Kitabı oku: «Trojan Horse of Western History»

To Lidia, Maria, Elizaveta, Svetlana, Gleb, Platon.

Be kind, develop your talents and love the truth!

Scientific readers: Victor V. Kondrashin, DSc, and Vladimir B. Kulikov, PhD.

Special thanks to Russian philanthropists Artem Suetin and Gennadiy Chernushkin, who helped to publish this book.

© Trojan Horse (rus. ed.) Piter Publishing House, LLC, 2014

© Translation A. Belyakov, O. Matveychev, 2015

© Design of English edition, Piter Publishing House, LLC, 2015

Alternative Introduction

We’ve decided not to write a traditional foreword, but to offer ten different answers to the question of what kind of book we have produced, instead.

Here they are:

1. This book is about the fact that the Trojans defeated the Greeks and not the other way around, as it is commonly believed.

2. This book is about the fact that the well-known Greek religion with its specific anthropomorphism was artificially created for some political reasons.

3. This book is about the fact that soft power, information warfare and falsification of history do not constitute innovations, but are the oldest essential features of the Western mind.

4. This book refutes the conventional wisdom that “history is written by the victors”. On the contrary, we have proven that the victors are the ones, who have managed to write history.

5. This book is about our postmodern world, where universals contradict one another, each of them entailing other universals as “my other”, and we have shown the horizons in terms of solving the problem of postmodernism.

6. This book tells the story of exciting journeys to both ancient Troy and to modern Troy.

7. This is a book that all will be able to comprehend, not only those educated in human sciences, because it is as bright, lively and entertaining as a mystery thriller.

8. This is a book of science, which opposes the fashionable sensational historical junk food that has recently appeared in bookstores under the anarchic banner of “Anything goes”.¹

9. This book is about the struggle for historical truth and justice, immersing us in the world, because without truth we are orphans.

10. This book is about history unfolding like a musical piece, and by an audible note we can’t guess the previous note, and neither we can predict the next one or project the present into the past and the future. To hear the music of history one must have the historical ability to hear.

Chapter 1
Mega-mall to megaron. Pilgrimage to the land of Homer

It took us half an hour to get from Europe to Asia. This is the exact amount of time it takes for a car-ferry connecting the Gallipoli peninsula with the Anatolian coast to cross the Dardanelles. We got to our final destination in about an hour from the fishing town of Gelibolu. During this last part of our journey we were overtaken with a special feeling. The road to Troy! This phrase so full of solemnity put us into a poetic mood. We felt like echoing Homer’s Zeus:

For of all cities beneath sun and starry heaven wherein men that dwell upon the face of the earth have their abodes, of these sacred Ilios was most honoured of my heart.

Iliad. IV. 45–46.

The landscape outside the window, however, conflicted with the state of our mind. Scant vegetated low hills alternated with sunflower and small pine wood plantations. Only a thin blue band on the horizon reminded us that we were coming to the centre of what used to be a mighty marine state in ancient times. Behind a stunted cornfield, we turned to a rural road. In other five minutes we arrived in the village of Tevfikye. It was Ramazan, and Troy was opened for visitors only after 1 p.m. In a café near the souvenir shop we had the very Turkish tea in small glasses and stared at the Greek tourists, who arrived by a huge bus. Deciding not to wait for the opening, but to buy some wooden horses and fridge magnets instead, they finally got back on their bus and moved on to the places where Hellenes had won honor in battles.

Fig. 1. The Troad is the ancient name of the Biga Peninsula, where legendary Troy is located.

Pilgrimage to these lands is a very old tradition. Every such pilgrimage can become a plot of a book, and it often has been a key event in global history.

In 480 B.C., while marching against the Greeks, Persian King Xerxes stopped his troops on the Hellespont coast. Two boat bridges were built across the narrow strait. Suddenly a storm started, destroying the bridges kept together with papyrus ropes, after which the King commanded to lash defiant waters and behead the builders. Before a new ferry was built, Xerxes visited the legendary fortress. According to Herodotus, the King “ascended to the citadel of Priam, having desire to view it, and having viewed and inquired of all that was there, he sacrifices 1,000 oxen to Athena Ilias, while the Magi offered librations to the heroes”.² However, the generous hecatomb did not help Xerxes to break the Greek spirit down or to conquer Greece. Having suffered some crushing defeats from the Greeks, having ceded them some of his land and having reduced the country to famine with his military adventures, Xerxes was murdered in the bedroom of his own palace.

In 334 B.C. the flotilla of another great conqueror entered the waters of Hellespont. Having stopped his ship in the middle of the channel, Alexander the Great sacrificed an ox to Poseidon, the God of the Sea. Then he approached the Troad coast and threw a lance onto the dusty ground. For the young king, this was a sign as to the beginning of the conquest of Asia: the “lance conquered” lands were considered to be a gift from the Gods. He jumped off the ship and was the first to get ashore. Since Alexander believed Achilles to be his ancestor, he laid a wreath on the grave of his great grandparent. He took the shield and weapons from the Temple of Athena, and these items brought him luck on the battle field soon after that. The first battle with the Persians took place on the Granicus River near Troy. The army of 40 thousand Persian satraps was smashed with one attack, after which groups of Macedonians cut through the lands of Asian continent like a knife through butter…

Later, Alexander ordered to release Ilion from duties and to equip it with the necessary facilities, because it was his serious intent to find the capital of his global empire there. His early death ruined these plans, though. The great empire split into parts, and the Troad lands with a larger part of Thrace were passed to Alexander’s comrade Lysimachus. Lysimachus built high ramparts around the town, made people from adjacent villages settle there and named the town Alexandria.³

In 48 B.C. after the victory over Gnaeus Pompeius in the crucial battle at Pharsalia, Julius Caesar came to the Troad.

 
He is wandering about the ruins of famous Troy,
Looking for tracks of the great wall erected by Phoebe.
The depths of the dead forests and sponks are
Where the Assaracus palace was – and
The Divine’s temples can hardly stand on the ramshackle stones;
And all Pergamon is covered with thick blackthorn:
Even fragments died!⁴
 

Just like Alexander, he believed to have descended from Aeneas and pondered moving the throne to the deserted Troy.

