Troy was built by the ancient Greeks when they crossed the sea around16th century BC, and flourished from13rd century BC to12nd century BC. The excavation of Troy site began in the middle of19th century and lasted until 1930s. Archaeologists discovered the ruins of Troy in nine periods from 3000 BC to 400 AD, and discovered the ruins of Athena Temple and the parliamentary hall, market and theater of the Roman Empire in 400 AD. Although these buildings have collapsed, judging from the remaining walls and columns, the momentum is quite magnificent. There are castles from 2600 BC to 2300 BC, with a diameter exceeding 120 meters. There are palaces and other buildings in the city. Many gold, silver, jewels and bronzes were found in a library in Wang Jiabao. The pottery was mainly red and brown. In addition, stone tools, bone implements and pottery spinning wheels were unearthed. Troy is the ruins of a burnt-out city. Its stone flower garden is 5 meters long and contains a large number of painted pottery and other daily utensils with simple shapes and geometric figures.
The Trojan horse project described in Homer's Iliad in the 9th century BC took place here. Paris, Prince of Troy, came to visit Menelaus Palace, King of Sparta, Greece, and was warmly received by Menelaus, but Paris abducted Menelaus' wife. Menelaus and his brothers decided to crusade against Troy. Because Troy was strong, it was easy to defend but difficult to attack, and the attack in 10 failed. Finally, the hero Odyssey put forward a plan to let Mycenae soldiers burn down their camp and leave by warship, creating the illusion of retreating back to China and deliberately leaving a huge Trojan at the gate. The Trojans dragged Troy into the city as a victory. That night, while the Trojans were drinking vinegar songs to celebrate their victory, Mycenae soldiers hiding in Troy sneaked out, opened the city gate and put them in the Greek army that had already ambushed outside the city. As a result, Troy was in ruins overnight. The story described in Homer's epic has become a famous piece in western literature and art.
Not far from the ruins of Troy, there is a museum, which is the only museum in Turkey that collects Trojan cultural relics at present. The museum is small in scale, and there are few cultural relics on display. This is because a large number of excavated precious cultural relics were stolen by western cultural relics thieves, including the treasure house of King Priam and Helen's necklace. Nevertheless, the ruins of Troy are still fascinating places. Now Troy has become one of the tourist attractions in Turkey, attracting thousands of tourists.
To find out the cause and effect of this debate, we need to fully explain the original materials describing this war. At present, the earliest texts describing this war are the Iliad and Odyssey. These two epics are called Homer's Epic and supported by Homer, a blind poet who may live in the 9th century BC. Modern scholars analyze the texts of Homer's epics, and think that different parts of the two epics are different in style and language, which shows that the two epics contain different times. Some scholars have pointed out that these two epics retain the creative mode of oral performance, indicating that the contents of the epics have gone through the stage of oral singing before being written into the text.
The Iliad and Odyssey tell us the beginning and result of the Trojan War. The beginning of this war is the so-called "disharmonious golden apple": the wedding reception of Peleus, the world hero, and thetis, the goddess of the sea. Because this marriage was directly arranged by Zeus, a group of higher-ranking gods were invited to dinner, but Eris, the goddess in charge of disputes, was not invited. The goddess who came uninvited was resentful, so she came uninvited and left a golden apple at the party, which read "For the most beautiful goddess". The three goddesses present at that time-Hera, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and Venus, the god of love and beauty-all thought they were entitled to the golden apple. They asked Zeus for a verdict, but Zeus pushed the question to Prince Paris who was herding sheep at that time. The three goddesses found Prince Paris, and in order for Prince Paris to give them the apple, they made their own promises: Hera promised Paris to become the king of the most powerful country after getting the golden apple, Athena promised Paris to become the smartest person in the world, and Venus promised Paris to become the most beautiful woman in the world. As a result, Paris gave the golden apple to Venus, so he got the most beautiful woman in the world-Helen, the wife of the Spartan king, and brought this woman back to Troy. As a result, the Trojan War, which lasted for 10 years, was triggered. The Greeks surrounded Troy 10 without occupying it. Later, Odysseus presented the Trojan plan, and Trojan was defeated.
There are generally two misunderstandings about the Iliad and the Odyssey.
