On the historicity of the Trojan War

One of the things that was mentioned several times in the comments on the game jam ratings for Are You a Better General Than Agamemnon? was "Greek military history," specifically not knowing enough about it to know who the characters in this game are, etc.

That's stuck with me for a very specific reason:  there is no hint of military history to the subject matter of this game.  The Trojan War is a myth, not history; the characters in this game are drawn from ancient works of literature (primarily the Iliad) and mythography, not from history.  In light of the fact that more than one person seemed confused on the subject, I thought maybe it would be beneficial for me to provide a brief rundown of what we know about the origins of the myth.

Things we know for a fact:

1. If the myth is inspired by a real war, it would have come during the later portions of the Late Bronze Age (LBA for short), during the florescence of the early Greek culture we now call Mycenaean (because of Agamemnon, actually), though we don't know what they called themselves as a group, if they had a single overarching name for themselves.  (Given that we know they spoke an earlier form of Greek, it's not impossible that they did in fact refer to themselves by a form of the term Anglicized as Hellenes.  But we don't have any evidence that they did, though.)  At that time, Anatolia (the bulk of the modern nation of Turkey) was ruled by the culture we now call the Hittites, though the term is slightly anachronistic; they called their land Hatti (though I don't know what their term for the people of their land was, and I don't know if anyone else does, either).
2. Troy was a real place.  It was called Wilusa by the Hittites, and Wilios by the Mycenaeans (or at least by their descendants a few centuries later), which led to the Greek name Ilios, the preferred name for the city in the Iliad (and in fact the source of the epic's name).  The name Troy comes from Troia, which was also in use in the Mycenaean period (I'll get to this below) and may be related to the term Tarwisa (or Taruisa depending on who has transliterated it), which was used by the Hittites to refer to a region of their territory which we suspect is the region around Wilusa.  (But, as with much of this, we aren't sure.  They used names in official correspondence and pronouncements of regal splendor, not on, you know, maps.  They didn't even leave behind any maps as far as I know.)
3. Though Mycenae was utterly insignificant in the historic period, during the LBA it was very important and very wealthy, as reflected in an oft-quoted Iliad phrase "Mycenae rich in gold," giving some justification that the Trojan War is being led by the King of Mycenae.  For that matter, the entire Catalog of Ships in the Iliad seems to better represent LBA power distribution than the power distribution of the era in which it was composed, and by the time Athenian and other Greek scholars were writing about it a few centuries later, many of the places referred to were so long gone that no one knew where they were!  (Including Pylos, Nestor's capital.  They knew it was in Messenia, and had a vague idea where it was, but didn't know its exact location.  Which is probably why it's been such a fantastic site archaeologically, because it didn't have millennia of people poking through its ruins looking for Nestor's treasures.)
4. There was at least one member of the Trojan royal family named Alexandros.  There is a very famous treaty between the Hittite Great King and "Alaksandu" of Wilusa, who is now typically referred to as being King of Wilusa, though the first time I saw a scholarly work talk about the treaty in question it called him a "sub-king."  I don't know if the change is due to a better understanding of the language the treaty was written in, an uncertainty about the actual correspondence of the term to modern terms, or if the original work I saw it mentioned in was purposefully skewing its data in order to justify considering the Trojan War historical.  (Given that the historicity of the war was one of its major points, I cannot overlook that as a possibility.)  In any event, if there was one Alexandros, there may have been more, as royal families tend to repeat names a lot, and this was already the case in the LBA.  (Both the Egyptians and the Hittites provide ample proof of that!)
5. Troy was destroyed in the LBA.  Many times over.  Some of the destruction layers at Hissarlik--the site in Turkey believed to be Troy, though to the best of my (somewhat out of date) knowledge, no written records found at the site have confirmed or denied that--have given slight indication that they could have been destroyed by warfare rather than earthquakes/fires, as there are weapons found in the destruction layers, but as there would probably also have been weapons in the case of a natural disaster destruction layer, since warfare was so integral to survival in the LBA, that is not confirmation of warfare.
6. There was contact between the Mycenaean Greeks and the people of Troy.  Mycenaean pottery was discovered at Troy, though we can't be sure how much of it came from direct contact, and how much would have been brought by third party travelers.  More tellingly, one of the inventory lists found at Mycenaean sites (I don't recall which one right now, but I'd say at least 50% chance it was Pylos, since it's been one of the best sites for tablets) included Trojan women (using a variant of Troia), which not only proves contact between the Troad and the Mycenaean Greeks, but strongly suggests that the Mycenaeans had fought battles on the Troad, taking some of the local women home as spoils, though it is not evidence enough to prove a full-on war, as opposed to a minor skirmish or even a slaving raid.  (Technically, I don't even know that such things happened in the LBA, but I suspect that they probably did because people are and always have been awful.)  There is also a letter that was sent by the Hittite Great King to the "King of the Ahhiyawa," a term believed to be the Hittite attempt to write the Mycenaean form of Achaian, talking about the king's brother, and about their former combat over Wilusa.  (Obviously, a lot of people have jumped on that as Agamemnon and Menelaos, but the thing about that is that the brother's name is rendered in Hittite cuneiform as Tawagalawa, which some scholars suspect is supposed to be Eteocles (from Mycenaean form Etewoklewes), so it's hard to pitch that as being Menelaos.)
7. According to the myth, the majority of the Mycenaean citadels were destroyed about a generation after the Trojan War.  Nearly all of the Mycenaean citadels were in fact destroyed at the end of the LBA, as part of the Bronze Age Collapse.  (It wasn't just them, of course:  practically every city in the region was destroyed, though most were then rebuilt.  Athens and a few of the Phoenician cities didn't fall, and it's been a while since I read the book on the subject, but I don't think any major Egyptian cities were actually destroyed.  But pretty much everything in Anatolia was wiped out, with most of the local cultures being shattered, too.)
8. Some of the names of people in the myth have been established as names already in use by the Mycenaean Greeks: Calchas (sort of), Orestes, Nikostratos (the name of Menelaos' son by his Trojan concubine), and of course Achilleus, which was evidently a pretty popular name, because they've found more than one way to spell it in Linear B!  (There's no listings for anyone named Patroclos, but the basic form of the name is attested in several names ending in -klewos, as Patroclos would have at the time.)  There are actually a lot of the Trojans' names attested in Linear B, too:  Alexandra (an alternate name for Cassandra), Glaucos, Hector, and even Tros, one of the legendary founders of the Trojan people.

