In Search of the Trojan War (41 page)

The presence of the lagoon underlines the point that, unlike the Trojan plain, Besika Bay has an abundance of fresh water even in the height of summer. In fact, it has been an important anchorage on this coast for centuries, probably for millennia. Navigational texts and shipping records from the Middle Ages onwards show that traffic going up into the Dardanelles would usually be
compelled to wait here, the last anchorage before the narrows, because the currents and winds coming down the Dardanelles were so strong. The British and French fleets did so on several occasions in the nineteenth century, and as we saw
here
, Lord Byron was detained in Besika Bay for seventeen days in 1810. Even into our own century, the Black Sea pilot for 1908 says it was not uncommon to see two or three hundred ships waiting for a favourable wind in the Tenedos channel and nearby anchorages.

In prehistory, with only oars and primitive sails, the bulk of maritime traffic heading towards the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara probably unloaded at Besika Bay and transshiped its goods by land past Troy. (Schliemann, for example, mentions that his supplies and tools were always unloaded at Besika Bay.) From there they would have been carried by cart or pack animal along the old track from Besika Bay to Troy. This route leads over a pronounced rise where the tower of Yerkesik stands today; from here Besika Bay and Troy are both visible, though neither can be seen from the other. This may be the
throsmos
or ‘rise in the plain’ recorded by Homer on three occasions when the Trojans deploy their army in a threatening position above the Greek camp. From the rise the road leads down to the ford of the Menderes (Scamander) on the line of the nineteenth-century causeway and then ascends from the river in a northeasterly direction towards the Trojan plateau and Hisarlik: this most likely is the axis of the battles envisioned in the
Iliad
.

Manfred Korfmann’s archaeological explorations have now shown a long continuity of occupation on the Besika site, with Byzantine defences and warehouses, Hellenistic port installations, Troy VI material, and a substantial settlement from as early as the third millennium BC. It is almost certain, then, that Besika Bay, and not the marshy and malarial flats below Hisarlik, was the harbour for Bronze Age Troy, and presumably also the site of the Greek camp. This is precisely what we would infer from Homer:

Their ships were drawn up far away from the fighting.

Moored in a group along the gray churning surf –

first ships ashore they’d hauled up on the plain

then built a defense to landward off their sterns.

Not even the stretch of beach, broad as it was,

could offer berths to all that massed armada,

troops were crammed in a narrow strip of coast.

So they had hauled their vessels inland, row on row,

while the whole shoreline filled and the bay’s gaping mouth

enclosed by the jaws of the two jutting headlands.

Iliad
, XIV, 35–44, translated by Robert Fagles

Originally a deep and wide embayment between two prominent headlands, Besika Bay fits the Homeric description perfectly. The discovery of the Mycenaean cemetery on its shore probably clinches the matter.

Then Korfmann’s team turned to the site itself. On the plateau south of Hisarlik, they began to examine the Roman town, looking for Bronze Age remains below it. Unfortunately the bedrock is less than six feet below the soil, and the Roman builders who liked to found their buildings on bedrock cleared away much of what lay beneath. But wherever they dug south of the citadel, in between the foundations of the Roman buildings and streets, remains of the Bronze Age were still disclosed. Right against the south wall were well-built houses of stone and wood, some very large. Two hundred yards from the south gate of Troy VI they uncovered the footings of six houses with such large quantities of Mycenaean pottery that the excavators wondered whether they had not found evidence of a small trading colony of Mycenaean merchants. Troy VI, then, certainly had a town.

Korfmann was anxious to define the limits of this town, and geomagnetic readings suggested the presence of a thick wall of mudbrick enclosing a large area extending towards the southern edge of the plateau. Excavating along this line, 400 yards south of the Troy VI walls, his team subsequently found a rock-cut ditch 3 metres wide, behind which there would probably have been mudbrick fortifications. There were also indications of two gates in this southern part of the circuit. Also, in the middle of the
plateau, a long cutting in the bedrock was excavated with rear post holes suggesting the presence of a massive timber palisade with a wall walk supported by posts: this may have been part of the eastern defences of the Troy VI lower town. Further geomagnetic surveys have yielded evidence of two more gates not yet excavated.

Troy VI was not just a fortress. The outer town formed an elliptical shape south of the citadel across the end of the plateau, occupying most of the western third of the Roman city. Covering an area of about 200 hectares, it was comparable in size with the Mycenaean towns of the Argolid and, if the whole area was occupied, it may have had a population of five or six thousand people.

