Original subtitles

[Narrator] In the ruins of the ancient city of Troy,

archaeologists discover a series of mysterious skeletons.

[Narrator] As they dig deeper, they find evidence of weapons.

[Narrator] Their discoveries shed light

on one of the most famous conflicts of all time,

the Greek legend of the Trojan War.

[Narrator] The wonders of Ancient Greece are among

the greatest ever known.

Greece was the birthplace of democracy and

the cradle of Western engineering and architecture.

From inspiring inventions,

to epic heroes and legends,

the legacy of Ancient Greece still shapes the modern world.

The story of the Trojan War is one of the

most famous Greek legends.

It recounts a 10-year conflict between the Greeks

and the city called Troy, that ends in its destruction.

Today, this epic saga and its heroes are seen as myth

and legend, but how much of this tale could be true?

-The Greeks believed this was an absolutely real story;

many believed that if the Greeks hadn't got

back from the Trojan War, their whole nation would

have become extinct.

[Narrator] Now, international teams of archaeologists dig

through centuries of earth to hunt for the

truth behind the myth.

-This is the one myth that's deeply embedded in our culture.

People have been looking for evidence of the Trojan War

happened for the past two centuries.

[Narrator] Why did the Ancient Greeks believe

the Trojan War really happened,

what might new discoveries reveal about

the world that inspired this epic?

The Ancient Greeks believed that Troy was

a city in what is now Turkey,

on the coast of the Aegean Sea.

Hisarlik Hill lies a few miles inland;

its name means "a place of fortresses."

Today, Hisarlik is better known as the site

of Ancient Troy.

Archaeologist Rustem Aslan leads one of the country's

longest-running excavations.

This morning, he's on his way to begin a

new season of digging.

[Narrator] In the 7th BCE,

Greek settlers founded a city here.

They called it Ilion, and believed it stood on

the same spot as Ancient Troy.

Over the centuries, Ilion's exact location was lost,

and the legend of its famous predecessor faded into myth.

[Narrator] All that changed when a German

archaeologist called Heinrich Schliemann

visited this hill in the late 1800s.

He began to dig,

rediscovering the Greek city of Ilion,

and revealing how it stood on top of ruins

more than 5,000 years old,

proof he claimed of Ancient Troy.

Archaeologists divide the history of Ancient Troy

into 10 periods.

The first settlement was founded around 3000 BCE,

around 500 years before the Great Pyramid of Egypt,

during a time known as the Bronze Age.

This season, Rustem plans to investigate

the fortifications of Troy number VI.

This site dates to the late Bronze Age,

which is when the Ancient Greeks believed the

Trojan War took place.

[Narrator] The problem is that this site lies

beneath more than 15 feet of earth.

Today, Rustem's team must first clear away all the

debris accumulated since their last season,

before they can even start to look for this city's secrets.

[Narrator] Rustem suspects that late Bronze Age Troy

could be the one from the myth.

So what evidence is there that the Greeks

were describing this city?

There is no single version of the Trojan War story.

The most famous are two epic sagas,

The Iliad and The Odyssey,

composed by a mysterious poet known as Homer.

But there once existed other tales now lost over time.

According to Greek myth, the war begins when Paris,

a prince of Troy, picks the goddess Aphrodite in

a beauty contest.

In return, she makes Helen, the wife of the King of Sparta,

elope with him to the city of Troy.

Some versions say that Paris abducts her.

Furious, the Spartan king sails with a massive

Greek fleet to bring her back.

They land in Troy to find the Trojans

behind their mighty walls, and an epic siege begins.

Ancient Historian Emily Hauser is in Troy

to investigate how the Bronze Age city matches

up to the one in the myth.

[Emily] We're always looking at a difficult process because

what we are engaging with is epic, it's poetry,

it's myth, it's legend.

But what we can do is maybe find sort of kernels

of historical truth that might have passed

down from generation to generation.

