- There is some circumstantial evidence in favour of a real Trojan War, but no direct evidence to support it. There is no evidence at all of historical figures named Agamemnon, Achilleus, Hektor, etc.
- In favour of a historical Trojan War:
- Troy VIi (a.k.a. Troy VIIa) was destroyed or damaged by fire ca. 1190-1180.
- The previous layer, Troy VIh, suffered earthquake damage sometime in the early 1200s which very likely weakened its defences.
- Classical-era and Hellenistic-era writers believed that the war happened, at one of various dates ranging from ca. 1225 to 1150.
- Homeric epic contains references to objects, words, and practices from the distant past, of which a very tiny selection can be reliably dated to the Bronze Age: a Mycenaean boar’s tusk helmet described in Iliad 10; and the fact that in Homer the words anax and basileus are generally used with their Bronze Age meanings. (Other elements that have at one time or another been dated to the Bronze Age are now generally rejected, for a range of reasons.)
- In favour of Troy VIi (VIIa): archaeological evidence points to a reasonably substantial discontinuity in Trojan culture at the end of Troy VIi; also, the end of the VIi phase coincides approximately with a wave of destruction that spread across Mycenaean Greece and the Hittite Empire in the first half of the 12th century.
- In favour of Troy VIh: a letter from the Hittite king to a king of “Ahhiyawa”, dating to the first half of the 13th century, refers to a Hittite-Ahhiyawan dispute over Wilusa (the Hittite name for Troy); and “Ahhiyawa” very likely is a Hittitised version of the Greek name “Achaia” (a term associated with the Greeks in Homer).
- Most or all of these points have serious weaknesses. So, against a historical Trojan War:
- There is no archaeological evidence of Greek or Mycenaean agency in the destruction of either Troy VIh or VIi.
- Classical-era sources had less reliable information than we do, since there were about 400-500 years of illiteracy separating Troy VIi from the time when they were writing.
- Very nearly all artefacts and cultural practices described in Homer match the late Iron Age or early Archaic periods — i.e. centuries after Troy VIi — and not the late Bronze Age. Where Homer does describe elements that are demonstrably earlier than the text of the epics, they are almost always more easily explained as false archaisms (i.e. attempts to describe a past age by using old-fashioned elements indiscriminately and anachronistically).
- The legend has it that Troy was destroyed after a ten-year war; in fact, Troy continued to be inhabited continuously until ca. 950 BCE.
- The letter that refers to a Hittite-Ahhiyawan dispute over Troy VIh makes it very, very clear that the Hittites were the aggressors. In addition, there is no mention of military conflict; it looks more like a diplomatic dispute.
- The coincidence of Troy VIi’s end with the destruction of the Mycenaeans and the Hittites clearly indicates a much more widespread cause than a war over one city.
- “Evidence of fire” (in Troy VIi) and “a violent war” are not the same thing. We know that the Hittites definitely did sack Troy ca. 1500-1400, for example, but there is not the slightest archaeological evidence of this.
- The evidence for the location of “Ahhiyawa” is not very solid. Ahhiyawa definitely controlled the SE Aegean and Miletos, but this obviously is a complete mismatch with the legend. We don’t know how much further their territory extended.
- Where it is possible to check Homeric evidence as to who fought on which side in the war, Homer is consistently wrong. (E.g. Homer has Miletos, the Carians, and Mysians on the Trojan side; Miletos was in fact under Ahhiyawan control in the 13th century, and the Carians and Mysians were later arrivals.)
- The evidence for linking Homeric epic to Mycenaean poetic traditions is very, very thin. We know nothing about Bronze Age Mycenaean poetry or legends, and the best evidence we have points to Aeolic, not Mycenaean, origins for the epic tradition. There are no distinctively Mycenaean elements in Homeric language. There is some influence from the Arcado-Cypriot dialect, which some scholars have taken as Mycenaean influence (the closest relative of Mycenaean among the Classical-era dialects is Arcado-Cypriot), but there is no strong indication that Mycenaean was an ancestor dialect of Arcado-Cypriot. It is at least as likely that there was a Bronze Age Aeolic poetic tradition, which spread southwards after the end of the Bronze Age.