An important gap in our knowledge of Troy VI has always been the lack of evidence about religious cults. Dörpfeld thought he had found a shrine in one of the pillared houses inside the wall, but it was always assumed that the town’s main shrine was destroyed when the Romans levelled off the top of the hill to build their Athena temple and civic centre. However, new finds below the Troy VI wall on the western side have offered a different possibility. Here a Mycenaean cult figurine was unearthed, the first such discovery on Hisarlik. Had this come from the shrine of a foreign community in Troy? Or was it a foreign god in a Trojan shrine? Either is possible – it was around this time that the sick Hittite king Mursilis had requested idols to be brought to his bedside from Lazpa (Lesbos) and from Ahhiyawa itself (
see here
).

Along with the Mycenaean idol was a very traditional Anatolian cult object, part of a bronze stag of a kind known from central Anatolia at Alaca Huyuk. It is fascinating that both these pieces were found in the area which was a cult area in Hellenistic times and where that most mysterious of all Troy stories, the weird custom of the Lokrian maidens, was enacted supposedly for a thousand years after the war until their ancestor’s crime had been expiated (
see here
). If there was a Bronze Age shrine in this area of the town, it would form a parallel with Mycenae where
the main cult building was below the hill and outside the palace area.

Finally, it was here on the west that Korfmann’s team found indications contrary to what has always been believed, that there may have been no break in settlement on Hisarlik between the end of the Bronze Age and the Ionian Greek settlement in the eighth century. In the area of the shrines, traces of a new stratum were uncovered, between Troy VIIb2 and Troy VIII, which suggested that an impoverished population hung on at least in this part of the lower town. This raises the possibility of continuity on Hisarlik from the late Bronze Age to Homer’s day. If the site was not after all a deserted ruin when the Ionian Greeks settled there in the eighth century BC, Homer could have had access to local traditions of the story which had been handed down orally on the site.

So now we can be clear that the Troy excavated by Schliemann, Dörpfeld and Blegen was the citadel of a sizeable town, which itself probably went back at least as far as 1500 BC. Troy VI then was the royal stronghold, the residence of the ruling clan. In this light we should remember that no other site in western Anatolia compares with Hisarlik. With more than forty strata and nearly seventy feet of deposits, it was in its region a uniquely long-lasting and massively fortified place. Nowhere north of Mycenae do such fortifications exist in the Late-Bronze-Age world. Bearing that in mind, it can surely now be assumed that Troy VI was the seat of an important Anatolian kingdom, quite possibly one of the regional capitals mentioned in the Hittite archives. This is all the more clear when we remember that Troy/Hisarlik was also one of the most ancient settlements in western Anatolia, with an impressive continuity of traditions on the site, especially in architecture. All in all, this suggests a long-lived dynastic seat: in short, a line of strong Trojan kings. Such of course was the Greek tradition.

If Hisarlik/Troy was indeed a major regional ‘capital’ in between the Greek and Hittite worlds, we may predict that it does appear in the Hittite tablets, just as Emil Forrer deduced so
long ago (
see here
). As yet we cannot recognise it for certain because the interpretation of the Hittite geography of the region is as yet controversial. But one place in the Hittite archives still stands out strongly as the likeliest candidate for Troy: Wilusa. This is a state about which a fair amount is now known, and what is known points towards the Troad for its location. As we saw in
Chapter 6
, Wilusa was a long-lasting kingdom in western Anatolia, once independent of the Hittites but a loyal (though distant) client state from around 1600 BC. In the treaty of about 1280 BC, perhaps shortly before the Trojan War, it undertook to furnish troops to the Hittite king for his military expeditions – and may have done so on the Kadesh campaign. It was an Arzawan state and presumably lay on, or near, the northwest Anatolian seaboard. The recent decipherment of a strange poetic or ritual text from thirteenth-century-BC Boghaz Köy has provided us with an interesting gloss on this question. Written in the Luvian language, which was spoken in west Anatolia (and perhaps in Troy?), the text gives this formulaic opening line to some lost work: ‘When they came from steep Wilusa …’ So the same epithet was applied to Hittite Wilusa as to Homeric (W)ilios (
Ilios ophruoessa, Ilion aipu
).

