Trojans Erotic

The Trojans were the Bronze Age inhabitants of Troy, a fortified city on the hill of Hisarlik in northwestern Anatolia, in what is now Çanakkale Province, Turkey. Their city stood from around 3000 BC, reached its height between roughly 1750 and 1180 BC, and was burned at the end of that span. No living people descends from them by name. The survivors stayed on in a reduced settlement, were absorbed into the later populations of the Troad, and Greek settlers refounded the site as Ilion some centuries afterward. What outlived them is a story, and it has proved more durable than the walls.

Almost everything popularly known about the Trojans comes from their enemies' poets. Homer's Iliad, composed some four centuries after the destruction, gives them Greek names, Greek gods and Greek speech, which tells us about Homer rather than about Troy. The harder evidence is thinner and more interesting. Hittite archives record a western kingdom called Wilusa, widely identified with Homer's Ilios, and preserve a treaty from around 1280 BC between the Hittite king Muwatalli II and a ruler named Alaksandu. That name sits uncomfortably close to Alexandros, the other name of Homer's Paris. Among the gods sworn to in the treaty is one Apaliunas, possibly an early Apollo, the god who takes Troy's side in the epic.

What language the Trojans spoke is unknown. The only writing recovered from the Bronze Age city is a single bronze seal inscribed in Luwian hieroglyphs, found in 1995, which makes Luwian or a related Anatolian language the leading candidate and nothing more. Their wealth is easier to explain. Troy sat at the mouth of the Dardanelles, where contrary winds and currents could hold ships for days, and the city profited from the wait. Excavation has turned up thousands of spindle whorls, pointing to textile production on a serious scale, and horse bones show up in the city's levels from the second millennium BC, which lends some weight to Homer's stock epithet, the horse-taming Trojans.

The legacy is a genealogy of borrowed ancestors. Rome claimed descent from the refugee Aeneas, and Virgil turned that claim into a national epic. Medieval Franks, Britons and Norse writers did the same, tracing their kings to Trojan exiles. Frank Calvert argued that Hisarlik was the place, and Heinrich Schliemann began large excavations there in 1871, cutting straight through the layers he was looking for. The mound, with its nine main levels of rebuilding, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998.