Was Troy ever lost?
The title is dramatic, but the city was never entirely lost. Greeks and Romans visited a place they called Ilion and treated it as the site of the legendary war. A Roman town stood there for centuries. In the nineteenth century, several travellers and scholars suggested that the mound of Hisarlik in north-western Turkey was Troy, and the British resident Frank Calvert, who owned part of the mound, was among the first to dig there. What Heinrich Schliemann did in the 1870s was to excavate it on a large scale and make it world famous. His story is one of real achievement and of serious mistakes.
Schliemann’s campaigns
Schliemann was a German businessman who made a fortune and then turned to archaeology, inspired by his reading of Homer. He began trial digging at Hisarlik in 1870 and worked with a permit from 1871. His main campaigns ran from 1871 to 1873, with further seasons in 1878 and 1879, and he returned in 1882 and 1890. Large crews of workers cleared the mound, and he published accounts of his finds that attracted wide audiences. His wife Sophia took part in the work.
His approach was to cut a deep trench through the middle of the mound, searching for the city of the epic. He understood that the lowest layers were the oldest, and he knew he was crossing several cities. But he assumed that the Troy of Homer must be among the deepest, and he dug through upper layers that he regarded as of little interest. In doing so he removed or damaged deposits that, by modern standards, should have been preserved and recorded.
Priam’s Treasure
In 1873 Schliemann found a hoard of gold, silver and bronze objects, which he named Priam’s Treasure. He photographed Sophia wearing some of the jewellery. The hoard came from the layer now called Troy II, which dates to roughly the middle of the third millennium BCE, many centuries before any plausible date for a Trojan War. So the name is misleading, and Priam himself belongs to the epic tradition and not to a documented ruler.
The treasure left Ottoman territory without the proper division of finds, which created a legal dispute. It was eventually given to Berlin, disappeared at the end of the Second World War and was revealed to have been in Moscow in the 1990s. Today the pieces are held at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and ownership has been disputed, with Turkey among those who have made claims.
Dorpfeld corrects the sequence
Wilhelm Dorpfeld, an architect, joined Schliemann in 1882 and brought much more careful recording. After Schliemann’s death in 1890 he excavated at Hisarlik in 1893 and 1894. He concluded that the layer Troy VI, not Troy II, was the one that matched a grand Late Bronze Age city. It had large walls of well-cut stone with towers, and impressive buildings inside. Dorpfeld argued that this layer was the best candidate for the Troy of Homer.
This was important. It showed that the sequence of cities could be read in a systematic way, and the pottery from each phase could be used to date it. It also meant that the famous treasure belonged to a much earlier world. This kind of cross-checking is typical of how archaeological methods mature from treasure-seeking to the study of whole sequences.
Troy VI and Troy VIIa
Later excavators refined Dorpfeld’s picture. Carl Blegen’s team in the 1930s concluded that Troy VI had been destroyed, perhaps by an earthquake, around 1300 BCE. The settlement that followed, Troy VIIa, was rebuilt using the old walls but showed more crowded houses and many storage jars sunk into the floor. It ended in a fire around the late thirteenth or early twelfth century BCE. Blegen saw this as the best candidate for the city of the epic.
That judgement has been questioned. Evidence of fire and weapons shows that violence happened, but it does not name the attackers or link them to a particular expedition. The case for a Late Bronze Age conflict at Troy is therefore a matter of interpretation, and the Homeric historicity debate continues. Newer work, including that of Manfred Korfmann’s team, has changed the view of the size of Troy VI and VII, since later Hisarlik excavations suggested a sizeable lower town.
The damage done
Schliemann’s trench remains a scar across the mound. It cut through walls and floors, and the spoil heaps he left mixed material from several periods. Later archaeologists have had to untangle disturbed layers, a task that is still difficult. Much of the Troy VI citadel’s interior had already been lost to levelling when Greek and Roman builders reshaped the hilltop, and Schliemann’s clearing removed more.
The criticisms of Schliemann go beyond methods. He exaggerated and sometimes embellished accounts of his finds, and his claims about where objects came from were not always reliable. Historians today still discuss how much of his writing can be trusted. Nevertheless, he drew attention to the Bronze Age Aegean at a time when it was almost unknown, and his excavations at Mycenae, Tiryns and Troy opened a new field.
What the story teaches
Schliemann’s digs illustrate a recurring problem in archaeology: when a site is approached with a fixed expectation, evidence that does not fit can be destroyed or ignored. The best response was Dorpfeld’s, which was to treat the mound as a sequence of real places with their own histories. Troy today is a protected archaeological site, studied by international teams and open to visitors, and the history of its excavation is itself part of what must be understood when reading the finds.