Mark Gagnon

Now, scholars still debate whether it's Troy 6H, destroyed by an earthquake, or Troy 7A, destroyed by war, that lies behind Homer's Troy.

And some argue that the legend blends kind of memories of both.

The destruction window does roughly line up with when the ancient Greeks said that Troy fell.

Though those ancient dates, like Orosthenes' calculation of 1184 or 1183 B.C.,

are themselves later scholarly constructs.

They're not contemporary records.

They happen to align with the destruction horizon at Troy 7a.

But that alignment is just suggestive.

It's not actually proof.

Now, does that prove that the Trojan War happened the way that Homer described it?

Obviously not.

There's no inscription saying Achilles was here and...

there was an arrow guided by Apollo that hit him in the heel and he died.

No archaeological evidence of this giant wooden horse was ever discovered.

Obviously, it'd be too old.

The city that was destroyed at Troy 7a was significant, but it was smaller than the grand description of the city of Troy that Homer describes.

Though Korfman's excavations did reveal a much larger, lower city than previously known, suggesting that Troy was potentially more important than earlier archaeologists had even assumed.

What the evidence found at the archaeological sites tells us is basically this, that there was a real fortified city at Hasarlik.

It's kind of it.

It was wealthy and strategically located, likely benefiting from this position near the Dardanelles and trade routes between the Aegean and the Black Sea.