THE CAPSTONE OF A TEN-YEAR EXPEDITION
The Trojan War is best known from its earliest source in Greek literature, Homer’s Iliad (ca.800 BC). Subsequent literary, documentary, and material sources provide evidence of the importance of the war for the Greek sense of mythology, history, and panhellenism in antiquity. Herodotus (ca.485-425 BC) famously states that the Trojan War took place “roughly 800 years” before his own time, thus dating the war as a historical event around 1250-1225 BC.
Throughout antiquity, the war and its heroes became the lodestone that everything was measured against.
The beginning of history
The Trojan War not only starts off Greek ‘history’, but it stands at the beginning of its archaeology as well. The excavation of Troy by Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s, and of Orchomenus, Mycenae, and Tiryns in the 1870s and 1880s, strengthened what was already accepted by many scholars and laymen alike: that Troy and the Trojan War somehow had a basis in historical places and events. The combination of material and literary sources was not without problems, though. As it became clear that early Greece had witnessed a period of widely spread cultural and societal development from the sixteenth through the thirteenth centuries BC, the Mycenaean period, the Trojan War seemed to be the era’s final chord. Comparative evidence from the study of the thirteenth-century eastern Mediterranean, however, suggested that the Mycenaean period in mainland Greece and Crete ended as society fell victim to successive as Mycenaean. Attempts to identify the world of the and the as representative of the so-called Dark Ages (ca.1200-900 BC) or Early Archaic Period remain unsuccessful due to lack of material and documentary evidence. The Homeric world thus presents itself to be studied from the and the , and so does its concept of warfare.
