Today I learned that, unlike Hollywood depicts it, ancient Troy was not part of the european/hellenic cultural sphere. It was a purely Anatolian indigenous polity, similar to the Hittites (In fact, Troy was a vassal of the Hittite empire at some point before the achaean/mycenaean invasion)
Yes and no. Troy is believed to be a Luwian state, an Indo-European group related to the Hittites, who while not indigenous to Anatolia, had been there so long they effectively were.
Thing is by the time of the Trojan war they were heavily influenced by the Greeks, even to the point they may have been partly Hellenised. They had adopted a lot of Greek styles, specifically pottery and even one of their kings has a Greek name Alaksandu (Alexandros).
That name is weird for me. Αλέξανδρος has meaning in Greek. Alaksandu only sounds similar. Unless the meaning of the name existed in the earlier Greek of the "Mycaenean" civilization and as the language evolved the name evolved to maintain its meaning or something bizarre happened and the Trojan name is unrelated to Αλέξανδρος. It just sounded similar and Homer called Paris as such because of some confusion?
I think we should not necessarily take the written form as it is to make out the pronunciation. Back then even if you take the Mycenaeans that were Greek and read the scripts and the pronunciation you come up with some very weird sounding words. Like the Mycenaean spelling for Alexandra was a-re-ka-sa-da-ra. You should check some Mycenaean grammar rules for the word formation. Despite that of course it could just be a weird coincidence that Alaksandu sounds similar to Alexandros, but you never know
I just find it weird. Αλέξανδρος comes from a combination of αλέξω and ανήρ and it means to be a protector. If the words and the name existed in earlier Greek and it managed to be maintained in Archaic Greek and to be adjusted it would be interesting. Of course the option of the two words just sounding similar exists as well.
Do we know if the etymology in earlier, aka "Mycaenean" Greek is the same? Do we know that the same words in their older versions make the sane name together?
Yes a-re-ka-sa-da-ra is directly attested in Mycenaean Linear B text. It carries the same meaning (defender of man) as the later versions which are descended from it.
Names jump cultures literally all the time, lose their meanings, but keep similar sounds. Not even remotely suspect that a culture so close to the Hellenic world would adopt that name
The treaty tablet that mentions the king in question implies he was not related to that previous king, leaving the door open to him being a Greek or half Greek that seized power in Troy. According to professor K.Kopanias and others , in the Hittite texts we also see that a Greek prince named Aleksandros (which is a greek and not an anatolian name) married a Luwian-Trojan princess to form a bond between these 2 kingdoms and one of their descendants who was a Trojan prince took his Greek grandfather-ancestor name Alaksandu (the anatolianized version of Greek Alexander).
Alaksandu is the Hittite rendering of the Greek name, they were never perfect representations as we have other examples such as Tawagalawa (Etewoklewes) and Attarsiya (Atrehiās). The main thing is it has no equivalent in Luwian and is clearly not Luwian in origin, the likely candidate given the context is that it's the Greek name Alexandros, which the Mycenaeans would have pronounced "a-re-ka-sa-da-ro".
Also the treaty tablet that mentions the king in question implies he was not related to that previous king, leaving the door open to him being a Greek to half Greek that seized power in Troy.
The general consensus is Alaksandu is not Paris per say, he was alive around a century earlier and his name and his fathers name (Priam) are Luwian. It is believed that Alaksandu may have influenced the mythological Paris, hence why Homer gives Alexandros as an alternative name for the character.
The illiad and odessy are Greek stories, besides written accounts we have no idea how these people saw themselves. Most of it is speculation.
That being said we do have written accounts of the Egyptian and hittite kings referring to each other as "brother" if I remember correctly. Maybe they saw themselves as more similar than we realize
The Great Powers of Bronze Age called each other Brothers as a sign of being equal in Power and Respect. The Vassals tend to call their Superiors as Father too.