Moreover, having visited Troy, Constantine the Great had been considering founding a new capital there until 330, when he changed his mind and chose to establish Byzantium on the Bosporus, another channel, connecting the Black and the Mediterranean seas. The Troad seemed a more preferable site for the capital, as from there it would have been possible to control not only the narrow straits, but also the land roads of Asia Minor, facing all the Ecumene.⁵ However, the sea was already far from Ilion, and the town lost the key element of its existence, which was the harbour. The Emperor gave the new city on the Bosporus a significant name of New Rome, as it was fated to become the centre of this thousand-year empire; however, while the Emperor was still alive, another city name was approved, Constantinople – ”the city of Constantine”.

In 354, Constantine’s nephew Flavius Claudius Julian made a pilgrimage to Ilion. Rejecting Christianity, which became the national religion of the Roman state in time of Emperor Constantine, Julian expected to find desecrated sanctuaries in Troy. He was surprised to discover that all the Pagan rites were still observed in the Hector’s tomb and in the Temple of Athena. Having become the sovereign emperor, he pursued the revival of Paganism and of the Hellenic spirit, due to which his contemporaries nicknamed him “Apostata”. However, Julian was bound to be the last Pagan Roman emperor.

On May 29, 1453, the Turkish Ottomans took Constantinople by storm, and Sultan Mehmet II made the city the capital of his state. Morea and Trapezus, the last vestiges of what used to be a great empire, fell under Turkish control in 1460 and 1461, accordingly. The Ottoman Empire was getting ready for further expansion; however, before sending his hordes to Christian Europe, Mehmet the Conqueror decided to visit Ilion. It happened in 1462. By then, the Troad had already been under Turkish rule for about a century.

Fig. 2. The Mehmet II memorial in Istanbul.

For half a millennium Turkish was spoken in the Troad. For new inhabitants of these lands Troy was a tourist attraction in the first place. As early as in the 16[[th]] and 17[[th]] centuries the enterprising Turks took Europeans, coming to the Eastern coast of the Dardanelles, to some randomly located ruins, claiming those to be remnants of the ancient Ilion. Nowadays, this tradition has been eagerly taken up by guides, who repeat ancient legends mixed up with the latest myths about the successful Heinrich Schliemann, King Priam’s treasures and the great victory of the Greek, allegedly confirmed by archaeological discoveries. The striking landmarks of the new tourist-oriented Troy include the false house of Schliemann in the village of Tevfikye and a large wooden horse built in 1975 for tourists to take pictures with. There are also fragments of antique buildings that the locals took away for their needs. Here or there you can see a bench made of a Doric column capital, or the fence supported with a piece of an ancient monument.

However, such a consumer attitude to ancient history is also typical for us, modern Europeans, used to being fed historical junk food from nice boxes.

Fig. 3. A bench made of Troy artifacts in the village of Tevfikye.

The consumer attitude to ancient history is typical for modern Europeans, used to being fed historical junk food from nice boxes.

If you asked a man from the street about his knowledge of the Trojan War, you would hear a quite confused story based on children books about the myths of ancient Greece, the song Cassandra by Vysotsky, a couple of films like the recent Hollywood Troy, or some clichés from block calendars about the heel of Achilles, the Trojan horse and the apple of discord. Even though these sources often contradict each other, the consumer’s mind still manages to put different facts together consistently.

So, the story goes that once upon a time there lived King Priam in the city of Troy. After his son Paris was born, the king heard a prophecy that Paris would bring the great empire to an end. Priam ordered to kill the baby, but the tender-hearted servants disobeyed him and left the boy on Mount Ida. A shepherd saved Paris and raised him, and taught him the basics of his trade. One day Paris, who was also called Alexander, was grazing, say, sheep in the mountain pasture, and there he saw three goddesses – Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. They asked the young shepherd to resolve their argument as to which of them was more beautiful. (An apple inscribed “for the fairest” was tossed in the midst of the feast, thus sparking a vanity-fueled dispute among the goddesses about who that apple was intended for). Hera promised Paris power over people, if he chose her; Athena promised him wisdom beyond other mortals had; Aphrodite promised him great love. After some consideration Paris selected Aphrodite, who showed him an image of the most beautiful woman in the water – his wife-to-be.

Then Paris went to Troy, where he was recognized as the King’s son. One day Priam and his sons Hector and Paris went to Lacedaemon, the capital of Sparta, to meet Menelaus, the king of that place, to conclude a new trade agreement. Having reached an agreement, the kings arranged a sumptuous feast, and it was then that Paris saw Helen. Helen was the wife of King Menelaus, but Paris realized that she was the very beauty he had seen in the water and couldn’t have left without her. The circumstances were the best for his solution. The following day, Menelaus left for Crete on business. As they say, while the cat is away, the mice will play. Charmed by handsome Paris, Helen sailed with him to Troy, where the lovers legitimated their marriage.

In any epoch abduction of one’s wife has been an inconceivable insult. In the Trojan era, it was casus belli. Upon returning to Sparta, Menelaus became furious. He summoned the kings of friendly states, and they decided to attack Troy with all their joint military power. They outfitted one thousand ships. Tens of thousands of soldiers in copper helmets with horse-hair crests believed they would engage in a blitzkrieg and reap some good reward. Among them were the heroes Achilles and Ajax, the artful Odysseus, the old wise Nestor, and they were led by the brother of Menelaus, the ferocious King Agamemnon. Though, weather conditions did not favour their campaign. There was no leading wind, and thus, Agamemnon ventured upon an awful deed of killing his daughter Iphigenia to favour the gods. Upon spilling her blood on the sacrificial stone, the wind changed, and the vast Greek fleet headed towards the Trojan coast.

