In Search of the Trojan War (37 page)

IBN KHALDUN
,
An Introduction to History
, III, 49 (AD 1377)

The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases. In peace and prosperity states and individuals have better sentiments because they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of daily wants and so proves a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes
.

THUCYDIDES
,
History of the Peloponnesian War
, III, 82 (
c
.400 BC)

WHY DO CIVILISATIONS DECLINE?
What happens when they do? These questions have always been at the centre of historical research as my quotations above show. In our attempts to isolate the causes of the collapse of the Greek world at the end of the Bronze Age we have found in different areas different explanations being put forward: earthquake, disease, famine, climate, war, drought, de-population, plague, attack from outside: in many places the archaeology has suggested a complex interrelation of such factors rather than any one cause. This is in keeping with the way we have been encouraged to look at the past by modern historians like Braudel: ‘in historical analysis … the long run always wins in the end … annihilating innumerable events – all those which cannot be accommodated in the main ongoing current.’ This view would have been largely accepted by the great historians quoted above, even if they would have been reluctant to relegate events to the ‘ephemera of history’ and to see individuals as ‘imprisoned’ in a destiny in which they have little hand, as Braudel would have it. But Polybius and Thucydides would have agreed on this modern emphasis on the interrelation of climate, geography, weather and patterns of cultivation on to which civilisations are grafted. Thucydides’ remarkable ‘anthropological’ account of prehistoric Greece (
see here
) shows how economic factors could have determined the rise and fall of Minoan and Mycenaean civilisation. The
World History
of the great medieval Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun gives full
play to the relation of political decline to disease, overpopulation, climate, rainfall and crop failure. In the past, however, there was no means of scientifically quantifying such factors. It is in the last few decades that archaeological techniques have been developed which are enabling modern historians actually to measure factors such as the depopulation of Messenia, and to estimate, say, the population of the Argolid against land use and crop yield. Much work remains to be done, and undoubtedly there will be important new discoveries in the future, but the effect of this geographical approach is to emphasise the role of the long term against that of the individual event, to diminish the role of the Hectors and Agamemnons of the Bronze-Age world, and to look instead at the roles of people like the women flax workers at Pylos, the silent masses who supported such societies. This will be the line taken by the next 100 years of Aegean scholarship. In this view the Trojan War – even if it occurred – is of little significance, being merely one of hundreds of Troys, that is one of hundreds of cities in the Late-Bronze-Age world whose fates as a whole need to be understood before we can make general deductions about this important phase of human history. It could even be argued that we need to understand all these other places and their fates before we can fully understand the site of Troy itself. Indeed, should the destruction of the city of Troy
only
be approached in this way, and the tale of Troy ignored? Such ideas have now come into play in recent work on the decline of the Aegean Bronze Age. Are the destruction of cities, the incursions of invaders like the Sea Peoples, only symptoms rather than causes? Was the economy of this world already in decline before the ‘glorious’ period of thirteenth-century Mycenae began? Archaeology can rarely give us unequivocal answers to such questions, and historians are tempted to look at other civilisations as models. In this case a most interesting model was put forward not long ago by American archaeologists working on the mysterious decline of the Mayan civilisation in Central America, for which there seemed no external explanation at all. The conclusion they arrived at was that early societies of any kind of
complexity of organisation often decline because the systems they have created to make their social structures work simply fail in the end to cope with the variety of natural factors which determine their means of production. As Khaldun noted, this can be triggered off by many things – a succession of bad harvests, drought, plague, rapacious rulers: in the face of such factors the very basic structures of society are too fragile to cope and they break down, their resistance gone like a living organism which has lost its immunity.

SYSTEMS COLLAPSE

The American archaeologists listed the factors they thought pertinent to the decline of the Maya, which can be convincingly applied also to the fall of Mycenaean Greece (and, incidentally, to the end of the Roman Empire in Dark-Age Britain too). The signs are as follows (the reader will immediately note that these are what we would call symptoms rather than causes):

1. The central political organisation collapses or breaks up; its central places (‘capitals’) decline; public building and work ends; military organisation fragments; palaces and magazines are abandoned; temples and cult places are eclipsed and only survive as local shrines; literacy is lost. This has obvious application to Mycenae over the thirteenth to the twelfth centuries BC.