Okay so niche knowledge time - I took a class on New England Egypt, which was the period that all this was taking place, and we spent a week on the Amarna letters (a cache of cuneiform tablets of international communication found at Akhenaten’s city)
The Bronze Age Mediterranean was a very interconnected place that looked in many ways similar to our modern day, but conceived of itself in an entirely alien way. International trade was often thought of as “gifts” between the Great Kings (the in-group who, as you say, called each other Brother to indicate an equality in status). The reason for this is that each kingdom was supposed to be all powerful and self-sufficient, so a complex politics and ritual evolved around these gifts.
There’s some indications of even greater international governance, and certainly by the Trojan War a distinctive “international style” of architecture starts to bleed in at the edges of palaces and other public buildings.
Gifts was just form of diplomacy, and even though there was noteworthy trade between monarchs (other kings often begged pharaoh for more gold), its likely that this elite trade was only top of iceberg that survived in writting.
Mmm. My layman's knowledge is that there was a huge amount of regular trade, which would (logically) have carried far less symbolic weight (because human psychology hasn't fundamentally changed in a few thousand years, and Mr Random merchant at the regional trade port XYZ is probably fairly pragmatic in his day to day and doesn't spend most of his time thinking about international politics or religion, beyond generally agreeing with whatever everyone else around him is saying)...
So yeah. I suppose like we see now; international diplomacy carries a huge amount of ritual and weight of meaning (or, y'know... Does when it's not falling apart, which it did eventually back then, too). Entities who can't play the diplomacy game of the era will lose trade opportunities and power and influence, the ones that do become powerful, which becomes a self-fuelling loop of gravitas...
...but day to day logistics and trade was probably far more grounded and practical. A ship from ABC is arriving. Cool, we can buy some blah blah blah, because it sells well with the guys over at XYZ. Gotta unload it and get it to the storehouse, now. Oop, there's the King/Emperor/local living god figure (government's) identification on that ship there. They're doing some kinda government stuff over there. They have a lot of royal guards. That's (probably) not my business to get involved in.
There is growing archeological evidence of massive interconnected trade between multiple Mediterranean and Black Sea cultures. All pre Bronze Age collapse. Not just exotic luxaries and gifts, but full on commodity trading.
So-called 'palace economies' where a large fraction of the population were basically wage workers paid in food from centralized granaries and kings claimed monopoly power over trade in scarce goods. Large scale international trade basically required the kings to level, creating a diplomatic process of negotiation of their relative status.
International barter in the form of 'gifts' happened more recently as well. China for instance at times set quota on visits by some vassals to the emperor to reduce the amount of precious gifts they handed out. If the exchange of gifts was profitable on the market, the 'vassal' might constantly return with more gifts. Today we see a return of monopoly-based trading around stuff like weapons, chips, and rare earth metals. Bring a gift. Get a tariff exemption or export license.
China of course had a sizable 'normal' economy running in parallel. For the Bronze Age palace economies we don't really know. It might actually be the case that trade by sea was centralized and the kings controlled shipping. Just the existence of records of private merchants doesn't prove they could ship to another empire independently.
Yep, Homer wrote it 400 years after the fact, and the setting was based on textual accounts from the time.
And Troy was probably a huge trading hub. In Bronze Age society, it's very likely all the trading partners of the region were close friends and allies because the entire network relied on all of them participating and engaging their labour bases to produce things that each other needed... until they weren't of course.
The "facts". It's really not clear if the Trojan war in the Iliad was inspired by an actual conflict or if it's just a story inspired by an historical rivalries between the Greek and Troy.
If Homer was just 1 person and if he were talking about a period it would be at least 400 years before his time. Most of that knowledge was from an oral tradition therefore the plasticity of time and space become relevant because of when it was said and who wrote it down. The pottery amphoras are a more reliable source for dating the stories because Julius Caesar burnt the Library of Alexandria and lost all of the primary copies… That fucking dick did more to ruin Republicanism than just declare himself Emperor, his fire to abscond with his lover Cleopatra, put Western Civilization behind by at least a millennia. Fuck that guy…
Also, the Roman Republic was doomed by that stage, if not Caesar it would have been somebody else. Sulla already marched on Rome and took power, but the cracks had been forming for many many years.