[Narrator] The Greeks believed that Homer's story

was true and described real events.

The problem is that his tales are not history as

we know it today.

His famous epic poem The Iliad is primarily

the story of Greece's greatest warrior, Achilles,

and takes place over less than two months in

the 10-year war.

[Emily] There are elements to the Troy that we find

in Homer that are poetic, and there are elements

that are looking back to a real historical city.

Obviously, we want to be careful,

but there are amazing correspondences that are

just kind of spine-tingling.

[Narrator] Emily takes a closer look at Troy VI's walls.

[Emily] You can see this massive tower here, well,

that ties in incredibly nicely to the way that

Homer describes the citadel of Troy as being

ringed by massive walls and towers,

he calls it eupurgos, which means "well-towered,"

"well-fortified."

[Narrator] These towers are not the only aspect of

the city that the much later Greek poet gets right.

[Emily] We get a lot of different features of the

city being picked out.

You can also see the slope of the walls;

it's a really distinctive angle.

And there's one moment in the epic where Homer is

describing Patroclus, Achilles' companion, lover,

closest friend, and he is attacking Troy.

And we get this passage three times,

Patroclus tried to scale the slope or the angle of the wall.

[Narrator] Emily thinks these architectural

similarities are more than a coincidence.

-There are memories encapsulated there of an

ancient city that Homer couldn't possibly

have known about.

These walls were actually buried under the ground.

[Narrator] How could Homer describe a city he

could never have seen?

The answer is that Homer must have drawn on a rich

tradition of stories about Troy that went back centuries.

The first people to tell these tales were oral poets

who preserved memories of real places.

[Emily] They would have passed their craft on to

the next generation of bards, almost like a sort of time

capsule passed from one generation to the next.

[Narrator] Archaeologists have discovered that late

Bronze Age Troy was a rich and powerful city that

controlled the entrance to the Black Sea.

Mighty stone walls crowned with imposing towers rose

30 feet above the plain.

They shielded the heart of the city,

a grand citadel and palace complex.

Below it stretched a sprawling lower town,

home to up to 7000 people,

making Troy one of the largest cities of its day.

Today, many archaeologists believe that Troy VI

is the city that the Ancient Greeks had in mind

when they sang songs about high-towered Troy.

But evidence for an actual war is still hotly contested.

This season, Rustem hopes his new dig will

shed light on this mystery,

he wants to find out how Bronze Age Troy came to an end.

[Narrator] The team gets to work.

Bronze Age Troy is buried so deep that it will

take weeks just to reach it.

Why did the Ancient Greeks believe their ancestors

had traveled here to fight in an epic war?

[Narrator] The legend of the Trojan War is set in

a time of kings and heroes.

According to Homer, Bronze Age Greece was

made up of rival city-states,

who all sent warriors to fight in Troy.

Who were the real Bronze Age Greeks?

How does their world match up with the one in the myth?

More than 300 miles south-west of Troy,

a second dig takes place at Iklaina near

Pylos in Greece.

Archaeologist Michael Cosmopoulos

from the University of Missouri-St. Louis

leads the excavations here.

He's fascinated by the stories of Homer and

the real world in which they are set.

[Michael] I grew up loving The Iliad and The Odyssey,

but what really fascinates me is the

connection to the present.

What you take out of the ground has not seen

the light of day for thousands of years.

[Narrator] At Iklaina, Michael and his team

investigate a late Bronze Age city.

This season, they're digging inside a large

house called a megaron.

[Michael] So what do you have here?

[Narrator] Very little remains above ground,

so Michael must piece together the building's

story from fragments buried in the earth.

[Michael] We have two kylikes here,

this is part of a third one.

[Narrator] A kylix is a type of drinking vessel

that was common in the late Bronze Age,

it's one of at least 10 discovered in this room.

[Michael] These are definitely household vases,

drinking vases.

This is fascinating, it's excellent quality pottery too.