But then there's the things that don't match up to the myth in any way.

1. Why aren't there any Hittites in the myth?  They ruled that area, and one of our few historical documents that suggest the war could have a historical basis makes it clear that the war was in fact between the Hittites and the Ahhiyawa, not between the Achaians and the Trojans.  (My personal theory here is that the Hittites are in the myth, only they're being called Ethiopians, because going from Hatti to Aithiopia is not really so far off, and in the earliest texts Ethiopia was described as being to the east rather than the south (which is why it was where the son of the dawn lived), but there's no evidence for my theory.  It's not even so much a theory as my personal historical head-canon.)
2. No evidence has ever been found to establish that any of the people in the myth were based on historical people.  (Unless you take the Alaksandu Treaty as proof that Alexandros was an historical figure, which even I find to be pushing it.)  You may be familiar with such archaeological sites as "the Palace of Nestor" or with archaeological artifacts like "the funeral mask of Agamemnon" or "Priam's Treasure" but those were named in modern times after the mythological figures.  The "Palace of Nestor" is at least from the correct time period (and one of the most important Mycenaean sites ever, thanks in no small part to the fact that no one had known where it was to go dig it up before the 20th century and modern archaeology), but the others are radically wrong.  Both the "funeral mask of Agamemnon" and "Priam's Treasure" were so-called by the same hack proto-archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, who was so eager to find evidence of the Trojan War being real that he didn't care about little things like accuracy.  The funeral mask (which has periodically been suspected of being entirely a forgery on Schliemann's part) was found in a grave circle at Mycenae that dated to about four hundred years prior to any war that could have been the inspiration for the myth of the Trojan War.  The so-called "Priam's Treasure" is an even more appalling mess:  in excavating at Troy, Schliemann had come up with this fantastical narrative of a servant trying to escape the looting with a small chest filled with the king's valuables, who was then slain by the Greek invaders who for some reason didn't bother looking to see what was in the chest he was carrying and thus left it there unopened, where it remained unopened even when the city was resettled, awaiting its German savior, blah blah blah, and he was so excited about this idea that he literally falsified it by gathering up all the jewelry found at the site (and possibly buying similar jewelry elsewhere in Turkey, according to one accusation I read) and then planted them at the location he wanted to be the setting of his tale.  On top of everything else wrong with that, he had bulldozed (not literally, as they hadn't been invented yet) right past the LBA destruction layers until he found one that was "majestic" enough to be Priam's Troy...meaning that the layer he had devoted the most time and energy to, the layer in which most (or all) of that jewelry was found...was about a thousand years too early.
3. Except for Achilleus and Hector, most of the names of the key players in the myth are not attested as existing in the LBA...though that doesn't really mean much in the long run.  (Agamemnon's daughter Iphigeneia was a Mycenaean goddess, though.)
4. If there was one of the destruction layers at Troy that was destroyed in such a cataclysmic war, why isn't that more obvious based on the material remains?  (Well, aside from the massive amount of damage done to the site by its 19th century "excavator," that is.)  For that matter, most of the Mycenaean citadels seem to have been destroyed by earthquakes and fires rather than the warfare described by the myths.
5. The general absurdity of many of the basic points of the story (ten years of war over one man's wife, ten years of a single war at all for that matter all being fought by the same combatants, every major kingdom sending its army and in most cases its king or crown prince to such an absurdly lengthy war and them not returning home to find their kingdoms overthrown by outside enemies (though many of the kings did return home to find them overthrown by their wives), the Trojan Horse, etc.) just cannot be easily glossed over as simple exaggeration.  Though I'm sure a lot of people do just that.