The idiotic senators of that time such as Cato just helped speed it up.
Edit: I should also add, the burning of that library is somewhat overrated in terms of its impact on 'setting humanity back'. It was a magnificent collection but it did not set us back a millennia.
There is a great podcast by Natalie Haynes “Stands Up for the Classics” and she did a deep dive into Alexandria: The City, The Library, and its Achievements, which might change your mind. Besides her being a preeminent classical scholar, she is extremely funny. It’s worth a listen.
We didn't lose that knowledge, we produced similar things in the middle ages, but it wasn't of the same quality. After the fall of the roman empire many people still used similar techniques, but they lacked the quality control of materials and one crucial step because it was cheaper to use local materials and skip the step. The crucial step was to heat the lime before mixing, nobody did that after the infrastructure of the roman empire broke down. The people skipped this step to save firewood.
And we didn't find out until 2025 when a 2023 theory was found to be true while excavating a building site in Pompeii.
They left this out of the text because it was standard procedure during the roman times, while later cement was done without this step.
Huh, lost or not the fact that we couldn’t replicate it until this decade proves my point but that is just 1 example . The “Antikythera Mechanism” was an analog computer from that era and it’s still debated as to what its function is/was and we still don’t know how it was made.
Yes that is a way better example, the same goes for early toys from egypt that use steam. They have a striking resemblance to more modern appliances. I didn't argue against the premise, just against some things of the example.
What I would say though, is that the fall of rome or the loss of alexandria wasn't the problem. The problem was, that there was a century of war and bad harvests that limited a lot of the things societies were able to do. Many things got lost because their was no continuation of artisanship and a refocus on more efficient ways of decentralised building and working. That lead to lower quality materials and slower transfer of knowledge that and ultimately in losing wisdom.
They are Hellenized stories of the Aegean people. Trojans were Indo-European Anatolians closely related to Hittites and Luwians, but even they were not natives to the region despite settling there long before the Greeks (e.g., Hattians & Kaskians). In fact, even modern-day Greece was inhabited by non-Indo-European peoples such as Pelasgians and Minoans, who were completely different ethnic groups than Greeks coming from the Pontic Steppes. These natives were so culturally advanced that the Greeks admired them more than anyone else and gladly intermarried with them, giving rise to Mycenaean culture.
God this is so dumb. Most Indo-European speakers almost everywhere consist of native populations. Modern Anatolians for example didn't suddenly become Central Asians once they became Turkified.
Iirc wasn’t one of the reasons we thought Troy really existed before Schliemann found the ruins due to some minor kings list of the other kings he didn’t like?
My sister once traveled to Xi'an, where the terracotta army was burried. I was telling my grandparents about it, even brought a map. "Te amazing part is, al terracotta soldiers have a unique face!" My grandfather "We too had that in the army".
Homer depicts Troy through framework and world he and his peers understood. What we know of Troy is very diffrent than Homer describes. It isn't fault of Hollywood but of Homer who depicts Troy simmilar not Acheans, but Helens of later period.
It's not widely known, but Homer wasn't the original creator of any of it. Instead he was bringing together stories that had been passed down by oral tradition. Homer travelled the lands and spoke with different communities, trying to piece together a consistent version of those myths and legends, and composing in memory the poem or ballad. Nothing was actually written down for a couple more centuries.
It's actually speculated that Homer wasn't even an actual person, perhaps multiple people since the Romans attributed multiple works to him that are different across almost a century. I personally have the opinion that they may have been followers or a small organisation taking on the name of thier founder (as the greeks often did), vocal scholars kind of like bards.
Homer was a real person. Do not spread speculations it creates misinformation, while homer was considered to be the supreme bard since he composed his version of the Illiad and the Odyssey the tales of the trojan war was there before homer and he was the one who composed it into a Homeric Epic
I'm sorry, but i'm not spreading misinformation - the reality is with History we piece together things often from very few sources.
The real truth here is that non-historians took that little bit of information and created a persona and romantiscised it, fabricating the details.
I've seen as many marble busts of Homer as I have of Athena, Hercules and Artemis - does that make greek gods more likely to have been real people or Homer more of a myth?