It's palace ware.

[Narrator] The kylikes tell Michael that this hall

probably belonged to a wealthy person,

it was one of several built by successive generations.

[Michael] What we are excavating at Iklaina is

a city going back to the late Bronze Age,

roughly 1600 to 1200 BC.

It's a large city, we guestimate that it

would have had between six and 8,000 people.

[Narrator] The megaron is just one of Iklaina's

many fine buildings.

On the edge of an escarpment lies a massive wall which

archaeologists initially thought was part of

Iklaina's defenses, but in amongst the stones,

they found something unexpected.

Fresco fragments that, when restored,

revealed vivid naval scenes and processions.

These weren't the ruins of a defensive wall but

the shattered remains of an enormous megaron,

an imposing multistory building of fine masonry

and painted plaster that stood at the same time

as Bronze Age Troy.

Michael thinks Iklaina was an early microstate.

An urban center that dominated the

surrounding countryside.

Other Greek cities like this were much larger,

among them Mycenae.

Mycenae was the greatest of the Bronze Age Greek cities,

home to over 6,000 people, crowned by a palace and

encircled by massive stone walls.

Copper and tin flowed into the city,

and in Mycenae's forges,

they became exquisite bronze weapons of war.

Gold filled its royal shaft graves,

laid over bodies of the elite with metal mined as

far away as modern-day Romania.

Even Egyptian faience, a bright glassy material,

reached Mycenae, proof of a city trading across empires.

Archaeologists refer to the Greeks of this

time as Mycenaean, after Mycenae,

but in Homer's texts,

the Greeks have a different name.

[Michael] Homer in The Iliad refers to the

Greeks as Achaeans, and this is a term that appears

to include the Greek troops from various parts of Greece.

[Narrator] Homer's description of Bronze Age

Greece is broadly accurate.

This was an age of rival cities.

The problem is that many of those that supposedly

joined forces against Troy don't match up with

any modern place names.

How much credence can we give to Homer's account

of this great alliance?

What evidence is there that a Trojan war ever took place?

[Narrator] At Troy, Rustem hunts for evidence

of a siege, the process is slow and careful;

they must record every step.

[speaking in foreign language]

[Narrator] The end of Bronze Age Troy is

difficult to untangle;

the city appears to have suffered extensive earthquake

damage around 1300 BCE before being rebuilt.

Archaeologists call this new period Troy VII,

and it was the final incarnation of

the Bronze Age city.

Previous discoveries reveal it ended suddenly,

around 1180 BCE, the mystery is why?

So Rustem plans to open a second trench

near the south gate.

[Narrator] According to legend,

the south of the city, facing the plain,

bore the brunt of the Greek attack.

As the Greek ships draw near, the Trojans prepare the city

for war and seal shut its gates.

The Greeks throw everything they have

at the city, but Troy's legendary walls hold firm.

So, the Greeks set up camp on the beach and

prepare for a lengthy siege.

For 10 years, they sit beneath the shadow

of the city walls, unable to break through.

Last season, Rustem discovered what looked

like burning in the lower town.

[Narrator] Rustem wants to discover the

extent of this burning;

the problem is that this part of Troy lies

underneath the later Greek city of Ilion

that stood here until the Middle Ages.

Rustem works with Co-Director Reyhan Korpe,

he's a specialist on the later city.

Together, they need to distinguish the later

levels from the earlier ones.

[Narrator] The team begins to remove the first layers.

[Narrator] So what evidence is there

that this city ever went to war?

There are no histories from the Late Bronze Age about Troy.

But there are written records.

Emily investigates one of them,

a 3300-year-old tablet now housed at Troy.

It's written by a people called the Hittites.

[Emily] This tablet is incredibly exciting,

it's a tablet that records a treaty made between a city

in northwestern Anatolia called Wilusa,

and the Hittite Empire.