A further insight into Wilusa may also be offered by the Alaksandus treaty. For in its coda it gives the names of the Wilusan gods. First is the Anatolian storm god (like the Greek sky god, invincible with his thunderbolt). There follows one lost name (perhaps female), then an Appaliunas, who can hardly be other than Apollo (Apeilon in Cypriot Greek); the tablet concludes with ‘the male and female gods, mountains, rivers, springs, and the subterranean stream of Wilusa.’

This suggests that Apollo was one of the chief deities of the Wilusans. Now it is a remarkable fact that in Homer Apollo is not the god of the Greeks, but the chief deity of the Trojans with his temple in their citadel. At the very beginning of the
Iliad
, of course, he is the god whom Homer sees as responsible for the ten years of suffering experienced by the Greeks, the ‘countless losses’ of the Achaians before Troy:

What god drove them to fight with such fury?

Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto …

So the theme of the
Iliad
is set out at the start. It may contain more than a vestige of Bronze Age fact. The cult of Apollo is now thought not to be Greek but Anatolian or Cypriot in origin (Homer calls him ‘Lycian-born’). Interestingly enough his name does not appear in the Linear B tablets so far unearthed. In classical times his cult was particularly strong in the Troad: according to the geographer Strabo ‘his worship extends all along this coast.’ In addition to his island shrines on Lesbos and Tenedos, he had several important cult centres, most famous of which was the Smintheum at Hamaxitus/Chrysa where there are traces of occupation as early as the third millennium BC. It is possible then that the proto-Apollo was indeed the god of the Troad in the late Bronze Age and that Homer has preserved a genuine memory of Trojan religion.

Before we leave this question of the possible identity of Troy and Wilusa, there is one last clue to be drawn from the treaty of Alaksandus: if Wilusa was indeed in the Troad, then where was the shrine of the deity of the ‘subterranean stream of Wilusa’ which the treaty singles out for special mention? There was a subterranean spring deep under the site of Troy itself, and another underground spring which rose outside the walls. But if the holy underground stream of the treaty was in the Troad, it can hardly be other than the famous Ayazma, two miles below the summit ridge of Mount Ida, the throne of the Trojan gods. This is the source of the Scamander river, whose sanctity is stressed by Homer above any other river (it is ‘divine,’ ‘born of the gods,’ ‘descended from Zeus’). Homer also says the river was worshipped with sacrifices, that bulls and, especially, horses were sacrificed to it;he says that a priest was maintained by the Trojans specifically to perform the rites for the river.

At the Ayazma, the river emerges into a picturesque basin under a limestone cliff, pouring out of a natural subterranean tunnel which is walkable for 220 yards into the mountain and
which in its early part is four or five yards high. It is one of the most famous natural features of the Troad; as Lord Aberdeen described it in 1803, ‘one of the grandest and most picturesque scenes … the water rises in a vast cavern and gushes out forming a magnificent spectacle.’ Charles Maclaren, who came here in 1847, attributed the ancient sacredness of the river to the fact that it springs from the very foot of Zeus’s throne:

Instead of collecting its water like other rivers from obscure, feeble and scattered sources, it bursts out at once into day in a magnificent cascade, clear as crystal, issuing forth in mystery and sublimity from a deep cavern in the hidden recesses of the mountain amidst thundering echoes, and encompassed by scenery of extraordinary beauty and grandeur.

The place is still visited by pilgrims today. Early this century, before the Greeks were expelled from the Troad, it had a great local reputation for the cure of fever (important in the malarial conditions of the Scamander valley) and a special service was held here by the Greeks on the festival day of Hagios Elias. In those days, the trees around the basin were hung with votive rags, and oil lamps and incense were burned. Indeed, in the remoter past the reputation of its sanctity spread far beyond the Troad. In 1803 Lord Aberdeen met pilgrims here from as far away as Constantinople and even, remarkably, people from Kula in central Anatolia who had come on a thirteen-day journey to bathe and drink the water. Here then the evidence from topography and ethnology, from Homer and the Hittite tablets may perhaps converge in a most striking way. In the Mediterranean world the immemorial sanctity of such places has often survived all changes of peoples and faiths, and although over three thousand years have elapsed since the treaty of Muwatallis referred to the sacred places of Alaksandus’ kingdom, it is not inconceivable that the ‘sacred subterranean stream of Wilusa’ has survived as a place of worship up till our own times.