First of all, the Iliad is a narrative of the entire Trojan War. In fact, the Iliad only tells a dispute between Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, and Achilles, the hero, before the end of the Trojan War. This dispute caused Achilles to withdraw from the battlefield for a time, which caused great losses to the Greeks on the battlefield. Later, Achilles rejoined the war because of the death of his comrade-in-arms, and killed hector, the first warrior of Troy. The whole Iliad ends with Hector's funeral.
The second misunderstanding is that the scene of Trojan horse killing the city comes from Iliad, but in fact this scene comes from Odyssey. The Odyssey, with another foreign Greek hero Odysseus as the protagonist, focuses on the story of Odysseus' return to his hometown after the victory of the Trojan War. On the way home, he inadvertently offended Poseidon, making his voyage full of twists and turns and extremely thrilling. It should be noted that the story of "Trojan horse killing the city" which was widely circulated later came from Odyssey rather than Iliad. This story is presented to readers in the way of Odysseus' recollection, thus becoming an eternal classic in western literature.
The position of Homer's epic in classical Greek times is no different from that of the Bible in Christianity. For hundreds of years in the classical era, two epics were the basis of Greek education. This gave birth to the business of reciting and explaining Homer's epic, and people engaged in this business often shuttled between different city-states. Plato once sarcastically said that mastering Homer is like mastering everything. At that time, the Athens city-state also made a law for Homer's epic, stipulating that a poetry reading meeting would be held at the Pan-Athena Festival held every four years, and the poems read could only come from Homer's epic. However, at that time, the versions of Homer's epics were obviously not unified, and the contents of the epics quoted by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were often different.
Age dispute
Although both epics are related to the Trojan War, their focus is not on the war itself. For those who sing and record epic poems, their task is not documentary, but to express their views on the meaning of life with the help of these stories. Therefore, a lot of information about the Trojan War was ignored. The most crucial thing in the neglected information is: When did the Trojan War happen? Herodotus, known as the "father of history" in the west, was the first person to try to determine the year of the Trojan War. Herodotus lived in the 5th century BC and was deeply influenced by Homer's epic. He wrote his book History in Homer's Ionian dialect, which was handed down from generation to generation. The whole work has obvious Homer style. Some scholars even think that he is the last person in Homer's family. According to the genealogy of the king of Sparta, Herodotus speculated that the year of the fall of Troy was 800 years ago, and changed it to the current AD date, about 1250 BC.
After Herodotus, many scholars used different data as the basis to infer the age of the Trojan War. Among them, the most influential is the presumption of erato Stenny who lived in the late 3rd century BC. Erato Stennis was the imperial teacher of the Ptolemaic dynasty, who was in charge of the largest Alexandria library at that time. The chronicle he wrote, as the name implies, is a chronicle book. At that time, each Greek city-state had its own unique chronology method, some according to the genealogy of the city-state king, some according to the chronology of the consul, and some according to the Olympic Games. On the basis of synthesizing the chronology methods of each city-state, erato Stenny re-established a set of chronology methods, and on this basis, rearranged and combed the major events in different historical periods of each city-state. The first historical event recorded at the beginning of the chronicle was the Trojan War. According to erato Stennis's calculation, the Trojan War took place from 1 193 BC to1/84 BC.
Herodotus and erato Stens lived in the classical Greek era in the heyday of the city-state system, and in the Hellenistic era when Greek culture was widely spread in Europe and Asia. Influenced by Homer's epic, they have different assumptions about the time of the Trojan War, but they all think that the Trojan War is a real historical event. Judging from the current information, we have not found that anyone doubted the authenticity of the Trojan War at that time. This is closely related to Homer's great influence at that time. The Alexandria Library, where erato Stens worked, was the center of studying Homer's epic at that time. The text structure of Homer's epic that we can see today was formed in Alexandria during Ptolemy dynasty.
While Homer's epic was widely circulated, the Romans began to embark on the road of external expansion. By 146 BC, the Romans suppressed the Greek uprising and brought Greece under their own rule. Political unity failed to bridge cultural differences. In the Roman-ruled areas, two cultural regions have gradually formed-one is the Latin-speaking western region and the other is the Greek-speaking eastern region. This also became an important reason for the later division of the Roman Empire.