It sounds like a fairly typical diplomatic correspondence,

but what's interesting about it is that Wilusa

has a secret hidden within it,

because that W later drops out of language

and it becomes in Greek Ilios,

which is Homer's name for Troy.

[Narrator] This tablet reveals that Wilusa was

probably what the Trojans called their city,

a name adopted by the later Greeks.

[Emily] We don't just get the name of the city,

we, in fact get the name of the ruler and

he is given as Alaksandu.

Now that is incredibly exciting because the name

of one of the Trojan heroes is Alexandros,

you might know him better as Paris.

Alexandros is given as his alternative name,

and it seems that that memory of that word

Alexandros might be harkening back to Alaksandu of Wilusa,

Alexandros of Troy.

[Narrator] The tablet dates to the 13th century BCE,

the same time as Troy VII.

Other tablets tell how Wilusa was once caught up

in a conflict between the Hittite Empire and

the king of a mysterious people called the Ahhiyawans.

[Emily] Linguists have suggested that there is a

close connection between Ahhiyawa,

in the Hittite texts,

and the word that Homer uses for the Greeks,

which is Achaeans, Akhaioi in Greek.

And it is possible that they are describing

a joint conflict that they had over the

city of Wilusa, Wilios, Troy.

[Narrator] Some historians suspect that the story of

the Trojan War might reflect one or more of

these conflicts, perhaps involving a real Paris,

not a prince but a king of Troy.

How might this match up with the archaeology?

What role, if any, did the Greeks play in Troy's downfall?

[Narrator] The Iliad goes into extraordinary detail

about the Greek army that fights at Troy.

It names dozens of bronze-clad heroes like Achilles,

all united under the banner of Agamemnon,

the King of Mycenae.

How believable is this story of a united Greek army?

At Iklaina in Greece, Michael and the team now

want to find out more about the

city's relationship with its neighbors.

As they dig beneath the house with the

broken drinking cups,

they find an upturned vessel.

-It's unique to us in that it's upside down because

the soil within it is intact.

[Narrator] The contents of the vessel could contain

crucial clues to who left it here.

Paulina removes it with great care.

[Michael] There is burnt stuff inside, okay.

[Narrator] The discovery of burnt material inside

the pot implies that it came from an earlier

building that burned to the ground;

it matches a similar pattern across the site.

-This is one of the most exciting finds we've had,

just because we are looking for destruction layers.

[Narrator] Michael believes that Iklaina

was the victim of a hostile takeover by its neighbor, Pylos.

-Iklaina is destroyed violently around the middle of

the 13th century BC,

let's say 1250 or so.

So, the question is, was the entire city

destroyed at the same time?

[Narrator] Ancient tablets discovered at Pylos name

Iklaina as one of the nine centers in its western province.

[Michael] We think that the Mycenaean name for

Iklaina was a-pu2.

We know that a-pu2 was located to the south;

it was not on the coast, and the only site that fits

this description is this one here.

It seems like in the early Mycenaean period,

at least here, there was a number of tiny,

small microstates in the rural area,

and then eventually they were absorbed,

possibly violently, creating the kingdom of Pylos.

[Narrator] Iklaina's inclusion in this list

is intriguing.

According to Homer, King Nestor of Pylos sent

90 ships to Troy, and ruled a group of nine cities,

one of which was called Aipy,

though to be a version of a-pu2,

Iklaina's original name.

-What is truly fascinating is that in The Iliad,

we have hints of a similar organization of the

kingdom of Nestor with the legendary King of Pylos.

It's by no means an historical record,

but at least preserves some kind of memory of

the organization of Mycenaean states.

[Narrator] The Iliad's description of the Greek army

might reflect these early kingdoms,

what did Mycenaean warriors look like?

Homer paints a vivid picture of battle;

his Greeks wield expensive bronze swords,

long spears, and ride into battle on chariots,

just like the earlier Mycenaeans.

