Excerpts from In Search of the Trojan War (1985)
by Michael Wood
1) The Questions
[Did] the Trojan War ever really happen? If so, where was Troy? Was it really on the site we call Troy today? Who were Homer's Achaians and Trojans, and why did they fight each other? Did Helen of Troy exist? And was there a real wooden horse? Also, why has the site been sought so assiduously for so long? Why the obsession with this story? And why did Schliemann, Dorpfeld and the rest come to the conclusions they did? . . . This book is aptly entitled a search, for I started it with no answers to any of these questions; indeed, if anything, I thought the whole story a myth, not a subject for serious historical inquiry. But I was convinced that the search itself was well worth undertaking . . . [p. 17]
2) The Stories (Homer & other legends)
On the mainland of Greece in the time of Priam's old age the most powerful king was Agamemnon, whose residence was at Mycenae. At this time, the inhabitants of Greece called themselves not Greeks or Hellenes, but Achaians, Danaans or Argives . . . Agamemnon himself had married Clytemnestra, daughter of Tyndareus of Sparta and sister to Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. When Helen grew to womanhood all the princes of Greece wanted her hand, but she went to Agamemnon's brother Menelaos, the richest and most eligible bachelor in Greece, who thus became king in Lakonia; so the two brothers from Mycenae now had a position of overwhelming power in southern Greece . . .
[Homer's] tale is simple and quite realistic. Paris [son of Priam, king of Troy] goes on a visit to Sparta and is feasted by Menelaos in his richly adorned
palace . . . On the tenth day of the celebrations, Menelaos has to leave for Crete to see Idomeneus, king of Knossos. As Aphrodite had promised, Helen immediately eloped with Paris . . . There are other versions of this tale . . . Some said that Paris carried off Helen by force, that the seizure was really a Trojan raid on Lakonia to seize treasure and women . . . some say that other royal women and slaves were taken too, and that Paris plundered elsewhere in the Aegean before returning to Troy.
When the bad news was brought to Menelaos in Crete he hurried to Mycenae and begged his brother Agamemnon to lead an army to Troy to take revenge. This the king agreed to do, though he first sent off envoys to Troy demanding Helen's restitution, with compensation. When the envoys came back empty-handed, Menelaos and his ally, old King Nestor of Pylos, travelled over Greece, asking the independent kings of Greece to join them in the expedition . . . In the story the great heroes in the army were Achilles, Odysseus (Ulysses) and Ajax, but their kingdoms were insignificant: the biggest contigents were from the Peloponnese (Pylos, Sparta, Tiryns and Mycenae) and Crete (Knossos). . . .
In the tenth year of the war . . . the Greeks ceased raiding Asia Minor and attacked Troy in earnest . . . The Trojan hero Hector now fell in single combat with Achilles, the best Greek warrior (this incident alone is the subject of Homer's
Iliad) . . .
3) The Plausible Reconstruction
[There] is an immense amount of circumstantial evidence which suggests that a kernel of the tale of Troy goes back to a real event in the Bronze Age; how much we cannot yet be sure, but it cannot do any harm to end with a plausible reconstruction of what might be reasonably adduced from that mass of
evidence . . . Here, then, is my version of the presumed 'historical' Trojan War and its background.
The fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC were the heyday of Mycenaean civilisation. The chief power was at Mycenea . . . Archaeology also shows us that the palaces at Mycenae, Pylos, Tiryns and the Menelaion shared the same material culture, the same artistic traditions, and the same bureaucracy down to the smallest detail . . . Knossos, too, seems to have been occupied at this time by a Greek dynasty that had intimate relations with Mycenae and the mainland, importing stone from the same Spartan quarries, using the same art and sculpture, and a bureaucracy identical in every detail . . . The overwhelming balance of evidence suggests that the Greeks, the Achaiwoi of Homer, were the people known to the Hittites as the people of Ahhiyawa throughout the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC . . .
Here we are entitled to take into account the traditions enshrined in Greek legends which are known to have a basis in the Bronze Age. It was the uniform belief that palaces like Mycenae were places of blood, ruled by violent men, prey to internecine struggle, and constantly engaged in warfare. The archaeology of palaces like Mycenae and the details in the Linear B tablets confirm that this was indeed a militarist and aggressive world . . . no doubt kings like Agamemnon were cruel and ruthless, as kings had to be in this kind of
culture . . .
Kings like Agamemnon, then, needed to reward and equip their war host with loot--treasure, raw materials, precious metals, cattle and women . . . In Homer, as we have seen, the greatest praise is to be called a 'sacker of cities'. This is the reality of Bronze-Age power; it has to do with the very structure and ideals of the society. This is entirely borne out by the Linear B tablets from Pylos . . .
Soon after 1300 BC the Mediterranean had started to witness the widespread raiding and instability which would later engulf it. There may have been economic problems, overpopulation, crop failures, drought and famine—these are questions the experts have yet to resolve; similarly we cannot yet answer the question of climate change . . . We should not rule out the possibility of internecine feuds within kin groups of dynasties, and fighting between rival city states . . .
Hypotheses these may be, but a combination of some or all of these factors must be true; we have to account somehow for the changing economic fortunes of the Peloponnese, and we have to assume that Agamemnon and his fellow kings and élites did what they could to remedy the situation. Their rule needed booty, slaves and treasure, and frequent predatory forays must have been the way they sustained themselves . . . Most likely these forays were to the north and east . . . Seen in this light, an attack on Troy, among other places, seems so obvious that if we had no tale of Troy we would have to postulate it . . .
A Mycenaean expedition to the north-east Aegean would not have been difficult to mount. They had the resources in terms of ships, even if Homer's catalogue has magnified the numbers. The Thera frescoes show us what may be a Mycenaean overseas expedition to the Libyan coast, with long-oared and sailed vessels containing heavily armed warriors with boar's-tusk helmets, long spears and oblong tower shields. The manner in which such forces were raised is shown in the Pylos tablets, where their equipment is enumerated in every detail . . .
The Trojan story . . . takes in a long period of Mycenaean aggression in the coasts and inlands of north-west Anatolia. Troy was not the only place sacked, but it was the best known to the Greeks, the best built and the most difficult to defeat . . . A plausible version of the story would be that . . . the Greeks descended on golden Troy after it had been damaged by a natural catastrophe [a severe earthquake] . . . But I will stick my neck out and suggest that the legend is correct in asserting that Troy was deliberately demolished after a bitter siege. The place was plundered, and its women carried back to work on the estates around Mycenae and Pylos . . .
What about the details? Did Agamemnon really exist? Possibly . . . Did Helen really exist, and was her seizure the cause of the war? . . . our evidence has shown that the seizure of women on overseas raids was indeed a common feature of this world, and the more beautiful the better. Of Helen we can at least conclude that she is possible! . . .
As for the Trojan heroes, it is an interesting fact that of the names in the Linear B tablets which are found in Homer, twenty of them (one-third) are applied to Trojans: in other words, Greek names have been invented for Trojan heroes, Hector among them . . .
And what of the wooden horse? It has been explained as a simple fairy-tale motif, and as we have seen it has been rationalised as a wooden ram in a horse-shaped housing in which men could have been contained . . .
Our search is nearly over. The sack of Troy was remembered because it was the last fling of the Mycenaean world . . .
1) In your own words, briefly state the thesis (main point) of these excerpts.
2) What is Wood's answer to the question: "Did the Trojan War ever really happen?" Explain.
3) What do these excerpts tell us about studying ancient history? Why must interpretation play a significant role? What sorts of evidence are used? Be specific.
Source: http://faculty.kirkwood.edu/ryost/hist201/Ancient/wood1985.doc
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