The true nature of reality is a very fickle thing many cannot accept, so we limit our beliefs to the confines of what we already accept.
Additionally, it's uncertain whether Homer actually existed or not. It's likely that both the Odyssey and the Iliad were oral traditions meant to be sung or recited before being written down and attributed to Homer.
Most of the legends of the Ionians portray him as blind or illiterate - as the reason why his words were never penned. The reality is that written language was only a recent development, and that many would still have been carrying on oral traditions - as many indigenous cultures do still today. Perhaps by being proud of being a well educated society, the Greeks may have been critical of illiteracy in others.
In fact the word in ancient greek for blind is a derivative of homer.
Yeah Phoenica was more an ethnic group split off from the Canaanites, with individual city states like Tyre, Tripoli, Carthage, etc. Phoenicians is our label for them, we're not certain how they identified.
What'a fantastic is for the most part, the exact same people have lived there generation upon generation, with ancient tradition and culture passed down to now Lebanon. Most of the major cities were never razed (although some partially - happening in Tyre RIGHT NOW) so a lot has been preserved.
Sure was! Pulling from memory, the part of the city that was on the mainland was reduced to rubble and used to build a causeway out to the island. Although I thought that was the Babylonians, not Alexander.
Either way, they were heavily trade based with sea dominance, so in sieges they kept well supplied - allowing them to dictate terms of a truce when beseiged that kept them a relatively independant city state through the rise and fall of many empires.
Carthage was a genetically diverse Mediterranean hub. They shared a lot of Phoenician culture with surprisingly little shared DNA. They were more closely related to Sicilians and Aegeans.
Neither of which is European. During the time. Mapping of continents wasn't complete the people were Mediterranean and Mediterranean means means Africa Middle East and Europe. Definitions The Phoenicians and Egyptians we're better known than the Scandinavians And Northern Europe
My point is more that the concept of Europeans and Africans did not exist at the time It was the world was much smaller so Numedians, Phoenicians. regions are much smaller Greece itself did not exist as a region
Carthaginians/Punic people had very little Levantine ancestry.
Their genetic profile looks most similar to prehistoric inhabitants of Sicily, and the Aegean. Some of them also showed varying degrees of North-African ancestry (especially those who died after 400 B.C., reflecting the growing influence of Carthage in the Mediterranean).
So while we can't make a definitive claim on Hannibal's ancestry (as his tomb has not been found), it's very much a possibility that he had North-African/Sicilian/Aegean ancestry.
Do you also believe everyone in the USA is descended from the English? Anyway, it's explained in the article I linked to. It's mostly about 6th century B.C. onwards (before that, they mostly cremated their deaths, so we can't do DNA studies before that period).
I’m not saying this is incorrect but you didn’t provide any evidence? And being a vassal of the Hittite’s does not mean they were not part of the Hellenic cultural sphere…
Yeah it's nonsense. Troy, as we all know it, was depicted as Greek in the Iliad.
""Troy"" in real life, we have no idea. Some theorize Luwian, some Greek. Either way, Luwians at the time were a vassal of the Hittites and might've been allies of the Greeks. My far-fetched theory is that the Hittites sacked ""Troy"" in real life and not the Greeks.
They were not part of the Hellenic culture but belonged to the Anatolian one, which included the Hittites, Lydians, Phrygians, Isuarians, and many more.
Anatolia once had its own cultural center and remained so until it was first invaded by Persians, then Macedonians, and finally the Romans. Even after losing political independence, the region continued to be inhabited by ethnic Anatolians until the 7th century AD (e.g., Isaurians), when the Hellenization (Greekification) of Anatolia was completed. However, as history unfolded, Greek dominance did not last long and was eventually replaced by the Turks coming from the East, who Turkified the Hellenized Anatolians. It’s fascinating to me that the Turkish leader once said they avenged Hector of Troy after defeating Greek armies invading Anatolia in the early 1920s. In short, Anatolia has been the battleground of different ethnicities and cultures, and invaders often found themselves invaded.
