Hisarlik - Human Settlement in The Region

Human Settlement in The Region

Elsewhere in Anatolia, there is abundant archaeological evidence of a thriving neolithic culture at least as early as the seventh millennium B.C. What may have been the world's first urban settlement (dated ca. 6500 B.C.) has been uncovered at Çatalhüyük in the Konya Ovasi (Konya Basin). Evidence from a cave at Karain near Antalya shows human occupation in the region extending over an estimated 25,000 year period.

While the archaeological record has much to say about the physical remains, it reveals little about the people who built and rebuilt the fabled city of Troy. The historical record for Troy is dominated by the epic poems of Homer and peopled with gods and heroes whose identities and histories formed part of the oral tradition of the area for centuries before the great Greek poet committed some of them to verse. Homer was not, however, overly concerned with history. Not surprisingly, the historical context for the epic Iliad and Odyssey is not as clear as one would wish. Various attempts have been made over time to identify the origins of the inhabitants of Troy.

As early as 1946, American historian Carpenter argued that the Trojan War, far from being an historical event, was in fact a synthesis of many such events involving peoples whose mutual involvement stretched back centuries. In the Iliad, the word most commonly used for the city of the Trojans is not "Troy" but "Ilion". Carpenter saw this as evidence of the possibility that Troy was not the name of a town at all, but rather the name of an area or district inhabited by the Trojans. The Greeks clearly had a legend about a war against the Trojans, but may have disagreed about where these people lived. At least one group of Greeks put them at a place called Teuthrania in the area known as Mysia.

Carpenter suggests that the real "Troy" is located in neither the Troad nor Aeolis but rather that the memory of a pan-Achaean expedition elsewhere was located at two different points in Asia Minor by later poetic traditions: at Ilion by the Ionic poets, because they found in this area a local folk tradition about a strong citadel sacked near the end of the Bronze Age (Hisarlik); and at Teuthrania by the Aeolic poets, to correspond with Aeolic traditions connected with their own occupation of this area.

If one is willing to accept Carpenter's line of argument this far, one can place "Troy" virtually anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean where bands of Mycenaean Greeks may have undertaken joint piratic raids. Carpenter goes so far as to place "Troy" in Egypt and to connect the story of the Trojan War with the raids of the Sea Peoples mentioned in Egyptian sources at the end of the 13th and beginning of the 12th centuries B.C.

The tangled and fragile skein of inference in the historical record gives no certainty as to the origin of the inhabitants but the fact remains that for over two millennia a thriving civilisation existed at Hisarlik.

Homer's interest in Troy ends with the fall of the city. Glimpses are recorded of the fallen city, walls burning, looting and destruction and a fleeing populace including Aeneas, carrying his father Anchises away from the scene of devastation and unknowingly in to a new and glorious future on alien shores. Troy’s history does not end with the fall of Priam’s city. The history of Troy is inextricably linked with the Bronze Age and later cultures of Anatolia, the name of which is from the Greek word for sunrise, anatole.

The inhabitants of Hisarlik lived among a number of vigorous, interactive and often warlike cultures. Apart from the mainland Greeks from whence they may have sprung, the Trojans counted such neighbours as the Hittites, Phrygians and Lydians.

The unbroken occupation of the region around Hisarlik continued with the arrival of the Romans, and later the Armenians and Kurds. Finally, after several centuries of trying, the Greeks gained control of the region once ruled by the Trojans. Around 1050-800 B.C., Ionian Greek refugees fled to Anatolia, to escape the Dorians. Many cities were founded along the Anatolian coast during the great period of Greek expansion after the eighth century B.C. One of these, Byzantium, a distant colony established on the Bosporus by the city-state of Megara, grew to supplant Rome and ultimately proved the downfall of Troy as it dominated all maritime and overland trade for almost 22 centuries.