The Trojan War - Myth vs. History
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Related resources
Homer and the Oral Tradition
Monsters of the Mediterranean
The Bronze Age Collapse
The Odyssey - The Long Journey Home
The Odyssey Goes to Hollywood
The World of Homer - Mycenaean Greece
What students do
- Weigh whether the Trojan War of Homer's epics really happened, using evidence rather than a verdict
- Compare the destruction layers of Troy VI and Troy VIIa at Hisarlik
- Analyze Hittite records naming Wilusa and Ahhiyawa as clues to a real conflict
- Read Herodotus' account questioning whether Helen ever reached Troy
What it covers
- Why Schliemann's "Priam's Treasure" is more than a thousand years too old for the epic war
- What the Bronze Age collapse can and cannot prove about a ten-year siege
- How a historian separates a real, evidenced past from a later poetic memory
Learning targets
- Explain the question at the heart of this lesson - whether the Trojan War of Homer's epics really happened - and why the honest answer is to weigh evidence, not to declare a verdict
- Describe the main lines of evidence - the destruction layers at Hisarlik, the Hittite records of Wilusa and Ahhiyawa, the Bronze Age collapse, and Homer's epics - and what each can and cannot show
- Analyze how a historian separates a real, evidenced past from a later poetic memory, using Herodotus' inquiry into the Helen story as a model of source-checking
From one teacher to another
Students walk in assuming this lesson will finally tell them whether the Trojan War really happened, and I don't correct that assumption right away. Hisarlik gives them a real destroyed city, more than once, which is exactly the kind of complication that makes the case interesting instead of settled. Herodotus does the modeling for them, questioning Homer's story centuries before any modern historian did.
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