Hisarlik occasionally spelled Hissarlik and also known as Ilion, Troy or Ilium Novum is the modern name for a tell located near the modern city of Tevfikiye in the Dardanelles of northwest Turkey. The tell—a type of archaeological site that is a tall mound hiding a buried city—covers an area of about meters feet in diameter and stands 15 m 50 ft high. To the casual tourist, says archaeologist Trevor Bryce , excavated Hisarlik looks like a mess, "a confusion of broken pavements, building foundations and superimposed, crisscrossing fragments of walls".
The mess known as Hisarlik is widely believed by scholars to be the ancient site of Troy, which inspired the marvelous poetry of the Greek poet Homer 's masterpiece, The Iliad. The earliest version of the city of Troy is called Troy 1, buried beneath 14 m 46 ft of later deposits.
That community included the Aegean "megaron", a style of narrow, long-room house which shared lateral walls with its neighbors.
By Troy II at least , such structures were reconfigured for public use—the first public buildings at Hisarlik—and residential dwellings consisted in the form of several rooms surrounding interior courtyards. Much of the Late Bronze Age structures, those dated to the time of Homer's Troy and including the entire central area of the Troy VI citadel, were razed by Classical Greek builders to prepare for the construction of the Temple of Athena.
The painted reconstructions that you see show a hypothetical central palace and a tier of surrounding structures for which there is no archaeological evidence. Many scholars were skeptical about Hisarlik being Troy because it was so small, and Homer's poetry seems to suggest a large commercial or trading center. But excavations by Manfred Korfmann discovered that the small central hilltop location supported a much larger population, perhaps as many as 6, living in an area estimated to be about 27 hectares about one-tenth of a square mile lying adjacent to and stretched out m ft from the citadel mound.
The Late Bronze Age parts of the lower city, however, were cleaned out by the Romans, although remnants of a defensive system including a possible wall, a palisade, and two ditches were found by Korfmann. Priam's Treasure is what Schliemann called a collection of artifacts he claimed to have found in within "palace walls" at Hisarlik.
Scholars think it is more likely that he found some in a stone box called a cist among building foundations above the Troy II fortification wall on the western side of the citadel, and those probably represent a hoard or a cist grave. Some of the objects were found elsewhere and Schliemann simply added them to the pile. Frank Calvert, among others, told Schliemann that the artifacts were too old to be from Homer's Troy, but Schliemann ignored him and published a photograph of his wife Sophia wearing the diadem and jewels from "Priam's Treasure".
What seems likely to have come from the cist includes a wide range of gold and silver objects. The gold included a sauceboat, bracelets, headdresses one illustrated on this page , a diadem, basket-earrings with pendant chains, shell-shaped earrings and nearly 9, gold beads, sequins and studs. Six silver ingots were included, and bronze objects included vessels, spearheads, daggers, flat axes, chisels, a saw, and several blades.
Priam's treasure created a huge scandal when it was discovered that Schliemann had smuggled the objects out of Turkey to Athens, breaking Turkish law and expressly against his permit to excavate. Schliemann was sued by the Ottoman government, a suit which was settled by Schliemann paying 50, French Francs about English pounds at the time.
There is a bit of exciting but controversial evidence that Troy and its troubles with Greece might be mentioned in Hittite documents. In Homeric texts, "Ilios" and "Troia" were interchangeable names for Troy: in Hittite texts, "Wilusiya" and "Taruisa" are nearby states; scholars have surmised recently that they were one and the same. Hisarlik may have been the royal seat of the king of Wilusa , who was a vassal to the Great King of the Hittites, and who suffered battles with his neighbors.
The status of the site—that is to say the status of Troy—as an important regional capital of western Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age has been a consistent flashpoint of heated debate among scholars for most of its modern history. The Citadel, even though it is heavily damaged, can be seen to be considerably smaller than other Late Bronze Age regional capitals such as Gordion, Buyukkale, Beycesultan, and Bogazkoy.
Frank Kolb, for example, has argued fairly strenuously that Troy VI was not even much of a city, much less a commercial or trade center and certainly not a capital. For its first few centuries, Ilion was a modest settlement. While many scholars believe that the people who resettled Troy after B. In , research published by a team of scholars in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology revealed that the amphora at Troy that was thought to have been imported from Greece was actually locally made and that much of the other pottery found at Troy after 1, B.
This led the team to suggest that many of the people who reoccupied Troy may not have been Greek colonists but rather people who already lived in the area. Xerxes, the Persian king on his way to conquer Greece, stopped to pay homage to Troy and, most notably, Alexander the Great would do the same in the fourth century B. When "Alexander went up there after his victory at the Granicus River he adorned the temple with votive offerings, gave the village the title of city, and ordered those in charge to improve it with buildings, and that he adjudged it free and exempt from tribute; and that later, after the overthrow of the Persians, he sent down a kindly letter to the place, promising to make a great city of it Jones, through Perseus Digital Library.
Troy's special status would continue into the period of Roman rule. The Romans believed that Aeneas, one of Troy's heroes, was an ancestor of Romulus and Remus, Rome's legendary founders. The city's inhabitants took advantage of this mythology, with it becoming a "popular destination for pilgrims and tourists," Bryce writes.
He notes that in this phase of Troy's existence, when it became a popular tourism location, the city became larger than at any time before, including when the Trojan War was said to have taken place. However, as the Middle Ages took hold, Troy fell into decline. By the 13th century, the city had been reduced to that of a modest farming community. Recent DNA research revealed the story of a woman who died years ago of an infection that occurred while she was pregnant. A new museum is being constructed at Troy and the Turkish government has put forward repatriation requests for artifacts that were illegally removed from Troy in the 20th century to be returned to Turkey.
A collection of gold jewelry in the Penn Museum that research reveals was taken from Troy in the 20th century has been returned to Turkey after lengthy negotiations, said C. Brian Rose, a professor of archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, in an article published in in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies.
The big question researchers face is, was there ever a Trojan War? If there was, then is this really Troy? Unfortunately, the only written remains found at Troy, that date before the eighth-century B. Greek occupation, is a seal written in a language called Luwian, the seal being perhaps brought to Troy from elsewhere in Turkey.
Scholars have noted that the topography of Troy as told in the legend does seem to generally match that of the real-life city and, as noted earlier, people as far back as Homer's time also believed this to be Troy. Yet the archaeological remains still pose problems. Troy at the time of the Trojan War was apparently destroyed by earthquakes and later on may have received people from southeastern Europe rather than Greece. These issues leave researchers with a mystery. Korfmann, the modern-day excavator of Hisarlik, believes the story of the Trojan War contains some truth.
Live Science. Generate Citation Usage Details. Click to Expand. Large or infrequently accessed files can take several minutes to retrieve from our archival storage system. Begin Download. Architecture Archaeological sites Ruins.
0コメント