2. The traditional ruling élite, the upper class, disintegrates; kings, as in Greece, vanish and the important local men, in this case the
korete
(‘mayor’) and
basileus
(‘headman’) take their place; their rich burials cease; their residences are often reused either by squatters or by cottage industries; the supply of luxury goods they bought or made dries up. This is not only applicable to a number of Mycenaean centres, but strikingly fits the transition between Troy VI and Troy VIIa, as against the hypothetical interpretation put forward (
here
).

3. The centralised economy collapses. Just how centralised this was in Greece can be seen in the Knossos and Pylos tablets (
see here
). Now there is no more large-scale trade, exchange or
estate management; crafts and specialised industries vanish; specialised and organised agriculture ends; people fall back to local homesteads, small-scale cultivation and a barter economy.

4. There is widespread abandonment of settlements and ensuing depopulation. Towns and cities are frequently left to be taken over by the lower classes; there is often a flight to the hills, to isolated defensible spots – like Karfi in Crete, for example, or Bunarbashi near Troy.

5. Particularly interesting with regard to Homer’s story are the cultural tendencies evident in the aftermath of such a collapse. In the ‘Dark Age’ which follows, a romantic myth develops concerning the ‘heroic world’ which has vanished. The new power groups which emerge – for whom in Greece the
basileus
is now the ‘king’ – legitimise themselves by constructing genealogies linking them to the states of the ‘Heroic Age’. Thus Ionian princelings of Homer’s day, like Hector of Kyme and Agamemnon of Chios, took the names of, and claimed descent from, the heroes, just as in Dark-Age Britain, Celtic kings made up genealogies with Roman names, and Anglo-Saxon newcomers fabricated regal lists linking themselves to the mythical kings of their continental Germanic past, even incorporating Roman names too. Early chroniclers and poets then tend to tell of the collapse of the old world in terms of a heroic struggle with outside invaders – whether it is the Dorians in Greece or the Saxons in Britain – and the tale is personalised in terms of deeds, heroes and battles. In the end, as much in
Beowulf
as in Homer, a confusion develops between the Golden Heroic Age of the past and the new Heroic Age. The function of the bard, if anything, is to equate the two.

To this account we should perhaps add a final note which connects with some of our earlier thoughts about the nature of archaeology as a science. The reverberations of the ‘Dark-Age’ and ‘Heroic-Age’ myths can be traced down to modern historians, who accept as evidence these romantic traditional narratives which were orally transmitted and only set down in writing centuries after the collapse. As we have seen, the slow
development of scientific archaeology has tended to be shaped by the acceptance of the myth in a way that the writing of history has not. It has, for example, focused on the larger and more obvious sites of the vanished states, like Mycenae, Tiryns or Troy, at the expense of the hundreds of ‘insignificant’ sites not mentioned in the myth but where the real life of the people persisted. This can be paralleled in Britain with claims for the historicity of the Arthurian tale and the digs at Tintagel, Glastonbury and ‘Cadbury–Camelot’. Like the Arthurian legend, the tale of Troy is a Golden-Age myth, made all the more potent because of an assumed kernel of historical truth.

THE TROJAN WAR: AN ATTEMPTED SYNTHESIS

So when I think of the individual, I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before. … As I see it, rightly or wrongly, the long term always wins in the end.

FERNAND BRAUDEL
,
The Mediterranean
, p. 1244 (1973)

