When I was thirteen, The Gold of Troy by Robert Payne was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It caught my imagination with its tale of Heinrich Schliemann and his discovery of the ruins of Troy in 1870. He found it at Hisarlik, in the northwest corner of what is now Turkey. I was struck not just by the discovery, but how he made it, as a rank amateur, not an archaeologist. He was a fan of Homer and followed clues in The Iliad.
When experts later excavated at Hisarlik, they found the remains of many cities, one built on top of another. It turned out that the layer Schliemann had identified as Homer’s Troy was a thousand years older than the estimated time of the Trojan War. The physical record had been damaged by Schlliemann’s amateur meddling, making it difficult to determine which layer, if any, was the Troy of legend. But the identification of Hisarlik as Troy stuck. That conclusion seemed to make historical sense. The site was near the beginning of the Dardanelles, the waterway leading from the Aegean to the Black Sea. Based on that location, historians and novelists presumed that the war was fought for control of that strategic sea passage. There was no reason to look any farther. But maybe the question should be opened again.
Doing research for an historical novel I was writing (Let the Women Have Their Say), I realized that Troy was built on new ground in the time of Ilus, Priam’s grandfather, not on the ruins of previous cities. And when it was destroyed, it was completely obliterated, the stones being used to build other cities elsewhere.
Strabo, a Greek geographer, historian, and philosopher, writing around 20 AD, insisted:
“No trace of the ancient city survives, as is natural, for although the surrounding cities were pillaged, they were not completely destroyed, yet it was demolished from its foundations and all the stones were taken up and transferred to the others.” (The Geography 13.1.38 ]
That doesn’t sound like the multi-layered ruins at Hisarlik.
Hisarlik is just three miles from the entrance to the Dardanelles, with the Black Sea beyond. That would have been an excellent strategic position for a city whose strength and wealth were based on sea power and trade by sea. But Troy was not such a city. Its allies were all in Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey. None were from the Aegean islands. Apparently, its trade was with the interior, over land routes.
Homer’s Troy had no harbor. The Greeks pulled their ships onto the beach and left them there. A city in an ideal position to control the Dardanelles would build a harbor nearby, with docks and anchorage. The Trojans did not do that.
And Troy had no navy. There’s no mention in The Iliad of Trojan ships, not even fishing boats. The only exception is the ships that Paris used to abduct Helen, which were built expressly for that voyage, and not by a shipwright, rather by a worker in metal (V 62–3). There’s no mention of trade by sea or of the impact of the Greek presence blocking the arrival of food or supplies by sea. Life goes on normally inside Troy for ten years of war, with no sign of shortages. Troy had little to do with the sea. Its trade and its allies were land-based.
Also, the Trojans never tried to attack the Greeks from the sea, even though the Greeks would have been vulnerable from that direction because their ships were beached and raised on props. In book 2 of The Iliad, their ships are described as rotting from years of disuse.
Hence, I suspect that Troy was not at that strategic position. It was somewhere else. Where?
Mount Ida (now called Kaz Dağı) is frequently mentioned as being nearby. That mountain rises about 20 miles southeast of Hisarlik, near coast of the Edremit Gulf. It covers a large area. The national park that today includes much but not all of it extends for over 82 square miles. Zeus and other gods sit on Ida’s highest peak — Gargaron — to watch the battles on the plain in front of Troy. But Gargaron is 37 miles from Hisarlik.
South of Mount Ida, beaches extend along the coastline of the Edremit Gulf. The island of Lesbos is south from there. In the days of the Trojan War the sea level was an estimated 1.5 to 2.5 meters lower than today, meaning there would have been more land between mountain and sea.
The city that once stood at Hisarlik could easily have been surrounded, cut off from supplies and forced to submit. But over the course of ten years, the Greeks never surrounded and never besieged Troy. Rather, they repeatedly faced the Trojan army on the plain between the city and the beach. If Mount Ida, covering over eighty square miles, had abutted Troy, the mountain would have served as an extension of the city’s defenses, making the city impossible to surround. In addition, Mount Ida would have been a reliable source for fresh water and would also have served as pasturage for goats, sheep, and cattle. Multiple paths through the mountain forest would have enabled Troy to stay in contact with allies for reinforcements, food, and other supplies.
Thebe, the birthplace of Hector’s wife Andromache, and Lyrnessus, birthplace of Achilles’ slave Briseis, are both believed to have been southeast of Mount Ida, at the Theban plain at the northeastern end of the Gulf of Endremit. If Troy were near Mount Ida, to the southeast of Ida, near the beaches of the Gulf, it would have been close to those towns, both of which were sacked by Achilles early in the war. Homer refers to “Troy where the soil is rich” (III 257), which sounds not at all like Hisarlik but accurately describes the Plain of Thebe, which in ancient times was renowned for its fertile food-producing fields. (The Wikipedia article on Thebe cites Herodotus, Xenophon, Polybius and Livy for that description).
So where was Troy? Xerxes and Herodotus believed it was near Mount Ida, to the southeast. Xerxes, with his million-man army, stopped at the site of Troy on his march from Sardis north to Abydus, where he crossed the Dardanelles over a bridge built of ships.
Herodotus recounts that epic march:
So the army made its way from Lydia to the River Caicus and Mysia. After the Caicus they marched, with Mount Cane on their left, through the territory of Atarneus to the town of Carene. Then they crossed the plain of Thebe, bypassing Atramytteium and Atandrus, which is a Pelasgian settlement, and, leaving Mount Ida on their left, they entered the district of Ilium. While they were spending a night at the foot of Ida they encountered their first thunderstorm, with high winds, and quite a large number of them were killed.
When the army reached the Scamander, which was the first river they had come across since leaving Sardis and setting out on their journey that failed to provide enough water for the men and animals and that they drank dry — anyway, when Xerxes reached the Scamander he wanted to see where Priam had ruled, so he climbed up to the citadel, looked around, and heard the whole story of what had happened there. Then he sacrificed a thousand cattle to Athena of Ilium, and the Magi offered libations to the dead heroes. The following night fear spread throughout the army, but in the morning they left there and continued on their way, passing, Rhoeteum, Ophryneum, and Dardanum (whose territory borders that of Abydus) on their left and the territory of a Teucrian tribe called the Gergithes on their right. [7.41–43]
Undoubtedly there was an important city at Hisarlik. Archeologists estimate that that site was inhabited for about 2000 years before the fall of Troy. But Troy was not at Hisarlik.
Thanks to OpenAI, version GPT-5 for conversation about this subject.
My novel Let the Women Have Their Say is available at Amazon.