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Until the 19th century it was widely believed that Troy and the Trojan war were imaginary. Then, in 1871, a German-born American citizen named Heinrich Schliemann began excavating an ancient city in Turkey. To the amazement of many, this retired businessman had discovered the lost city of Troy (also called Ilion, or Ilium in Latin).
Nine cities have been found at the site, one on top of the other. The seventh city was destroyed around 1250 BC and appears to be the Troy of legend. You can still see the ruins of its towers and its walls, which were sixteen feet thick.
Schliemann identified Troy's location through clues he found in the Iliad , the epic attributed to the Greek poet Homer. Little is known about Homer except that he was blind. In ancient times it was believed that he had lived during the Trojan War, but most modern scholars think that he lived in the 8th or 9th century B.C. His poems weren't written down when they were first composed, but were transmitted orally for many years. Some people suspect that the poems were actually the work of successive generations of poets, and that Homer didn't exist.
Of course, the same thing was once said about Troy. Thanks to the work of Heinrich Schilemann, virtually everyone today agrees that the city whose seige Homer described was quite real. The eccentric Schliemann is often belittled as an amateur, even a fraud, but there is no denying the importance of his discovery. Without him we might still regard the Trojan War as nothing more than myth.
What started the Trojan War? It has been suggested that the Greeks may have been fighting to gain control of the Dardanelles, a water passage between the Mediterranean and Black seas, near Troy. Or perhaps the war truly was fought over a woman named Helen. The truth is lost in the past.
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