Counting on an immediate victory was a mistake, though, as the Trojans avidly defended their city tooth and nail, refusing to surrender the abducted queen. The siege of this city continued for nine years, with no side able to gain the upper hand. However, in the tenth year Achilles and Agamemnon had a row, and that became the turning point in the course of this war. During one of the raids to a suburb of Troy Agamemnon captured the daughter of the priest Chryses. The grieving father asked the King to release his daughter taken hostage, and having been refused, he pleaded with Apollo to curse the Greek army with pestilence, which Apollo did. The terrible illness took down the Achaeans, and Achilles on behalf of the public demanded that their leader returned Chryseis to her father. Chryses gathered his darling, and Agamemnon received Achilles’ prisoner Briseis for compensation. Achilles felt hurt, got angry and refused to participate in battles. He asked Zeus to take revenge upon Agamemnon for this loss by allowing the Trojans to score military success. Zeus met his request, and the Trojans led by King Priam’s son Hector managed to make their way to the Greek vessels and to start a small fire there. Patroclus, the best and only friend of Achilles, engaged in battle with Hector and was killed. Broken hearted, Achilles put aside all his pointless and minor villainous acts and went for revenge. Having taken out thousands of Trojans on his way, he forced his way towards Hector, challenged him to fight and killed him in view of Priam, watching the combat from the fortress walls. Then he tied the opponent’s body to a chariot and dragged it three times around the fortress walls.

Fig. 4. Lucas Cranach the Elder. The Judgment of Paris (1528).

Fig. 5. Franz Matsch. Triumph of Achilles (1892).

At night, Priam quietly came to Achilles’ camp and begged the Champion to return his son’s body. Shocked by the old man’s courage and torn by guilt for his friend’s death, Achilles agreed to his request.

However, the death of the best warrior of Ilion didn’t profit the Greeks at all, especially since they also lost their best fighter very soon after that. Paris managed to shoot Achilles with an arrow in his only weak point, his heel. Then Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, devised an artful trick. He proposed to make a huge wooden horse to be gifted to the Trojans, and to put the best Greek soldiers inside it, and to take the fleet from view of the fortress defenders. After the Trojans awoke, they would see the horse and drag it inside the city, after which the soldiers of that special squad would leave the horse, kill all men, have their way with all women and burn everything they see.

And this trickery was managed. Despite protests of Cassandra, the sister of Paris, and admonition of the priest Laocoön saying “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!”, the Trojans dragged the monstrous thing into the city. To do that they even had to take a part of the fortress walls to pieces, as the Greek gift was so great. Everything was over that very day. Priam and Paris were killed, Helen was returned to Menelaus, and the city was wiped from the face of the Earth. Only few survived and, led by the Dardian King Aeneas, they left their native land in search for a new motherland, and, after many years of wandering and dangerous encounters, they ended up in Italy on the bank of the Tiber River.

This is the story told in fictional and documental films, articles in popular magazines, and even school textbooks – along with stories that every intelligent person should know, in particular, rumors about the gold of Troy (“that what’s-his name Schliemann”), and cunning Stalin having secretly removed the treasure from prostrated Berlin, plus stories of blind Homer with a lyre in his hands. However, the more intelligent audience tends to clarify the details of this picture basing on so-called scientific evidence.

It appears that the main books of Homer narrate only a small part of the above-mentioned events. Only fifty days in the ten years of the siege of Troy were worthy of the bard’s notice. The Iliad starts with a description of Achilles’ anger about being deprived of his legal prey – Briseis. The poem ends with Patroclus’ funeral, followed by Hector’s funeral. To a large extent, despite many battle scenes, this poem is not about war but about a quarrel between the leaders of two powerful tribes – the Mycenaeans and Myrmidons – and about the fatal consequences of that quarrel for the union of Achaean states.

Despite many battle scenes, the Iliad poem is not about war but about a quarrel between the leaders of two powerful tribes – the Mycenaeans and Myrmidons – and about its fatal consequences for the union of Achaean states.

The Iliad tells us about the whining nature of invincible Achilles, who couldn’t hold back his tears while complaining about Agamemnon to his mother; about cowardly Paris, who like a hare ran away from Menelaus on the battle field; about Helen being peevish and shaming her husband for being afraid of laying down his life in an uneven confrontation with one of the best Greek soldiers:

Thou hast come back from the war; would thou hast perished there, vanquished by a valiant man that was my former lord.

Iliad. III. 428–429.

Homer told the story about the wooden horse in his another poem, the Odyssey. By the way, we can learn from it that the Trojans nearly fought, trying to decide,what to do with the horse.

Either to cleave the hollow timber with the pitiless bronze, or to drag it to the height and cast it down the rocks, or to let it stand as a great offering to propitiate the gods…

Odyssey. VIII. 507–510.

Apparently, the Trojans considered the horse to be not a gift to the city (why would that be, though?), but rather a sacrifice to Poseidon, that the Greeks left behind before departing from the battle field. Thus, they decided to drag their trophy (or a souvenir, to use the up-to-date language) in. Don’t tourists coming to Troy from Istanbul or Izmir do the same? What do the wooden horses that tourists let into their houses hold?

All other events of the Trojan War – from Helen’s abduction to the Exodus of Aeneas – are described in the surviving fragments and retellings of the so-called Cycladic poems, as well as in works of later writers such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Virgil, etc. From these additional sources we can learn that the fate of Iphigenia wasn’t too tragical: at the moment she was to be sacrificed, she was saved the goddess Artemis, who hid the girl in a cloud, took her to Tauris and made her a priestess. You can also learn that the wooden horse was made not by Odysseus, but by Epeius, and that there were three thousand men inside it. For instance, one can also learn that during the Trojan War there was only something like a holographic image of Helen in Troy, and that she herself stayed in Egypt and was faithful to her husband through all these years.⁶

Fig. 6. The souvenir shops in Tevfikia are full of Trojan horses.

By the way, not ten but twenty years passed since Helen had been abducted till the end of the Trojan War (the Greek troops were really delayed on their way to Ilion, but we’ll come back to this fact later). Helen herself recalls it, while mourning over Hector:

Fig. 7. The Iphigenia Rock in the Crimea (village of Castropol), where, according to legend, Agamemnon’s daughter was hidden.