In the western region, since the 3rd century A.D., the rise of Christianity and the invasion of foreigners have caused many traditional cultures in this region to die out. The spread of Homer's epic stopped in Western Europe. In the eastern region under the Byzantine Empire, the study of Homer has not been interrupted, but it is also limited to a certain social class. 14 and 15 centuries, the Byzantine Empire faced a serious threat from the Turks. Many well-educated Byzantines fled to Western Europe for refuge. Many manuscripts of ancient Greek and Roman works also spread to the west, which constituted an important factor in the emergence of the Renaissance in Western Europe. Many Latin translations of Homer's epic also appeared at this time. It is said that Petrarch, known as the "father of humanism", likes to take the original Homer epic with him, although he doesn't know ancient Greek. Boccaccio, the author of decameron, asked a Byzantine who was visiting Italy to translate Homer's epic into Latin in 1360. 1448, a publisher in Florence published a Homer epic, which became the earliest printed version of Homer's epic.
Interpretation of Homer's Epic from the Perspective of Different Factions
When Homer's epic was rediscovered by western Europeans, it no longer had the sacred authority that it once had in the classical era and the Hellenistic era. The unreasonable plot and the conflict with the aesthetic standards of the new era have made Homer's epic severely criticized by a large number of cultural celebrities, including Voltaire. In this context, historians also participated in the debate on Homer's epic. A "dispute between ancient and modern" that dominated western historiography in the 17 and 18 centuries began. It was in this debate that the Trojan War changed from a "historical fact" to a "myth". Around Homer's epic, European intellectuals are divided into two schools: those who worship the past and those who worship the present. The former thinks that Homer is the greatest educator in ancient times; The latter thinks that Homer is just a fictional character of the ancients, and the Iliad is just a patchwork of many ancient story chapters. From the root, the essence of this debate is the opposition between modern new scientific knowledge and classical knowledge, and people need to build new political knowledge with new political experience. However, the construction of this new knowledge takes the form of criticizing Homer's epic.
Historian Vico's criticism of Homer's epic is very representative. Vico wrote the book "New Science", and the core of the third volume of the book is the so-called "discovering the real Homer". He believes that the truth of Homer has always been hidden in the philosophical lies of classical philosophers. He wants to clarify the Homer illusion created by Plato and Aristotle through scientific exploration such as history and archaeology, and show a real world covered by these philosophers. He concluded that Homer, regarded as the greatest educator of the Greek city-state, did not really exist in history. Homer is only the carrier of the ideal hero in the eyes of the Greek people. He also clearly pointed out that the Trojan War was not real, and the war fought by the Greek Coalition forces for ten years never happened in history.
If you have seen the film Looking for Troy, I believe you will be impressed by one scene: the archaeologist heinrich schliemann is having a heated debate with a group of scholars in the university lecture hall. The focus of the debate is whether Troy exists. Heinrich firmly believes in the existence of Troy, while many scholars laugh at him and think that it is crazy for him to judge the existence of Troy only by Homer's epic. This scene in the film reproduces people's doubts about Homer's epic since17th century. The prejudice of many scholars on Heinrich's research ideas in the film must be restored to the historical scene of "the dispute between ancient and modern" in order to be truly understood by us. It is against this background that we can truly understand Heinrich Sheriman's insistence on finding the resistance behind Troy. Heinrich, on the other hand, broke through many obstacles, and through his own archaeological excavation, broke all kinds of thinking limitations formed by western historians since Vico, and finally led the debate about Troy to a new world.
Major archaeological discoveries and controversies in Troy
Heinrich Schliemann was born in a poor priest's family on 1822. By chance, he learned the story of the Iliad from his father. From then on, Troy, which only appeared in the epic, became Heinrich's dream. In order to explore the legendary Troy, he made two preparations: first, he obtained sufficient financial resources through business; Second, I have learned as many as 18 foreign languages. 1868, he finally came to Turkey and began his search for Troy. In his words, he "took Homer as a guide" to locate the region of Troy. Finally, he determined that the "Scarman Dos Plain" where Troy was said in the epic was near the Daniil Strait today.