But their huge tower shields are too early

for the period; real Mycenaeans carried

rounded ones, and Homer describes the armor

of his own time, rather than the protection

the Mycenaeans would have worn.

The Mycenaeans were certainly capable warriors,

but The Iliad blends fact with fiction.

So what evidence is there that the Greeks

were responsible for Troy's destruction?

At Troy in Turkey, after nearly six weeks of digging,

the team has uncovered a paved surface,

it looks like a street running next to the palace.

[Narrator] The street tells them that they

have reached the Late Bronze Age levels.

They can also make out signs of a catastrophic event

that hit the city around 1300 BCE.

[Narrator] The earthquake forced Troy's residents to

rebuild their city.

And sitting on top of the new defensive wall

in front of the palace,

the team uncovers a forgotten arsenal.

[Narrator] Why were the Trojans stockpiling

weapons here?

The answer could help solve the mystery

of the Trojan War.

[Narrator] At Troy, Rustem and Reyhan take

a closer look at the Late Bronze Age

sling shots in the lab.

They want to find out if they could be Greek or Trojan.

[Narrator] The first step is to date them.

They do this by looking at fragments of pottery

found among the sling stones.

[Narrator] The bone arrowhead is a light weapon

designed to pierce flesh.

For Reyhan, it brings to mind a passage

in the Greek story of the Trojan War.

[Narrator] All these weapons appear to be Trojan,

not Greek and date to the very end of the Bronze Age.

They look like a defender's stockpile and

hint at a time of trouble.

Around 1200 BCE,

dozens of cities fell across the eastern Mediterranean,

among them powerful centers like Ugarit

in Syria and Megiddo in Israel.

So, could there be a connection with

the fate of Troy?

A clue might lie across the sea at Luxor in Egypt.

Egyptologist Arto Belekdanian investigates

the temple of Karnak.

This enormous sanctuary existed at the same time

as Bronze Age Greece and Troy.

[Arto] The Great Temple of Amun in Karnak is a huge site.

The oldest evidence for it goes back to the 2100s BC.

This sprawling complex that we're in is the

result of over two millennia of construction and additions.

This place was still growing all throughout the

entire Mycenaean periods.

[Narrator] Many pharaohs have left their mark on Karnak,

but Arto is intrigued by one inscription in particular.

-This inscription records the great victory

of King Merneptah in the fifth year of his reign against

the Sea Peoples.

Now the Sea Peoples are this loose coalition of

separate peoples that came together in the very

Late Bronze Age and began attacking all kinds

of places throughout the eastern Mediterranean area.

[Narrator] The inscription says the

Sea Peoples attack Egypt around 1207 BCE,

about 25 years before Troy VII's destruction.

Some historians blame them for the devastation

of the Late Bronze Age.

Exactly who they were and where they came from

is a mystery, but the name of one group is familiar.

[Arto] One of the peoples that King Merenptah defeated

in the process is a group that he names as the Ekwesh.

Many archaeologists believe that the Ekwesh

are none other than the Achaeans of the

Trojan War, the Greeks.

[Narrator] The name Ekwesh sounds like the

Egyptian word for Achaean, so what might Greeks have been

doing among these raiders?

At Iklaina in Southern Greece,

Michael's excavations have revealed that Pylos's conquest

of Iklaina was short-lived.

Both cities were destroyed around 1200 BCE.

-It appears that the fate of Iklaina was linked

to what happened to the wider region.

At the same time, we had wave of destructions

throughout Greece, there seems to be major upheaval.

[Narrator] The civilization of Mycenaean Greece

collapsed at around the same time as those in the east.

Michael suspects that the survivors fought for resources.

-It looks like there is some kernel of

truth in the Trojan War and Mycenaean uh,

army may have attacked Troy in an effort to capture

and plunder a rich city, and at the same time gain

control of the straits to the Black Sea.

But that war appears to have been exhaustive,

and the Mycenaeans eventually did not survive

much longer after that.