- The reality of the city had never been in doubt. Ilium was a big, bustling city from the 700s BCE to 500 CE, and a smaller town for many centuries after that too, and no one had ever doubted that. What Schliemann really proved was that there was no basis to an argument about the location of pre-classical Ilium. This argument had been prompted by the ancient geographical writer Strabo, who thought that ‘ancient’ Ilium had been in a separate location from contemporary Ilium. The idea was revived in the 1790s, and it had already been widely rejected since the 1820s. Schliemann’s success, such as it was, was in debunking that argument. By finding a Bronze Age city underneath the classical one, he showed that it hadn’t moved around.
- (1) From the point of view of classical Greeks, the Trojan War is way way further in the past than many other legendary events, of which some were real, others extremely doubtful, others outright fictional: the First Sacred War (supposedly early 500s BCE), the founding of Cyrene (631 BCE) the Lelantine War (ca. 700), the Boeotian migration, the Ionian migration, the Achaean migration, and the Dorian invasion. Of these, Cyrene is the only one where we can be really confident that it actually happened (and that’s mainly only because we know Cyrene did exist, and Greeks must have got there somehow). I suspect the Lelantine War was a real thing too, but it isn’t proveable. Taking the Trojan War as real means putting it on a firmer footing than all the others. And that isn’t justifiable. (2) The stories, places, and society depicted in Homer show a great range in terms of how distant in the past they are. Some story-types, and possibly one or two poetic formulae, may go back as far as Proto-Indo-European, or ca. 4000 BCE: phrases like ‘(my) fame (will be) unfading’, certain metrical features, folktales like the Cyclops story. But most cultural and material elements of Homeric society are basically contemporary, that is, early 600s BCE, altered by lots of false archaism to give them an artificial flavour of oldness. The supposed antiquity of the oral tradition that gave rise to the Homeric epics is partly an illusion; where it is real, it doesn’t have much to do with the war itself. The age of the Homeric formulaic system (and its age has been challenged!) does not in any way ensure that the content is old. Even if it did, we’d face the same question over the war of the gods and the Titans, and I hope everyone would agree that that wasn’t real.(edited)
- (3) The circumstances in which the Trojan War story developed need to be considered too. The Iliad depicts an ethnic conflict: on one side the Greeks, on the other side an ethnic blend of several cultures, including significant Greek elements (the cult of Athena, Greek names on the Trojan side, etc.). This is an excellent match for the Troy of the 700s-600s BCE. The site had been abandoned from ca. 950 BCE until the 700s, but then Greek colonists settled it, establishing the civic cult of Athena Ilias, which is depicted in Iliad book 6. But it wasn’t a Greek-only place: the fact that Troy was never considered part of Aeolis (the Aeolian colonies in western Turkey) indicates a bit of an ethnic mix. I find it simplest to imagine a legend about an ethnic conflict arising in that period, in the 700s and 600s. Basically, I don’t see any way of linking Homer’s stories to the Bronze Age, except for a tiny minority of genuinely archaic elements. Homer knows nothing about the Hittites or Arzawa. Almost everything about the Iliad points to the 8th-7th centuries BCE. The fact that Herodotus, Eratosthenes, etc. dated the Trojan War to a point in time that we happen to call ‘the Bronze Age’ is coincidence: they had much less information about the history of the epic tradition than we do. The genuinely archaic elements are very few and far between. Aside from archaic linguistic and narrative elements, there’s a boar’s tusk helmet in Iliad 10 (the part of the Iliad that was composed last!); the names ‘Priam’ and ‘Paris’ are genuine Luvian names; the title anax is used in a sense that hadn’t existed since the Bronze Age; a few placenames appear which had been abandoned for centuries, in one case since the Bronze Age (Eutresis). But these elements are dwarfed by the enormous amount of 8th-7th century material. A Trojan War isn’t impossible, but I see vanishingly little reason to think it at all likely.