Troy and the Trojan war

The ruins of Troy now perch on the edge of a plateau overlooking a river flood plain.
Homer knew his geography, say US researchers. The ancient Greek writer's description of the war fought around Troy is consistent with a new reconstruction of the way the region looked about three millennia ago1.

In his Iliad, Homer recounts how the city of Troy was besieged and finally conquered by the army of the Spartan king Menelaus, who sought to reclaim his wife Helen from her abductor, prince Paris. This is thought to have happened around 1250 BC.

Homer's account of the siege and battles give several clues about the lay of the Trojan plain. Then, in the first century AD, the Greek writer Strabo expanded on the description in his book Geography, by which time Troy was known as New Ilium.

Ancient Troy is thought to have stood at a site called Hissarlik in present-day Turkey; archaeological excavations have revealed the remains of a city. There are, in fact, several different ancient Troys, as the settlement was built and destroyed many times since the third millennium BC. These ruins now perch on the edge of a plateau overlooking a river flood plain of sand, silt and marshland.

When Troy was first built around 3000 BC, say John Kraft, of the University of Delaware in Newark, and his colleagues, it was on the coast of a great bay that filled most of the plain.

Today, however, Troy's environs look very different. Little by little, silt from the Simois and Scamander rivers (today called the Dumrek Su and Kara Menderes), which flow into the bay, moved the Dardanelles coastline several kilometres north, leaving Troy high and dry.