017 Transcript

Episode 017 Black Ships on Trojan Shores Today we will take a look at one of the most enduring myths of ancient history, the Trojan War as enshrined in epic form in The Iliad. In myth, this is the war where the face of Helen launched 1,000 Achaean ships, destined for Ilios, or Troy, where they would besiege the city and have their vengeance. You may wonder why the Trojan War as a focus for our podcast on maritime history. The sack of Troy, the Trojan Horse, all that happened on land, right? And yes, it did, but there is an undercurrent of maritime power running like an integral thread throughout the entire myth. Without the Achaean sea power, the entire story would change, and who knows how history would have differed. We’ll talk today about the role sea power played in the period, and how differing cultural views influenced the Mycenaeans, the Trojans, even the Hittites. This may be a long episode, because I also think it’s important to get an accurate picture of the Late Bronze Age world’s dying stages so that we can frame the emergence of the Sea Peoples in its proper light. And, there are many players on this stage, as I’m sure you’re aware. We’ve talked in past episodes a bit about Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of one of these players, the Mycenaean civilization, and more specifically about his unearthing of golden artifacts from shaft graves at Mycenae. Beyond Mycenae, I think it’s pretty widely known that Schliemann also discovered the site of Troy with its many layers. He had his personal theories about the sites back then, and historians in the intervening years have proposed many alternative theories, even today we are still simply theorizing. Was the site of Troy the actual site of the events in The Iliad? Was the Trojan War even real in a historical sense? If so, where does the epic drama of Homer’s tale depart from historical events? And, the bottom line for any student of history, what contemporary sources are there to even help shed some light on any of these inquires? Many questions to begin with today, but I trust that in looking at some of those sources we can today see some of the historical reality underlying one of the earliest tales of a war where a naval force played a large role. Episode 017 1 A brief warning here before the plunge: this whole discussion is quite complex. My hope is to present you with a coherent picture of a distinct possibility of what the history looked like, but keep in mind there are many theories to explain the history behind Homer’s Trojan War and the proper interpretation of the historical documents that we’ll look at. This discussion could take up hours if we let it, indeed, stacks of books have been devoted to the subject. In addition to the complexity, this topic dovetails into our future discussions of the Sea Peoples and the Late Bronze Age Collapse, so I want to lay a good foundation today and will reference much of what we say today in the upcoming episodes. Here’s to hoping it all makes sense when we’re through! Perhaps it is ill advised, but for today’s episode I’m going to make the assumption that we’re all familiar with the basic plot of the Trojan War as recounted in Homer’s Iliad. The recent Hollywood adaption in the film Troy is, to put it bluntly, a travesty to Bronze Age history, as well as to the Homeric tradition of the myth itself, but I’ll suppress any pedantic urges for now and hope you all can do likewise. If you’re looking for a good podcast treatment of the Trojan War myth, look no further than “The Myths and History of Greece and Rome” by Paul Vincent. He dedicates a handful of episodes to recounting the myth, and I’ve enjoyed his podcast immensely. With the preliminaries behind us then, let us now take the plunge. We’ve seen that the Mycenaeans of 1500 through 1300 BCE were quite active in Mediterranean trade, making much contact with the Levant, Cyprus, and some coastal areas of Anatolia. They were also the originators of the oared galley, the ‘long-ships’ that Homer has the Achaeans using to make their way over to Troy. Some have said the the Homeric authorship of the epic at some point in the 8th century BCE (which is a huge debate in and of itself) would have resulted in later Greek traditions and practices seeping into what was supposed to have taken place at least 400 years before Homer’s time. There is certainly a degree of that transference present, as there will be in most any writing or history, but with regard to the description of ships in the Iliad, much of what Homer described has been proven accurate through archaeological finds dated to the period of the 13th century BCE, the period where historians generally place the Trojan War. The ‘black ships’ we talked about in Episode 15, for example, not to mention the fact that Homer describes longships steered by a single pilot on a single steering rudder. That is precisely how early period galleys were built, while the galleys of Homer’s day actually had dual steering rudders. These few specifics aside, though, before we can really get into the real-history events behind the Trojan War, a civilization that’s not yet graced the stage of our podcast needs to make its debut. Episode 017 2 This civilization is that of the Hittites, a super-power of the Bronze Age world, though a relative late-bloomer in the grand scheme of history, as were the Mycenaeans. The discovery of the Hittite civilization and their history is another fascinating topic that is way beyond our scope, and I’m actually not sure whether a podcast has yet examined the Hittites in depth. For our purposes today it’s enough to know that they were the occupiers of much of Anatolia, having emerged as a distinct civilization only in the 17th century BCE, but having had progenitors in the region for several hundred years previous. The Hittites borrowed their cuneiform writing from the Assyrians, and while they did occupy an expanse of territory that bordered the Mediterranean along much of Anatolia’s southern coastline, stretching around to the Levant coastal city of Ugarit, reaching right to the walls of Byblos at one point, the Hittites were not seagoing peoples by any means. These were the famed charioteers of the ancient world, a huge portion of their empire land-locked. This does not mean that they had no maritime connections, however. The Hittites controlled many coastal cities, and though the cities remained nominally independent and reliant on formal alliances or vassal- city agreements with the Hittite king, it is thought that the Hittites would call upon the ships of major coastal cities in times of need. We’ll see this proven out when we get to look at one of the oldest recorded naval battles in history, waged by the Hittite king Suppiluliuma II against some invading Cypriots, but using the ships of a Ugarit, a Syrian city controlled by the Hittites. Episode 017 3 Being largely landlocked and dependent on the trade of its coastal allies, the Hittites were keen on retaining control of the Levant for as long as they could. This is the was the cause of the Battle of Qadesh, which took place around 1275 BCE. Ramses II of Egypt attempted to expand Egyptian control northward, but the Hittites were having none of it. That’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves, perhaps, but it’s good to keep in mind at least. As I’ve said, the Hittites controlled much of Anatolia, varying portions of the Levant, and their eastern reaches abutted the empires of Assyria and the Mittani. The real focal point for us today though is the western most stretches of Anatolia, the coastlines and the islands that dot the edge of Aegean Sea but are a moderate distance from Greece proper. Knowing what we know at this point, that the Mycenaeans were quite active on the seas, and that the western coast of Anatolia was just barely within the reach of Hittite influence, it should be no surprise to find out that many areas along the western coasts of Anatolia were destinations for Mycenaean goods, to a moderate extent. This is the point where the physical letters and records found at Hittite archaeological sites come into play, and its as good a point as any to emphasize just how amazing the discovery of these Hittite records have been to our understanding of the Bronze Age world. Much like the Mycenaeans, Minoans, and others, the Hittites were not really known until the archaeology boom of the 19th century. Since that time, many thousands of Hittite cuneiform tablets have been discovered throughout Anatolia, none more important than a cache of 2,500 tablets found at the ancient equivalent of the Hittite Foreign Office. These tablets, among others, will form the basis of our talk about the Trojan War, and they are a fascinating glimpse at diplomacy and the inner workings of the great ancient empires, while also being 3,000 year old windows into the same human nature that sits at the helms of the nations today. As we look at these documents and get into the intricacies of war and politics, a basic framework is instructive.

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