The Archaeologist Who Discovered the Trojan horse and Troy Were Not Just Myth
Homer’s epic poem, the Iliad, recounts the final year of the Trojan War, fought in the thirteenth century BC. As told by Homer, the city of Troy was subjected to a ten-year siege by a Greek coalition led by Mycenae’s High King Agamemnon. The epic poem features plenty of rollicking adventures, a surfeit of graphic and gory combat, and numerous plot twists and turns from humans and gods. In the end, the city falls when the wily Odysseus tricks the Trojans and gets them to let in a huge wooden horse, hollow on the inside and packed with Greek warriors. The Iliad is an awesome story. As history, however, Troy and the Trojan War were dismissed for centuries as a fake account that belonged more to the realm of mythology than to that of facts.
Then came a discovery that overturned those assumptions. German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822 – 1890) was convinced that there was actual truth in the Iliad, and set out to prove it. From 1870 to 1890, he conducted excavations at a site in northwest Anatolia – the Asian part of modern Turkey. He made some initial finds of gold and silver, that convinced him that he had found Homer’s Troy. As it turned out, Schliemann had excavated the right city, but the wrong period: his initial finds dated from about 1000 years before the Trojan War. Still, it was a once-in-a-generation archaeological find. Then, as seen below, Schliemann matched it with another.