Such conclusions about the importance of the individual in history will not appeal to those interested in great events and battles, to those who wish to believe in a real Agamemnon or Hector, a real Trojan War. In fact in this ‘structuralist’ view it would be pointless to write a work of history on a ‘historical’ Trojan War, a contradiction in terms; even if we could prove beyond all doubt that it were a real event, it would still be of minor importance compared with the long-term deep structures touched on in this chapter. As it is, with ambiguous evidence at our disposal, it is easy to agree with the strictures of Sir Moses Finley, who has not only denied that the war ever happened, but insists, in
The World of Odysseus
, that ‘Homer’s Trojan War … must be evicted from the
history
of the Greek Bronze Age’. And it is true that, like it or not, the Trojan War has long since transcended the strict analysis of the Bronze-Age historian: so much so that
the work of Schliemann, Dörpfeld and Blegen, who dug Hisarlik, and of the hundreds of commentators, though to a lesser or greater degree scientific in method, is in one sense as much an illumination of the
myth
as are the works of Berlioz, Virgil or Aeschylus mentioned in
Chapter 1
. The myth in each case conditioned the interpretation of the evidence. The reason is that for most people Lord Byron’s remark is true: ‘We do care about the authenticity of the tale of Troy … I venerate the grand original as the
truth of history … and of place
; otherwise it would have given me no delight.’ Faced with this paradox, the strict historian has to agree with Schliemann’s friend Charles Newton who said, in reviewing Schliemann’s
Mycenae
in the
Edinburgh Review
in 1878:

How much of the story is really to be accepted as fact, and by what test we may discriminate between that which is merely plausible fiction and that residuum of true history which can be detected under a mythic disguise … are problems as yet unsolved, notwithstanding the immense amount of erudition and subtle criticism which has been spent on them.

But it would be unfair to end on such a note in a book of this kind. As I hope we have found in this search, there is an immense amount of circumstantial evidence which suggests that a kernel of the tale of Troy goes back to a real event in the Bronze Age; how much we cannot yet be sure, but it cannot do any harm to end with a plausible reconstruction of what might be reasonably adduced from that mass of evidence: a piece of political journalism, if you like, which can be taken with a pinch – or stirrup jar – of salt, according to taste. Here, then, is my version of the presumed ‘historical’ Trojan War and its background.

The fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC were the heyday of Mycenaean civilisation. The chief power was at Mycenae: there the dynasty extended its influence over the whole Peloponnese by military conquest or by dynastic alliance of a kind common in the Bronze-Age Near East. This extension
may be reflected in the archaeological record by the rebuilding of Pylos (
c
.1300 BC) and of the Menelaion (
c
.1300–1250) and by the first destruction of Thebes, the great rival in central Greece (
c
.1300?). Archaeology also shows us that the palaces at Mycenae, Pylos, Tiryns and the Menelaion shared the same material culture, the same artistic traditions, and the same bureaucracy down to the smallest detail. Tiryns, like Pylos, had some sort of archive and thus may have been independent of Mycenae, but it is more likely that it recognised the overlordship of Mycenae and was its port. Orchomenos, the enemy of Thebes, may also have been part of this world, employing the same artists and architects. Knossos, too, seems to have been occupied at this time by a Greek dynasty that had intimate relations with Mycenae and the mainland, importing stone from the same Spartan quarries, using the same art and sculpture, and a bureaucracy identical in every detail. This was one world, then: its city states may have had independent traditions, their own kings, but at certain times they acknowledged a ‘Great King’ in the same way as other kingships in the Near East. The overwhelming balance of evidence suggests that the Greeks, the Achaiwoi of Homer, were the people known to the Hittites as the people of Ahhiyawa throughout the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC, and that in the thirteenth century they were at times acknowledged as ‘Great Kings’ by the Hittite Foreign Office, in the same way as the kings of Egypt, Babylon and, later, Assyria. I assume that at this time the seat of the king of Ahhiyawa was at Mycenae, and that he was a member of the dynasty remembered by Greek tradition as the Atreids. At this time the Greeks extended their influence throughout the islands of the Aegean; their trade routes led west to Sicily and eastwards via Cyprus to Syria; they controlled settlements on the coast of Asia Minor at places like Iasos and Miletus, whose regions were acknowledged by the Hittites as Greek territory with agreed frontiers. To a limited extent the Greeks were involved in the diplomacy of the time, exchanging gifts and ambassadors with the Hittites, sending cult idols to the Hittite court, and entertaining Hittite royal kinsmen. That they
were known to the Egyptians and had direct ambassadorial contacts is shown by the inscription recording an Egyptian visit to Mycenae and Crete in around 1380.