For this is now the twentieth year from the time when I went from thence and am gone from my native land.

Iliad. XXIV. 765–766.

Thus, it appears that by the end of the war, Helen, “a person who set thousands of ships afloat”, was already quite an elderly lady then. And if Paris’ faithfulness is worth of delight in the light of the aforesaid, the patience of his compatriots is perplexing, on the contrary. Should they have suffered years of hardships for the sake of a fading foreign matron? For pity’s sake! Those Trojans were nearly saints!

Fig. 8. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Helen of Troy (1863).

This is how the legend of Troy is known to the most informed intellectuals, who are rather few! But those who went through the trouble of reading Homer’s poems in full and attentively, rather than looking them through are even fewer. “I’ve read the list of ships up to the middle,”⁷ Osip Mandelshtam admitted. However, it should be noted that the relevant song “Beotia or the Catalogue of Ships” is a wonderful remedy for insomnia. The best known Russian translation of Homer’s Iliad is that of Nikolai Gnedich, the contemporary of Pushkin. Extremely beautiful, but heavy and archaic, this version has sent se veral generations of readers into sound sleep. Translations by Vikenty Veresaev and Pavel Shuisky are not as popular; they are more modern and better accord to the letter of the original, though, the spirit of the poem was lost. Therefore, maybe that is why these versions are not so popular.

For Homer’s contemporaries, the style of the Iliad and the Odyssey sounded as peculiar as the style of Gnedich is for us. It combines the dialectical features of the Aeolian language and that of the Ionic Greeks, who, by the 10th century B.C., began to colonize the Aegean Region and the North-Western part of the Anatolian coast, and the archaisms of rhapsodies of the Mycenaean epoch, poetic tradition of which reached Homer from the distant past. “That language was clear to listeners, who, since childhood, were used to the songs of Homeric bards – the creators and performers of Greek epos – although, in real life, nobody spoke that language. The unusual language emphasized the singularity of the events described and helped listeners to get transferred to the world of the heroic past, where people were in every respect considerably stronger and braver than people of that days. Even if an expression wasn’t clear to the public, this redoubled authority of the Homeric bards, who seemed to know things that simple people did not know of”.⁸

It is noteworthy that things in the West go as such: academic circles there still accept the old “classical” translations of Homer, although, for the purpose of public enlightenment, they issue cut versions of the Iliad and its brief narrations, or even comics. In due time, the novel by Alessandro Baricco An Iliad⁹ became a box-office project. This Italian writer tries to interpret the classic poem in a new way, removing everything that had to do with Gods, fate and other empyreans from it, which a modern reader would be unable to understand.

Well, even in the book-concerned 19[[th]] century the Iliad was not considered to be entertaining reading. In 1884 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, maybe the greatest Homer specialist of that time wrote, “Now Homer is no longer a widely read poet… Even most philologists largely know him as poorly as Christers know the Holy Bible”.¹⁰ We hope to refer to Mr. Wilamowitz again and again in our work. Now we simply state that most of the people living today, just like the generation of our grandparents, have not read Homer thoroughly and thoughtfully enough to ask the essential questions:

1. Did Troy really exist or was it only a myth, and is it useless to look for it on the perishable Earth?

2. Did the Trojan War really take place, or is it a poetic fabrication intended to make people think about the nature of force and weakness, bravery and cowardice, anger and generosity, about boredom of immortality and greatness of death?

3. Did the Greeks win that war, as Homer and the whole antique tradition insisted, or have we been for a few thousand years captivated by false ideas, unintentionally or intentionally formed for us by writers of the distant past?

4. And above all, what lessons can we learn from this story for our up-to-date life, and more specifically, what lessons can be derived for us, the Russians?

Now we are in Troy to try and answer these questions.

Chapter 2
The Adventurer Who Tripped Over Troy

Heinrich Schliemann is really worshipped in the Troy archaeological reserve. Portraits of this international adventurer are literally everywhere: in souvenir shops, on covers of guide books, in informational boards and even in the above-mentioned model of the archaeologist’s house, which workers of German television made to shoot a documental. Almost 150 years ago Schliemann showed the locals something that was not a gold vein but at the least made it possible for them to always have some “tea” and “fish” on their tables (“çay bardak”, “balyk tabak” – the Turkish language is quite associative for the Russians). Those who aren’t involved into excavation works restarting from time to time, take a job in the tourist industry: they rent rooms, sell fridge magnets and guide tourists. We’ve met two country boys in one of the dusty streets of Tevfikye. Having noticed visitors from afar, they put their sun-tanned arms out in hope for baksheesh, a habit formed over many generations. We give them a lira each. It can’t be helped. Youngsters…

Heinrich Schliemann himself played the leading role in formation of the Schliemann cult. A master of self-promotion, he invented quite a number of legends about himself, the majority of which are still living.

Fig. 9. The false house of Schliemann in the village of Tevfikye was built by the Germans.

Most modern biographies of Schliemann are based on his autobiography, which was long ago acknowledged to be a rather doubtful source. For example, check the frequently republished biography of Schliemann, considered to be classical, written by the German historian Heinrich Alexan der Stoll.¹¹

According to one of them, Heinrich Schliemann was born in a poor German family and became keen on Troy when he was eight, after he had got an illustrated History of the World by Georg Ludwig Jerrer for Christmas. The book contained a picture of Ilion aflame with its huge walls and gates, through which Aeneas fled with his father on his shoulders. Not wishing to believe that Troy was only a fairy tale told by Homer, the boy decided by any means to find the legendary city. It is commonly believed (and guides leading tourists in Troy insist on this very version) that Schliemann was the only man all over the Earth, who believed that the Trojan War had really taken place. Using geographic hints from Homer’s poems, he found and excavated Troy! Since that time, everything written by Homer started to be taken as the absolute historical truth.

The only one who believed… Well, if an outright lie can be called a wrench, let’s call it a wrench. But first of all, let us tell you about the kind of person that Schliemann was.

