Mark Gagnon

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.

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.