The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean Read Online Free PDF Page B

myth. When Heinrich Schliemann first visited the site of Troy in 1868, there was a substantial body of opinion which held that the city had never existed at all, and the majority of those who did believe in it favoured a completely different location, a place called Bunarbashi; it was Schliemann who first identified Hisarlik, some six miles away to the north, as the true site, entirely on the basis of the geographical evidence given in the
Iliad.
One of the reasons for his rejection of Bunarbashi was that it was three hours’ journey from the coast: Homer specifically states that the Greeks were able to go back and forth several times a day between their ships and the beleaguered city. Another was the steepness of the slope:

I left my guide with the horse at the top and I went down the precipice, which inclines at first at an angle of 45 degrees and then at an angle of about 65 degrees so that I was forced to go down on all fours. It took me almost fifteen minutes to get down and I came away convinced that no mortal, not even a goat, was ever able to run down a slope of 65 degrees and that Homer, always so precise in his topography, could not have wanted us to believe that Hector and Achilles ran down this impossible slope three times.

    At Hisarlik the situation was very different:

The slopes which one has to cross in going around the city are so gentle that they can be traversed at running speed without risk of falling. In running three times around the city Hector and Achilles thus covered fifteen kilometres.

    Unfortunately, Homer clearly states in the
Iliad
that there were two springs at Troy, one hot and one cold; none could be found at Hisarlik. At Bunarbashi, on the other hand, the situation was even less as he describes: Schliemann found no fewer than thirty-four–all, according to his pocket thermometer, of precisely equal temperature–and was later told that there were six more that he had missed. He got over the difficulty by assuming that the underground watercourses had been changed by subsequent earthquakes, which indeed they very probably had.
    There also exists historical evidence for the Trojan War, or for something very like it. Records left by the Hittites of Anatolia 6 indicate a large-scale Mycenaean military expedition to Asia Minor during the thirteenth century BC ; moreover, the city that is revealed in the sixth of the nine archaeological layers discovered on the site at Hisarlik–which is now generally accepted to be that of the Homeric Troy–shows every sign of having come to a violent end. We shall have to be content with that–not, of course, that Schliemann was. He had burrowed right down to the second layer when suddenly, on the penultimate day of the dig, he came upon a quantity of golden treasure and later proclaimed to the world that he had found the jewels of Helen of Troy; he even had a photograph taken of his beautiful Greek wife–whom he had previously sent for, sight unseen, by mail order from Athens–bedecked with them. We now know, however, that that treasure belonged to a period almost a thousand years earlier than the days of King Priam. Poor Schliemann: he never knew how wrong he was. 7
    The three or four centuries following the Trojan War were marked by no outstanding civilisation of the kind we have been discussing. This was a period of change and transition, with invasions of Dorian tribes from the north and consequent shifts of population which involved considerable new Greek settlements in Asia Minor. It was not until about 800 BC that things finally settled down again, with the lands bordering the Aegean finally united by a single language and culture. Even then, among the countless isolated feudal communities which made up the Greek world, we find no single town or city rising to the top or in any way standing out from the rest; but trade and communications had been restored, and–more important still–the alphabet had been revived and improved, above all by the