Mark Gagnon

And sometime between 1220 and 1180 BC, it was destroyed violently.

Something happened.

Now, whether it was similar to what Homer described and, you know, like a love affair gone bad that turns into this all-out war, the most beautiful woman ever, or...

Was it just, you know, one of the many numerous millions of sieges that have happened throughout human history to an ancient site that just got built on and built on and then eventually forgotten?

Because there are multiple things at play during that time in history that might have contributed to the fall of Troy that Homer never wrote about.

The Late Bronze Age was one of the most interconnected and sophisticated periods in all of ancient history.

And the truth is, around the time of the Trojan War, it was about to collapse.

You see, around 1400 to 1200 BC, the Western Mediterranean was dominated by a network of powerful civilizations.

The Mycenaeans were essentially the Greeks of the Bronze Age.

They controlled mainland Greece and the Aegean Islands from a massive fortified palace at Mycenae.

And then you have the Tyrians and the Pylos.

These are the people that Homer was writing about for four centuries after their civilization was basically wiped off the earth.

When he described Agamemnon as the king of golden Mycenae, he was referring to a real place.

And when Schliemann excavated Mycenae in 1876, he found shaft graves filled with gold, including the famous golden death masks.

Now, Schliemann reportedly telegraphed the king of Greece and said this, The thing is that he hadn't.

The masts were just centuries too early, but the discovery proved that Mycenaean Greece had been massively wealthy.

Now, to the east, in what is now Turkey, sat the Hittite Empire, one of the great powers of the Bronze Age, rivaling even Egypt in its time.

And this is where some of the most compelling evidence for a historical Trojan War comes from.

You see Hittite diplomatic records written in cuneiform on clay tablets.

Cuneiform is basically like this imprinting method that the Hittite people and Sumerians, they would basically use to keep records in these clay tablets.