Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 23

Greeks attacked Troy more than 3,200 years ago, in the 13th century BC. (In the next chapter, I explain BC, AD, CE, and BCE.) The stories about that decade-long war were already ancient by the time of the philosopher Aristotle and Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. The Iliad and The Odyssey are supposedly the work of a blind singer–poet called Homer, but nobody knows for sure who he was, when he lived (maybe the ninth century BC), or even whether he lived. One widely respected theory is that, long before anybody wrote these stories down, storytellers and singers performed them, often set to music, over and over, each generation teaching the tales to the next.

As centuries and millennia went by, the real Trojan War faded so far into the past that these stories were all that was left — that is, until Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German enthusiast, decided to find Troy. With little to go on except his faith in Homer, he dug up not just one but a stack of nine Troys built one on top of another. Then he went to Greece and discovered the mighty civilization of Mycenae, which also figures in Homer’s saga.

Sure that The Iliad’s account of the Trojan War was true, Schliemann fixed on an ancient mound at a place called Hissarlik, on the southwest coast of modern Turkey.

Starting in 1870, Schliemann’s workers dug into a promising mound of dirt and rubble. What they couldn’t budge, they blasted with explosives. If you’ve seen documentaries about modern archaeologists painstakingly picking through an archaeological site with dental picks and soft brushes, put that image out of your head. These guys approached excavation with all the delicacy of a dog in a flower bed.

The crew hardly slowed down as they passed through what later archaeologists identified as the probable Troy of the Trojan War (about 1250 BC), only three levels down. Schliemann’s workers burrowed to an earlier layer of the ancient city, one from before 2000 BC — maybe 700 years earlier than the Troy in Homer’s stories. In 1874, Schliemann found gold artifacts that he erroneously thought had belonged to Priam, the Trojan king in The Iliad.

Not satisfied with his Trojan findings, Schliemann went back to Greece to look for the palace of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks in The Iliad. There, he not only made more finds (in the form of ancient tombs), but again came up with treasure, including a golden burial mask that he declared to be the Mask of Agamemnon. Later archaeologists dated it to about 1600 BC, too early for Agamemnon, and some modern archaeologists even think it’s a fake that Shliemann placed in the tomb so that he could “discover” it.