Heinrich Schliemann was raised in a troubled family (his father, a Protestant priest, was a libertine and an embezzler of state property), and he had to earn his living from the age of fourteen. For five long and boring years, he had been working as an errand boy in a grocer’s before he decided to change his life cardinally and applied for a job as a sea cadet on a schooner sailing to Venezuela. The vessel ran into a storm, and Schliemann told that he was among the few survivors. According to the newspapers, there were no victims in that shipwreck, though, but why would anyone bother spoiling such a wonderful story with some truth…

It was so much more interesting to imagine himself like Robinson Crusoe setting his foot on the Dutch land with a torn blanket over his shoulders. Anyway, having found a job in one of the trade houses of Amsterdam, Schliemann started studying languages. Schliemann’s gift for languages was an authentic medical fact. He mastered fifteen languages, including Russian, which, by the legend, he studied from pornographic poems by Barkov.

The “Schliemann’s” method of language studying is rather popular today; its essence is in the oral narration of text fragments in the foreign language. Step-by-step memory gets used to a new language, and receptivity to the new type speech increases. It is interesting that most adherents of this method have no idea of what Heinrich Schliemann did besides these studies.

Knowledge of Russian allowed Schliemann to come to Russia as a commercial representative. One year later, in 1847, he took out Russian citizenship. The newly-minted “Andrei Aristovitch” founded his own company and quickly grew rich supplying the indigo dye and Chilean saltpetre. He was into any business that promised profit. Of course, at the time of “gold fever”, Schliemann was in America, buying gold sand from gold diggers for a mere song and thus doubling his fortune. During the Crimean War, Schliemann was selling weapons to both sides, but he made a greater profit supplying cardboard-soled boots to the Russian army. Before abolition of serfdom in 1861, Schliemann bought up paper necessary for printing large posters with the manifest to resell it to the Russian government at an exorbitant price…

In 1864, having left his Russian wife Yekaterina Lyzhina and his three children in St. Petersburg, Schliemann set off for a journey around the world. He visited the ruins of Carthage in Tunis, remnants of Pompeii in Italy, ancient temples in India and Ceylon, the Great Wall of China and the Aztec ruins in Mexico. Shocked with everything he had seen, he signed up for to attend lectures on antique history and archaeology at Sorbonne. In 1868 Schliemann made his first excavation on the Greek island of Ithaca, which lasted for only two days. Having found a couple of shards in the ground, Schliemann, without a shadow of a doubt, passed them off as items that once belonged to King Odysseus himself.

After that the businessman visited Mycenae and the Asianic coast of the Dardanelles, where having missed the ship to Istanbul, he got acquainted with American consul Frank Calvert. Schliemann published the results of his journeys in his book Ithaca, Peloponnesus and Troy, for which he managed to obtain a doctoral degree from the so-so University of Rostock. The degree was conferred on him in absentia, as the competitor was visiting America to deal with issues of getting American citizenship and divorcing his Russian spouse.¹²

However, the scientific European community did not take his research seriously, and Schliemann decided to submit some foundational proof, having dug out an ancient city or, at least, something that could have possibly passed off as the traces of it…

Was Schliemann the first to search for the ancient Ilion in the North-Western Turkey, as it is often announced? No way. Even the laurels of the first explorer of Hisarlik are not rightfully his.

As it is set now, it was not difficult to find Troy; supposing that city was mighty enough to fight against the unified forces of the entire Greece, it should have controlled main trade ways, and, thus, it should have been in a prominent location. Moreover, “nature abhors a vacuum”, and if there is a city on a crossroad of trade routes, it will be restored after any defeat. So, today there must be a city engaged in the same business as Troy was in due time, monitoring routes and growing rich. It is not necessary to be as wise as Solomon to guess that this city is Constantinople-Istanbul, which is great due to the fact it controls the straits from the Black and Marble seas into the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas. There are two straits; Istanbul is located on the Bosporus, and its great predecessor apparently was on the Dardanelles. The geographic details in Homer’s poems point at them. At the same time, as Constantine the Great noted, being on the Hellespont is even more favourable, as not only the sea-gate but also the land-gate between Europe and Asia can be controlled. There was no better place for a city.

After it becomes clear, it is necessary to estimate and consider how far the sea had moved over three thousand years after the events described, and to look for some hills and fortress ruins at the entry to the Dardanelles, and to hear some legends from the locals…

The first scientific attempts to determine the precise position of Troy date back to the 18[[th]] century. In 1742 and 1750 the Englishman Robert Wood made two trips to the Troad and put his impressions in the book An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer. Despite he believed it was senseless to search for Troy, as it had been destroyed to the ground, Wood was the first person to suggest that the place where Troy had been changed for the worse since the ancient times. The harbour became silted, and the rivers changed their flow. His book was reissued 5 times in four languages and caused some public reaction of the scientific community.

In 1768, 1 year before Robert Wood’s book was issued, Baron Johann Hermann, a student of the glorified nationalist Johan Winckelmann, the founder of modern ideas about antique art, travelled around the Troad. After this journey he was the first to voice the hypothesis that ancient Troy must have been in the area of the Hisarlik Hill, located several kilometers away from the coast. The German cartographer Frantz Kauffer (1793), the mineralogist Edward Clark (1801), who later became a Cambridge University professor, and Charles McLaren (1822), the author of The Theses on the Topography of the Trojan War, also identified Hisarlik as the location of ancient Troy.

Jean-Baptiste Lechevalier, a French archaeologist, put forward another hypothesis. In 1785 he walked all the way from Hellespont to the Ida Mountain Range with the Iliad book in his road bag and using Wood’s book as a guide. Lechevalier was convinced that Homer described the geographic features of the peninsula rather accurately. The French scientist decided that the spot was close to the village of Bunarbashi (Pinarbashi) in the Scamander River Valley.

In 1864 the Austrian diplomat and traveler Johann Georg von Hahn decided to practically check the hypothesis of Lechevalier. Having started an excavation near Bunarbashi, von Hahn discovered the traces of some settlement. However, it became clear later that those remnants of ancient buildings dated back to a later period from 7[[th]] to 5th centuries B.C.