So, what do we think happened?  Well, we don't know.  But it's obvious enough from what we do know that there was some kind of war, on a much smaller scale, which must have caught the attention if not of the people at least of a few poets, who then wove in elements (and likely bits of pre-existing poetic works) of other stories until it was inflated into the tale we know now.

And is that it?

Well....yes and no.

If you want me to give my scholarly opinion on the factual basis of the Trojan War, that's about all I can say.  Because that's all we know for sure.  However, if you want me to give my personal conjecture, based not only on evidence but on my own flights of fancy...well, actually, I'm going to give it whether you want it or not! ;)

Among the things we know that I didn't mention above is the fact that the place we know as Miletus was already a site of much contention in the LBA:  it was a Mycenaean colony, but the Hittites felt it was part of their kingdom (rather rightfully so, really), and there was a lot of fighting over it, and I believe it's confirmed to have changed hands more than once (though I'm not 100% sure of that).  There is also a lot of strong scholarly conjecture that Helen started her mythological career not as a demi-goddess, but as an actual goddess of the pre-Greek inhabitants of Greece.

From there, it feels like a pretty easy fit between the myth and what little we genuinely know:  Alaksandu of Wilusa enters Millewanda (Miletus), either as a conqueror by force or possibly by stealth as a false guest, and in exerting his (or his master the Great King's) power over the region, he takes their gods hostage.  This is a practice well documented in Mesopotamia, where the cult statue of one or more gods is/are taken by the conquerors and held hostage to ensure that the conquered people behave themselves, and there is evidence that the Hittites also practiced it.  There is no evidence of the Mycenaean Greeks ever practicing this (I can't even think of any comparable myths among the later Greeks that could have come from the practice), so it's safe to say that they viewed it not as taking their gods hostage, but as outright theft and nothing more.  (Much like the theft of the Palladion from Troy by Odysseus and/or Diomedes in the myth as it is now.)  Outraged, the people of Miletus are determined to get their god(s) back, and determine to wage war to recover the stolen god(s), sending a cry for help back to their kinsmen in Greece.

As to what happens next, well, I don't know how much you know about Medieval history, but the way the first Crusade happened was that when the Byzantine Empire wanted to try to retake Jerusalem, they sent a request to the Pope in Rome, asking for a few thousand mercenaries (essentially) to help make it happen.  The Pope, seeing an opportunity for political power, over-dramatizes the request in an appalling fashion, making out that Jerusalem was being ravaged by utter monsters who did the most disgusting things (none of which was even slightly true), and stirring up pretty much half the population of Europe to go marching off to the "rescue."  It was especially popular with extra sons who had no chance of inheritance, and with the poor who wanted to try and become rich by any means possible, and were foolish enough to think that war against the "infidels" would be an easy method.  (The Byzantines were horrified by the rabble of an army that showed up on their doorstep, naturally, and just sort of pointed them in the direction of Jerusalem and unleashed them.  Because they figured "better them than us.")

Since human nature is pretty hard to change, I think something similar could have happened over a call from Miletus asking for help in saving the goddess Helen from her Trojan captors.  Extra sons, nobility without fortune, soldiers who hoped to become nobility by the tip of their spear...they would have been overjoyed at the notion of capturing a wealthy trading city like Troy, leading to representation (but not by kings and crown princes) from most of the major palatial centers, as well as various smaller cities and villages.  Of course, the end of the tale would probably have been very anti-climactic:  most likely, the Hittites would have been able to overwhelm them by sheer numbers, but if the ruling family from Miletus was involved, then there were likely peace talks, upon the conclusion of which the Hittites decided--possibly due to the different practices on the Greek mainland--to return the goddess statue rather than risk continued warfare.  (They had bigger issues on their plate at any given time than the primitive Ahhiyawa, after all!  Like wars and political marriages with Egypt.)  Naturally, the survivors making their way back to Greece after the fact would have stilted their tale so they didn't sound so pathetic, and then poets would have taken that even further...and there you go!

Not much of a theory, perhaps, but I think it's fairly plausible, all things considered.  (One of many projects on my back burner is to do a novel or a game of that concept of the possible origin of the myth.)

So, there you have it.  The (lack of ) historicity of the Trojan War.  As perceived by me based on research I did about five or six years ago.  (*cough*)

(In other news, I do still intend to remake this game eventually in a form that's more like an actual game.  But first I want to finish the adaptation of the full novel of which The Cousins is the first chapter, and then I have another Trojan War-related game I want to make for a game jam I joined for this summer.  (It's primarily about Patroclos and Achilles first meeting and falling in love...unless you pick the wrong choices and they only become friends.)  After that, though, hopefully this will be next, rather than book two of the novel series.  The novels are about a daughter of Achilles--fathered in the last weeks of his life--and her cousin, a daughter of Odysseus, and their adventures with the son of Aias.  (Eurysakes, the same one who's featured briefly in this game...)  Just thought I'd mention that, in case anyone's interested.)