Later, it turned out that Sheriman was the greatest luck in his life to locate this archaeological site. This man, who has never received professional archaeological training, excavated cultural relics belonging to different eras in West Salik. Each floor represents a city, and there is thick soil between floors. There are several floors, and there are obvious signs of fire. But Sheriman didn't notice this. He just wanted to find what Homer said about Troy, and he decided that Troy must be at the bottom. As a result, the top cultural heritage layer was ruthlessly destroyed by him.
At 1873, the god of luck finally showed Sheriman his true colors. The migrant workers hired by Sheriman dug a stone pavement more than 5 meters wide. He concluded that there must be ruins of large buildings at the end of this road. So he sent more people to dig. In May 2008, the ruins of a large building appeared in front of Sheriman. The excited Sheriman thinks that this building is the palace of Priam mentioned in Homer's epic. In June, he excavated a large number of gold and silver utensils and bronze products under a wall of this building. The most striking of them are two gold crowns. In ecstasy, Sheriman shipped these treasures back to Germany, and then announced to the world that he had successfully found the "treasure of Priam".
Sheriman asked his wife to take a photo with the gold wares he dug up in archaeology, and sent this photo to the newspaper at that time, thus announcing to the world that "he found the legendary Troy".
In Sheriman's view, the ruins he dug up and the unearthed gold and silver jewelry he showed to the public are enough to show that Troy in the epic is real. Indeed, his discovery also brought him a great reputation and had an unparalleled influence on those scholars who insisted that Troy did not exist. However, fate played a big joke on Sheriman who wanted to find Troy. After Schliemann, German archaeologist Wilhelm Dorpfeld presided over the further archaeological excavation of Sisalik. After a detailed investigation of the stratigraphic stage of the archaeological site in this area, he published the book Troy and Irian in 1902, pointing out that the archaeological site has nine consecutive settlements in history. These residential areas are layered and eventually form nine corresponding cultural heritage layers.
Among the nine strata, the first five strata represent an era from 3000 BC to 2000 AD, belonging to the early and middle Bronze Age. Among them, the layer where Sheriman found gold and silver jewelry belongs to the third layer, which is equivalent to about 2250 BC to 2 100 BC. Compared with the Trojan War defined by Herodotus and erato Steny, it is about 1000 years earlier.
Later scholars basically accepted Delfield's theory of chronological stratification. They are concentrated on the sixth and seventh floors, because the times they reflect are roughly equivalent to those described in Homer's epic.
The sixth and seventh layers are consistent with the description in Homer's epic in some details. However, the archaeological remains unearthed from these two floors are quite rare, which are not comparable to those magnificent buildings described in the epic. Moreover, archaeological evidence shows that the sixth floor was destroyed by an earthquake rather than a war, which means that the city site of the sixth floor should not be Troy in the epic. As for the seventh floor, a large number of fire remnants, bones and slings were found, indicating that the seventh floor should have been destroyed by the war. But there is not enough evidence to prove that this is the epic Troy. Some people even think that the fifth floor of Troy's wall is 4 meters thick, and some sections of the wall are more than 9 meters high, but the western section of the wall is relatively poor, which is consistent with Homer's description of the poor architecture in the western section of Troy. Therefore, some people think that the fifth floor city site is Troy mentioned in the epic.
These are all just guesses in the end. Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, is there a Trojan horse that the Greeks used to tame the Trojan horse? There is no archaeological evidence to support it. Which of these nine-story ruins belongs to Troy in the epic? Maybe it's okay. But one thing is certain. Heinrich and later archaeologists named this place "Troy", which was a key hub for the Greeks to reach the Black Sea region in ancient Greece. In order to get this hub, the ancient Greeks attacked here many times and finally took control of it.
The ruins of the eighth period show the trauma of war and fire as a whole, so it can be considered that the Trojan War did happen. However, this process is not a revenge war as Homer said, and it is more likely that Greece fought for the important geographical position and trade rights of Troy.
According to archaeological excavations, the age of the eighth site of Troy is close to that described in Homer's epic, and the unearthed pottery patterns also prove that the Trojan culture in this period is close to that of ancient Greece. In addition, as far as the achievements of modern archaeology and historical research are concerned, the Trojan War is real, which led to the war of aggression launched by the Hittites.