In one year Frank Calvert led a test excavation in Hisarlik. Two generations of his family had lived near the Troad already, and Calvert had perfect knowledge of the region. But the real revolution in his world-view happened after 1849, when he met the famous Russian scientist Pyotr Chikhachev. Chikhachev, better known in Russia as the pioneer of the Kuznetsk coal basin, had authored about 100 scientific works on geology and paleontology of Asia Minor, and the most detailed map of the Troad was based on his topographic studies. By accompanying Chikhachev on his expedition, Calvert gained invaluable experience and knowledge in the field of archaeology and geology, but, most importantly, he started to believe the Russian scientist’s statement that Troy should have been searched in the depths of Hisarlik, a part of which he acquired later.

Calvert came to believe that Troy should have been looked for in the depths of Hisarlik after the famous Russian geographer Pyotr Chikhachev, whose role in the discovery of this ancient city has still not been acknowledged by the descendants.

Chikhachev’s role in the discovery of Ilion remained unnoticed by the descendants, and all the victorious palms passed to Schliemann, who in turn claimed them for himself rather than Calvert. The man who identified the location of Troy was undeservedly forgotten, as, alas, is a frequent occasion in history. Today only the Altaic mountain range named after him and the commemorative plaque in Gatchina remind us of the merits of this scientist.

While making the digging in Hisarlik in 1865, Calvert came across traces of the Temple of Athena and of the city wall that built by Lysimachus. At that the diplomat’s financial opportunities exhausted. Calvert had hoped to continue the search after meeting the conceited millionaire Schliemann, who believed that the ruins of Troy were in the spot, where Lechevalier had identified them – in Bunarbashi. Later Calvert affirmed that in a letter to The Guardian newspaper: “When I first met Doctor [Schliemann] in August, 1868, the Hisarlik and the Troy location were new subjects for him”.¹³ Schliemann denied everything and even launched a full-scale war in the press against Calvert, charging him with lying. There are no document dated before 1868 that would testify to Schliemann being engaged in the Trojan issue at all. According to the historian Andrei Strelkov, Schliemann simply “tripped over Troy” during one of his travels.¹⁴ However, the businessman presented it all as if he had been looking for Troy for all his life and selected Hisarlik as the site to excavate the ancient city, basing on hints of Homer. To eliminate any mentioning Calvert in the history of the Troy’s discovery, Schliemann invented a story about the dream of his childhood and the illustrated book,¹⁵ and introduced himself as a man truly possessed by Homer’s epos, and even gave the children born of his new Greek wife Sophia the names of Engastromenos,¹⁶ Agamemnon and Andromacha.

Fig. 10. Karl Bryullov. Portrait of P. Chikhachev (1835).

Thus, was all of it happened later, and in August, 1868, Calvert saw the dear visitor in his house on the shore and convinced him to join the excavations assuring him, “All my land [on the Hisarlik Hill] is at your disposal”.¹⁷ Having felt the scale of profit in case they succeeded, Schliemann agreed to take part in the project. As early as in December he started consulting with the highly experienced Calvert about organization of excavations, in particular – in regard to quantification of mattocks and shovels for the works. At the same time he negotiated with the Turkish government for a license for archaeological works.

At last, on October 11, 1871 having employed workers in the near villages, Heinrich Schliemann started soil works. Calvert tried to prevent his comrade from hasty decisions and advised him to carry out the sounding of cultural layers of more than 17 meters deep, at first. However, Schliemann, being sure that Homer’s Troy was the most ancient thing of everything possible, decided to dig down to the very continental plate.

Long trenches up to seventeen meters deep and wide ruthlessly cut up the Hisarlik Hill, until Schliemann managed to dig down to an ancient settlement, destroying everything of no interest to him and not shining under the sun. Schliemann announced that he had discovered the ruins of the city of Priam.

The merchant’s barbarous approach to excavations not only deprived future scientists of the most valuable archaeological information, but also resulted in destroying the traces of the old city he had discovered. Left to the mercy of fate in the aggressive environment, they began to crumble and get weathered, suffering from roots of trees and bushes.

They managed to halt the destruction process only in 1988, when expedition participants began to protect the walls of the ancient citadel by their own efforts, led by Professor of Tubingen University Manfred Korfmann.

The thickness of the cultural layer of seventeen meters, though accumulated for some thousands of years, seemed unbelievable until we learned about their origin. “Fires often occurred, as wood and straw were used for construction [during the Bronze century],” Professor Carl Blegen explained, who used to excavate Hisarlik Hill in 1932–1938. “When a house burned down, its roof would collapsed and its walls would scatter. […] Since there were no bulldozers or graders then, nobody tried to clear the site of the fire or to remove the waste. It was much easier to level the site, covering the not remaining fragments of a building with a thick layer of waste (which ensured the noticeable growth of the cultural layer), and then to build a new house on the same spot. In Troy, such things happened rather often, and every time the ground level rose by 80–100 centimeters. Steady growth of the cultural layers on the hill also occurred due to other factors. For example, floors in all dwellings but palaces and magnificent private residences were made of earth or compacted clay. People weren’t used to collect domestic and kitchen wastes at certain special sites then. So, all wastes, including bones, food waste and broken utensils were left on the floor of the dwelling or were immediately chucked away to the outside. Sooner or later, the floor appeared to be covered with animal bones and wastes so much that even hosts with strongest stomachs understood that something should have been done about it. Solving the issue was simple and rather efficient: waste from the floor was not cleaned out, but was covered with a thick layer of fresh clay, which was compacted after that. During the excavation, the archaeologists often discovered houses, where that process was repeated many times until the floor level appeared too high for normal living, and it would have become necessary to lift the roof and to rebuild the entrance”.¹⁸

Schliemann continued his excavations for three seasons, and finally, on May 31, 1873, he came across some real treasures at the surrounding wall near the southwest gate, at a depth of 8.5 meters. Here is how he described those events:

