Troy
A real city at the mouth of the Dardanelles, destroyed and rebuilt nine times.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.8 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
The mound at Hisarlik holds successive fortified settlements from around 3000 BCE, controlling the entrance to the Black Sea. Heinrich Schliemann dug it in the 1870s convinced it was Homer's Troy, wrecked a great deal of stratigraphy doing so, and found a treasure he wrongly assigned a thousand years too early. The city of the right period, Troy VI or VIIa, was large, wealthy and violently destroyed around 1180 BCE. Whether that has anything to do with the Iliad is unresolved.