Ancient Troy (Hisarlik)

Selected Excerpt on Troy

The Fall of Troy in Antiquity (March 1963)
Carl Nylander in Volume XXXVII (Pages 6-11)

The Greek poet Homer wrote about the ancient city in The Iliad. It is located in western Turkey near the entrance of the Dardanelles strait which connects the Aegean Sea to the Black Sea by way of the Sea of Marmara. Troy is one of the world’s most important archaeological sites because of its place in literature and what it tells us about a critical early period in the development of European civilization. Archaeologists have been excavating here since the 1870's and have found evidence of nine different settlements built on top of each other at different periods since the Bronze Age. In some places visitors can see all nine levels .....

TROY I (3000-2500 BC): The first inhabitants of Troy built their houses on a 16 meter high indigeneous rock at the western end of the ridge. The city was fortified by a wall made of rough stones. Today we can see only a short segment of this wall some 12 meters long and the main gate with two square towers. The thickness of the fortification wall is about 2.50 meters. The other remains of the first Troy we can see today are some foundations of houses in Schliemann's north-south trench. Manfred Korfmann -- the head of the latest excavation team which cleared the trench and made some reconstructions there in 1988 -- calls them row of long houses. Although this type of workmanship is seen in Mesopotamia also there was no direct influence since it was already known all over Anatolia and can be seen even today on the walls of some Turkish houses. We can also see the same design very often in the ceramics of Troy I .....

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The History of the Ancient Near East Electronic Compendium