In excavating this wall further and coming closer and closer to the ancient building and to the North-West from the gate, I came upon a large copper article of the most remarkable form, which attracted my attention all the more as I thought I saw gold behind it.… In order to withdraw the treasure from the greed of my workmen, and to save it for archaeology… I immediately had “paidos” called.…This word is of unknown origin; it came into the Turkish language and is used instead of the Greek άνάπαυσις, meaning rest time. While the men were eating and resting, I cut out the Treasure with a large knife…. It took huge efforts and involved risk, as the fortress wall, under which I had to dig, could fall down on me any moment. However, the view of so many subjects, every one of which was of great value for archaeology, made me fearless, and I did not think about any hazards. It would, however, have been impossible for me to have removed the Treasure without the help of my dear wife, who stood by me ready to pack the things which I cut out in her shawl and to carry them away.¹⁹

In the niche discovered by Schliemann, a set of 8830 precious metal articles were found, including necklaces, diadems, rings, brooches and bracelets. Owing to Calvert’s brother Frederic, it was possible to take the treasure to Athens. Having placed it to a bank, the businessman told journalists

Fig. 11. Schliemann’s trench with traces from the early Bronze century.

that he had found neither more nor less than the treasures of the Trojan King Priam. This sensational news covered front pages of newspapers, and the photograph of Sophia Engastromenos in “Helen’s attire” was published everywhere. Schliemann provided pictures of these treasures in his book The Trojan Antiquities, issued in 1874 by the famous publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus.

The scientific community, which previously paid no attention to entertaining claims of the dilettante, launched a squall of criticism against him. Professional archaeologists were shocked with the barbarity by which Schliemann literally ripped the cultural layers of the ancient hill to pieces and destroyed many of the more recent constructions.

Many questions were also asked in relation to Schliemann’s story being more like a plot of an adventure novel. As it was learnt later from Sophia’s correspondence with her husband, she could not have participated in transportation of the treasure, as she was in Athens then.²⁰ Besides, the content of the treasure was also doubtful. For example, the golden bulb of 23 carats for drinks suspiciously resembled a sauceboat of the 19[[th]] century and, within the meaning of Schliemann’s letter sent to his Athenian agent on May 28, 1873, in which he asked to find a reliable jeweler, this claim was taken to verify that the “Priam treasures” were a fake. According to another version, the “treasure” could have been made of items previously acquired either in Istanbul markets or found at different times during excavations in Hisarlik.²¹ One way or another, the treasures could not have belonged to legendary Priam, as they were found in the cultural layer being a thousand years older than Homer’s Troy.²²

Fig. 12. Sophia Engastromenos in the “Great Diadem” from the “Priam treasure” (1874).

The treasures found by Schliemann could not have belonged to legendary Priam, as they were found in the cultural layer that was a thousand years older than Homer’s Troy.

The Sublime Porte read the newspapers, too, and having learned about Schliemann’s unprecedented smuggling, sued him for ten thousand francs. Silently grinning, the millionaire reimbursed the damage, added extra forty thousand and declared himself the absolute owner of the treasures. Later Schliemann made several attempts to place them in museums in London, Paris and Naples, but they refused to take the treasures for political and financial reasons.²³ In 1881, Schliemann eventually presented the “Priam treasures” to the city of Berlin, having received the title of the “honourable citizen of Berlin” in exchange, a title, that was previously conferred to Chancellor Otto von Bismark. The treasures remained there until Professor Wilhelm Unverzagt transferred the Trojan finds to the Soviet Command in 1945 according to contribution conditions. For a long time, the collection was considered to be lost, but it was actually stored in strict confidence in the Pushkin Museum of Moscow (259 items, including the “Priam treasures”) and in the State Hermitage (414 items made of copper, bronze and clay). It was only in 1993 that Yeltsin’s Government declared that the most valuable part of the Trojan treasures were being kept in Russia. On April 15[[th]], 1996, the trophies were exhibited in the Pushkin Museum for the first time.²⁴

Having found the “Priam treasures”, Schliemann did not cease his exploratory activity and continued to dig out Mycenae, Orchomenos and Tiryns. He returned to working at the Hisarlik Hill for three times. While different people think differently about Schliemann’s activities, it is noteworthy that his adventures not only peaked scientific interest in the history of Troy, but also resulted in discovery of the previously unknown Aegean civilization. Schliemann never learned about it and died in certainty that all his finds were only related to the Trojan War era.

After Schliemann’s death, in 1893–1894, his friend and colleague Wilhelm Dörpfeld studied the stratigraphy of the archaeological layers of the Hisarlik Hill in more detail and determined that nine cities had replaced each other in sequence during the course of nearly 4.5 millennia in that spot. Accordingly, the periods of Troy’s existence were numbered from 1 to 9. In Dörpfeld’s opinion, Homer’s Ilion lied in the sixth layer (Troy 6), which Schliemann ruthlessly destroyed during his first excavations. Dörpfeld arrived at this conclusion even despite the fact that no traces of military operations were found in relation to destruction of Troy 6.

In 1932 Dörpfeld’s business was continued by the expedition of the Cincinnati University, headed by Carl Blegen, a renowned American archaeologist. Blegen corrected his predecessor and proved that Troy 6 (1800–1300 B.C.) had perished due to an extremely strong earthquake. Blegen divided the Troy 7 epoch into three periods and suggested that Homer’s Troy had existed in the 7а period (1300–1100 B.C.), with its apparent signs of a siege and damage.

The diagram proposed by Carl Blegen in relation to the sequence of existence and destruction of ancient settlements on the Hisarlik Hill became a classical one.

Troy 1 (3000–2500 B.C.) dates back to the pre-Greek culture, as ancient as most ancient civilizations, such as the Egyptian, Sumerian, Aegean and Indus ones. Inhabitants of Troy 1 had no gold, but lived in rather good houses, called megarons, they used metal tools and bred sheep and goats.

Fig. 13. According to Dörpfeld and Blegen, the Trojan settlement is a kind of a sandwich cake. (Image © Nika Tya-Sen.)

