigmatic
To-ro-ja
(‘The woman of Troy’?), ‘servant of the god’. The Pylos tablets name 700 women, with their 400 girls and 300 boys, and another 300 men and boys who ‘belong to them’. Some of the ethnic groups are sizeable: ‘twenty-one women from Cnidus with their twelve girls and ten boys’. These descriptions often use the word
lawiaiai
, ‘captives’, which is the same word used by Homer to describe women seized by Achilles at Lyrnessos during a foray south of Troy (
Iliad
, XX, 193) and it is a remarkable fact that Homer also names a number of places in the eastern Aegean as the homes of women taken on Greek raids, including the islands of Lesbos, Skyros and Tenedos (
Iliad
, XVIII, 346).

These tablets are vivid evidence for the predatory nature of Mycenaean expansion in the eastern Aegean. The women must either have been captured on pirate raids, or bought from slave dealers in entrepôts such as Miletus. The fact that they are usually mentioned with their children but not with men implies the familiar raiding pattern of the sackers of cities, where the men are killed and the women carried off. The
Iliad
and the tablets complement each other here in a remarkable way, and it must be assumed that Homer is here again preserving a genuine Bronze-Age memory. Presumably the women would only have been
called ‘captives’ for a short while before being assigned occupations, though they seem to have been kept together as ethnic groups, and as families (unlike, say, in the American Confederacy, where slave families were deliberately broken up). This would have had practical advantages for the slave owners – perhaps it made the captives work better – and there is an exact contemporary parallel in the Ugaritic tablets which mention ‘the sons of the slave women of Kt’ (i.e. Kition in Cyprus?). Here then, even without lonely
To-ro-ja
, we have the clearest possible context for the Trojan tale.

It did not need many ships full of armed raiders to threaten and sack a small city and enslave its people: six vessels sack Laomedon’s Troy in the Herakles legend. Small groups of people, chieftains and their war bands, appear at many places in the thirteenth-century Near Eastern texts. As often as we read of armies plundering, we find small bands of adventurers trying to carve out a new home somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean. The title they most coveted, if we can trust Homer, was ‘sacker of cities’. In the Homeric epics, and still in Aeschylus, it was a leader’s greatest claim to glory. Agamemnon, Achilles, Nestor (‘in my youth I was one’) and even Athena herself bear the title of ‘sacker of cities’ in Homer.

We should not overdo the search for ‘modern’ motives for this. In the
Iliad
the sacker of cities does not destroy to increase his political power, to combat inflation, to open up trade routes to the Black Sea or to the tin mines of Europe; he does not destroy to appropriate the mackerel and tunny harvests. He sacks cities to get booty, treasure, horses, cattle, gold, silver, fine armour and weapons – and women. We must not forget the women (after all, the legend insists that the seizure of a woman was the cause of the Trojan War). Time and again Homer tells of the fight for ‘the city and its women’. When Achilles tells Odysseus of the twenty-three cities he has sacked he mentions only ‘treasure and women’ as his gain. This is what makes him proud, and gives him fame after his death. And the more beautiful the women, the better. In this they are remarkably close to the great African
‘high-kings’ of the Zande, recorded in the anthropological work of E.E. Evans-Pritchard – the victorious chief takes the most beautiful women for himself and gives the others with their children to his retinue (‘These
akanga vura
, “slaves of war”, were not regarded very differently from ordinary wives. …’: could that offer a clue to the real ‘Helen’?).

Such, then, were the goals of ‘heroic’ kingship. If economic necessity can partly explain such attacks – to replenish the slave labour in the ‘state industries’ – nevertheless it was doubtless still true that the greater the booty captured, the larger the quantities of gold and silver, the finer the horses and the more beautiful the women, the greater the honour due to the conqueror. This was what ensured the victorious king a large following, and it guaranteed their loyalty. And the larger the warrior band, the more ambitious the military enterprise that could be undertaken next time. Perhaps the Trojan War was such an enterprise. In this light the Asian women who laboured in the flax fields around Pylos, receiving their monthly rations and bringing up their children as slaves with Greek names, are perhaps our most eloquent testimony to the thought world of Agamemnon and the sackers of cities. This was the reality of the ‘Heroic Age’, and in its essential spirit Homer’s tale has got this right. Until recently, I might add, it was still possible to touch on a real continuity with these women. In the countryside above Pylos, one of the palace’s regional centres was by the modern village of Koukounara (Ro-uso?). In this region the tablets mention women retting flax, and here until the 1950s this back-breaking task was still performed by the local women; now man-made fibres have broken this ancient tradition, but the river where the ‘women of Asia’ bent in servitude in 1200 BC is still called Linaria: ‘flax river’.

