Did it actually happen?

Until the 19th century it was generally believed that the Trojan war and city of Troy were imaginary. But, in 1871, Heinrich Schliemann, a German archaeologist began excavating an ancient site on the west coast of Turkey. Schliemann had identified Troy's location through clues he found in Homer’s Iliad. Through his work and that of subsequent excavators, the ruins of nine cities have now been uncovered at the site, lying one on top of the other; evidence that Troy was destroyed and rebuilt many times. The seventh city was destroyed around 1250 BC and it is thought that this is the Troy of legend.

Stories about the Fall of Troy were told orally for several hundred years before Homer composed his epic, the Iliad, about the Greek heroes who conquered Troy and the Trojan heroes who attempted to defend it. These tales were woven around a combination of people who almost certainly did exist, for example King Agamemnon of Mycennae, and mythical heroes such as Achilles on the Greek side and Hector on the Trojan.

Without Homer's poems, the story of Troy might have remained a Greek story; instead it endured and evolved over many centuries into a central story of the origins of western civilization.

These notes are based on and extracted by permission from Dianne Thompson’s pages on the Northern Virginia Community College site TROY - Medieval Trojan Romance - http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/Troy/troysites.html

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