Troy 2 (2500–2200 B.C.) was a large city of the Minoan culture with walls of four meters thick, cobbled streets and gates. The basic activity of its inhabitants was agriculture: manual grinding mills were found in almost every house of this city. They used potter’s wheels to make utensils. Troy 2 traded fabrics, wool, ceramics and timber in the huge territory from Bulgaria and Thrace up to Central Anatolia and Syria, which promoted noticeable growth of its financial well-being, demonstrated by a great number of golden and silver items found in this cultural layer, including the “Priam treasure” found by Schliemann.

The city was destroyed by a sudden fire, and locals had no time to collect their precious utensils. However, according to Blegen, the catastrophe “did not cause any significant damage to the settlement’s cultural development. Given the retention of the former civilization and absence of obvious traces of foreign influence, the culture of Troy 2 was gradually and steadily developed until its successor Troy 3 picked up the baton”.²⁵

Troy 3 (2200–2050 B.C.) and Troy 4 (2050–1900 B.C.) were established on the site of the capital that burnt-down. They were protected with walls and occupied a large area. Despite the rather primitive (even compared to Troy 2) culture in general, the population of these cities improved upon cooking methods and notably varied their diet.

Troy 5 (1900–1800 B.C.) was a city with a quite high culture level given the samples of fine ceramics and building art discovered. Compared to the previous periods, the manners and habits of the citizens changed a lot. “One of the innovations that was introduced in Troy 5 (which archaeologists regret strongly) was procedding to a new and more efficient way of house cleaning. Now they swept the floor and cleaned it from the rubbish accumulated during the day; therefore, nowadays archaeologists can only rarely find animal bones, various small items discarded and lost, as well as whole or broken ceramic vessels”.²⁶ Like the previous cities standing on Hisarlik Hill, Troy of that period was destroyed, although the cause for this remains unknown: there are no traces of a fire in the ruins of buildings, and nothing would confirm that the city was captured by enemies.

Fig. 14. The Southwest (Scaean) gate where Schliemann excavated the “Priam treasure” dates back to the Troy 2 period.

Troy 6 (1800–1300 B.C.) was a really great city with block walls of 5 meters thick and with four gates, with squares and palaces. Its population were people of foreign traditions, who apparently came there from another place and brought their own cultural legacy with them. They tamed horses, established a custom of cremation of the deceased, and perfected the art of weapons production. As early as in the beginning of the Troy 6 period, the range of pottery wares had been changed to something new. This city was leveled by an earthquake, as evidenced by specific cracks on walls of buildings.

According to the legend, Ilion was founded by Ilus, son of Tros. Then the power was overtaken by Ilion’s son Laomedon. During its times, Troy achieved might and established control over Asia Minor, Propontis (the Sea of Marmara) and the straits. Laomedon erected a “city on the top of the hill”, the walls of which were built by Poseidon, who ended up a slave to Zeus (by Zeus’ will) together with Apollo, ordered to pasture Zeus’ oxen. For their assiduous work, Laomedon promised to pay the gods, but changed his mind and, in the end, just expelled them from the country, threatening to cut their ears off (Ilus. XXI, 440–458). Then Poseidon sent a sea monster to Ilion to devour all the people. It was when Heracles came in and killed the monster, getting into the monster’s belly and hacking all its entrails. For this feat, Laomedon promised him magic horses but once again failed to keep his promise. Nothing to be done, Heracles had to destroy the city, to kill Laomedon and to shoot all his heirs to death by bow and arrow, and to give the king’s daughter Hesion²⁷ to his friend Telamon. At the same time, Hesion was allowed to release one of the captives. She chose her younger brother Podarces and paid for him with her headscarf. Since then, Podarces was called Priam, meaning “redeemed”.²⁸ Thus, the legend obviously referred to the times of Troy 6, and the earthquake that destroyed the city was interpreted as anger of Heracles.

Fig. 15. That’s what Troy 6 looks like to our contemporaries. (Image © Nika Tya-Sen.)

Who were the founders of Troy 6, so noticeably different from the cities of previous periods? Blegen was sure that they were Greeks; however, he could not know for sure how they departed for new lands. He wrote, “They did not manage to define whether they roamed from the North to the shore of the Aegean Sea, or sailed from the South of Russia across the they arrived in Greece by sea from the West or the East. There are no hints left by either ceramics, artefacts, or horse bones”.²⁹

Fig. 16. The fortification wall and the East gate of Troy 6 (15th – 13th century B.C.).

Troy 7 referred to the period 1300–1100 B.C. The Trojan War is considered to have taken place during that period. There are some calculations based on different methods, but most of them put this era at between 1220 and 1180 B.C.

The ancient writers could only estimate the dates of the Trojan War, according to the approximate number of generations up to the first Olympic Games, epical tradition, etc. And they arrived at different results, ranging from the 14th to 12th centuries B.C. There were other methods, too, including the study of archaeological artefacts, epigraphy, etc.

The unique method was applied in 2008 by Marcelo Magnasco, Professor of Physics and Mathematics of the American Rockefeller University, and Constantino Baikouzis, astronomer from the Argentina’s La-Plata Observatory.³⁰ They took note that according to Homer when Odysseus was beating the grooms seeking to marry his wife Penelope,

…the sun has perished out of heaven and an evil mist hovers over all

Odyssey. XX. 356–357

and they decided that this text pertained to a solar eclipse. The dates of solar eclipses, both in the past and future, can be easily calculated. Having compared these dates with other astronomical data provided in the text, scientists concluded that King Odysseus returned to Ithaca on April 16th, 1178 B.C. According to Homer, Odysseus’ wandering after the Trojan War took about 10 years. Thus, according to Magnasco and Baikouzis, the Trojan War could have been limited with chronological frame of 1188 and 1198 B.C.

After the earthquake, the city was built up again. There were no traces of people in the ruins of Troy 6, and Blegen concluded that the population survived and immediately after the earthquake ended they returned to the city and started to restore their houses. In due course, the city became more populated, as the streets became more compact and the houses became smaller. However, traces of imported goods and wealth vanished. In general, Troy 7 was nothing of the majestic city “rich in gold” described by Homer.