MYCENAEANS IN ASIA MINOR

In our search for the Mycenaeans in Asia Minor we can go further. Important evidence has emerged recently of a Mycenaean
presence on the coast of Asia Minor, not merely as raiders but as settlers. We have noted the presence of slaves from these parts in Mycenaean mainland palaces. Archaeological evidence enables us to corroborate this picture in a most interesting way. Twenty-five sites have now been identified on the Turkish coast, or its immediate hinterland, where finds of Mycenaean pottery have been made. This of course does not prove the presence of Greeks, though tombs at Colophon and Pitane may suggest this. But Mycenaeans were certainly present in the south-western part of Anatolia, south of the river Maeander. Here archaeological evidence suggests a large enclave whose main centres were Miletus, Iasos and somewhere near Müsgebi where a rich cemetery has been found. These places all looked westwards, towards islands already colonised by Mycenaeans, especially Rhodes, Kos, Samos and Chios. There is also evidence of Mycenaean contact inland from Iasos into the plain of Mylasa, at least as traders; the two main river routes into the interior – the upper Maeander and the lower Hermus – have provided some further slight evidence of the carrying of Mycenaean goods. This makes sense: the country around the lower Hermus provided the Mycenaeans with slaves; the upper Maeander route into the interior leads to Beycesultan, where a few Mycenaean finds were made at the Late-Bronze-Age palace which may have been one of the centres of the Hittite allied state of Mira, a state important enough to correspond with Egypt.

These finds should not be over-exaggerated, but the evidence will obviously grow. Pottery was found in 1983 to add to that already discovered at Masat Hüyük, in the Hittite heartland, and Bronze-Age sites in Caria and Lycia, whose existence was denied not long ago, have recently come to light. The evidence of this Greek enclave is significant: Miletus, Iasos and Müsgebi – Halicarnassos could have controlled a significant hinterland, and many scholars believe this is what Hittite tablets tell us, as we shall see in
Chapter 6
.

MILETUS: A BRONZE-AGE GREEK ‘COLONY’ IN ASIA MINOR?

It is worth looking at Miletus in a little more detail, as the exciting finds made there in the early years of the century have been largely destroyed without being published. Similarly no general account exists in English of the recent discoveries of the ‘Mycenaean’ wall.

Of all the sites on the coast of Asia Minor Miletus is the most dramatic to today’s visitor. Once the self-styled ‘first foundation of Ionia’, ‘metropolis of Asia’ and ‘mother city of numerous cities in many parts of the world’, Miletus now lies 4 miles from the sea, left high and dry by the silt-bearing stream of the river Maeander. Now the visitor can walk across the sandy scrub of its harbour mouths, past the stone lions of the Lion Harbour. The immense ruins of the classical city extend along what was once a sea-girt promontory roughly a mile in length by 1200 yards across at its widest, narrowing to about 200 yards at the northern tip. The promontory had three main projections, forming natural harbours which looked out to the Aegean. On the southernmost and lowest of these, opposite the great theatre, German excavators since the Second World War have discovered remarkable remains of the Late Bronze Age. It appears that Miletus was originally a Cretan settlement taken over by Mycenaeans in the fifteenth century BC. The subsequent settlement was destroyed by a severe fire in around 1320 BC, after which a large fortification was built encircling the whole hill. The length of the wall was over 1100 yards, enclosing 50,000 square yards (compare Mycenae at 38,500 square yards, Tiryns at 22,000 and Troy VI at 20,000, for example). In other words the place was big enough to be the capital of a kingdom. The wall had a remarkable feature, square bastions every 15 yards, for which there are parallels in Hittite, late Mycenaean and Cypriot architecture, and it may be that Miletus was a cultural link between the Anatolian and Aegean worlds. Of the internal layout of the city we know little, but there were pottery kilns, houses, and on the low summit of
the hill some sort of residential complex centring on a court – possibly a ‘palace’. These excavations have been discontinued, though it might have been hoped that tablets would be found. The pottery associated with these remains includes much Mycenaean work, and there seems little doubt that Greeks were present in the city. This impression is reinforced by the discovery in 1907 of a cemetery at Degirmentepe a mile to the south-west of the city. Here today’s visitor can still see at least a dozen rock-cut Mycenaean tombs with the characteristic circular chamber and narrow entrance. Unfortunately their contents were destroyed during the Second World War in Berlin, but what pottery had been exhibited was of the thirteenth century BC; it is likely that more tombs, going back to the Minoan settlement, remain to be found.