[Narrator] The grand Greek army that Homer says

fought for honor may have been pirates or raiders.

Did the memory of this violent age,

when the entire Bronze Age world fell apart,

persist as myth and legend?

But Troy's walls made it one of the strongest cities

in the eastern Mediterranean,

so how did it fall?

As the team continues to dig,

they come across a disturbing find at the south gate,

human skeletons.

[Narrator] At Troy, the team investigates

the recently discovered skeletons at the south gate,

one appears to be that of a young man.

The team carefully brushes away the soil.

[Narrator] Reyhan takes a closer look at the

skeleton's bones.

[Narrator] DNA analysis might reveal when this person died.

But this individual is not buried deep enough to

be a victim of the Trojan War.

[Narrator] The Byzantines were the Medieval rulers of

large parts of modern-day Turkey.

The discovery paints a remarkable picture

of Troy's longevity.

The Bronze Age destruction layers remain

out of reach for now.

So, how did the Greeks believe Troy came to an end?

The fall of Troy is perhaps the most famous

chapter of the tale.

After 10 years of war, the Greeks devise a new plan;

they build a huge wooden horse and leave it at Troy's gates,

then sail away as if abandoning the fight.

The Trojans believe the horse is a gift to the gods;

they drag it into the city and celebrate

their supposed victory.

That night, Greek warriors hidden inside

climb out and open the gates to let the Greek army in.

While the Greeks set fire to Troy,

King Menelaus finds Helen and claims her back.

What might lie behind such a dramatic ending?

Emily investigates the western wall where Troy

is said to have fallen.

-This is a part of the citadel that,

in Homer in the epic The Iliad has an incredibly

resonant part to play, we see it cropping up

time and time again in the epic.

[Narrator] According to The Iliad,

this is where Prince Hector of Troy meets his wife

Andromache and predicts the city's end.

[Emily] Hector knows that this is a war that

he is going to lose;

this is a war that will end in the destruction of Troy.

And Andromache responds to him and says Hector,

you need to defend the wall,

it is not about attacking it;

it is about defending, and she points to the

western circuits of the wall, and she says there is a

place where there is a weakness at the wall.

[Narrator] Archaeologists have discovered that the

stonework here is unusual.

After the earthquake in 1300 BCE,

the Trojans appear to have blocked up the west gate.

[Emily] This is one of those moments where

archaeology and literature,

epic and myth really kind of collide.

This is a place where we are seeing a significant

defensive weakening.

[Narrator] Rustem thinks that this part of the city

was viewed as a potential weak spot.

[Narrator] War chariots were expensive and

terrifying weapons, but they had fallen out

of use by Homer's day.

Rustem thinks the memory of heroes climbing onboard

these prestigious military vehicles might

have influenced the myth of the Trojan horse.

[Narrator] The story of the Trojan horse is just one

of many fantastical tales inspired by this

ancient metropolis.

The team at Troy will continue to hunt for more clues

about this city's downfall, and perhaps uncover that

elusive piece of evidence that might confirm

if the Greeks were here at the time of

the city's destruction.

[Narrator] Troy, like its counterparts in Greece,

was a real city, one so powerful that its

soaring towers and mighty walls became the setting for

a series of mythological tales that still have the

power to move us today.

-People think that myths are fairytales,

and they're not.

Myths and legends are the product of human experience,

the wisdom of people over the centuries.

One of the basic core truths that we learn from

The Iliad and the story of the Trojan War is how war

and violence affect humanity.

[Emily] The Greeks didn't see it as we do,

as myths disassociated from history.

We've got to remember that the word that we get myth

from in Greek, it's mythos, it's word.

So, it's a way of transmitting information,

and for them, this was an absolutely real story.

[Narrator] The epics of Homer and the stories of

the Trojan War are among the greatest works of

literature ever composed.

An attempt by the Greeks to understand who they were

and where they came from, a window into a lost age,

an age of heroes.