The Case for Historical Significance in Homer’s Landmarks at Troia

Abstract

Intensive deep-coring of the alluvial plain of the Menderes (ancient Scamander) River in the vicinity of Hisarlik (ancient Troia) has established the approximate position of the shoreline in the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1250 b.c.).At that date the Menderes flowed into a marine embayment that extended northwards to the Hellespont (Dardanelles) from, or near, the latitude of Troia. This palaeogeographic reconstruction has removed the basis for Schliemann’s and Leaf’s placing of the Greek Camp and Ship Station on the present coastline, and revived former speculation about the significance of the Beşik Bay anchorage to the south-west of Troia at the time of the Trojan War. The author reviews the topographical indications in Homer’s Iliad, and concludes that they presuppose an east-west, rather than a north-south, axis for the fluctuating fighting that Homer pictures. He argues that this tends to support the historicity of Homer’s ‘military topography’, and gives reasons, based on the Iliad, and Strabo’s account of the Troad, for placing the Greek camp and ship station, not at Beşik Bay, but at a then existing salt lagoon (now known as the Lisgar swamp or Kesik plain) that formed a westward extension of the Troia embayment in the neighbourhood of ancient Sigeion.