Was Troy real?
In 1871, a German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann began excavating a 5-acre mound in Turkey called Hisarlik that he later reported was Homer’s “mighty-walled Troy.” Now under excavation by the Project Troia team led by Germany’s University of Tubingen and the University of Cincinnati, the mound overlooks the Dardanelles straits linking the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, matching Homer’s descriptions. Homer called the city both Ilios and Troia. In Latin, the Romans called the site Trojanus, which in English has been shortened to Troy. “Probably most archaeologists would say, yes, Hisarlik was Troy,” says archaeologist Christopher Ratte of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Excavators have found layered remains of at least 10 past settlements at Hisarlik dating from 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1300. The sixth-level city is believed to be the Troy described in The Iliad. Excavations in the 1990s found that a harbor and large city surrounded the hilltop citadel. “The upshot is that Troy w