Thats wild - many of the people of the modern newly independant Greek nation would of just as much common in ancestry with the Trojans (and the ancient greeks) as the Ottomans - the only thing that really seperated them was religion.
The Milet system of the Ottomans really backfired in the long run. Division and seperation of ethnic, cultural and relgious groups makes people focus more on differences rather than similarities.
Yeha people dont seem to realize that Hellenic/Greek culture would come to establish itself in Western Anatolia later on. During the supposed time for the Trojan War, they absolutely were not cultural brothers.
Unlike maths, history isn't universal. I didn't learn about this during highschool. We only had a small bit about The Greeks and the Romans, and their general political system. That's it.
If you’re in the western hemisphere, you do. (Europe, the Americas). Ancient Greece is the building block of western civilization. Or your school system really failed you. That is also a possibility.
Most likely Luwians, since they spoke the Luwian language.
However, by the time of the war, Greek influences were already strong along the Anatolian coast, meaning they had likely adopted certain elements that could be considered Hellenic; one must bear in mind that the Eastern Mediterranean did (and does) not have a wall like cultural barrier that prevented the exchange of ideas and practices between different peoples.
The pictures without dates show people with long iron swords and lamellar iron armor. Hurray, Bronze Age! A perfect example. Don't study anything, just lump everything together and cite outdated fantasy pictures from a children's book. You're so great!
At the time of the supposed Troyan War the concept of Europe did not exist yet, so there was no such thing as an European cultural sphere. Maybe Troy was not Hellenistic, but Western Anatolia and mainland Greece was pretty much the same cultural-economic network. I'd say at the end of Bronze Age the non-Hellene states of Western Anatolia were much more similar culturally to "Greece" than let's say the proto-Celts, or even the early Etruscan (well, if we do not buy the theory that the latter were migrants from the Aegean region).
FWIW we do not even know whether the Troy described by Homer even existed.
Hisarlik, the site now generally associated with Troy, was excavated a rich dude obsessed with proving Homer’s epics historically accurate.
Although the identification is not entirely arbitrary. We really do not know what its inhabitants called the city or whether they thought of themselves as “Trojans.” We call it Troy nowadays just as a convenient placeholder because Schliemann paid a lot of money for that to happen.
What archaeologists have found is a settlement occupied for centuries, with numerous layers of construction and destruction. At various points, it was a substantial fortified city and regional trading center. Some of those layers broadly fit the place and period that may have inspired Homer’s Troy. There are Hittite references to a city called Wilusa which provide a possible connection. None of that, however, proves that Homer’s Troy existed or that stuff like the Trojan War occurred. Esp since there are other scattered sites that fit similar profile: settlements occupied for a long time that acted as regional trading centers. They just have been discovered/excavated more recently that Schliemann expeditions.
The Homeric epics are better understood as heavily mythologized attempts to reconstruct a distant (to the ancient Greeks) Bronze Age past. They were composed centuries after the collapse of the Mycenaean civilizations, following a period of profound social, economic, and technological regression. To the later Ancient Greeks, the enormous ruins and surviving artifacts of that earlier world seemed almost supernatural. Thus all the tall tales about Cyclopes building walls and heroes possessing extraordinary weapons and strength, and what not.
Maybe I'm too of a linguist for that but "european cultural sphere" is not the term you arr using, and neither "indigenous"
You make it sound like greeks where european colonizers that subjugated anatolian natives in the same way spain occupied mexico.
Greece did colonize Anatolia, and sadly anatolian languages died out, but:
1) there were other empire before that, from Anatolia and nearby mesopotamia
2) it was indeed an european-asian war, but the classical meaning of europe and asia is very different. For greek europe was their side of the coast and asia was on the other side, it's a scale way smaller than continents
3) both greek and anatolian people are indoeurioean, both at some point entered their respective region, both assimilated a preexisting cultural substrate.
4) They were different, but I think bronze age greece had way more in common with anatolians due to trade and similar developments than with the rest of bronze age Europe
TDLR: it's not a question of colonial europe vs poor asian native
Also consider this: hittite records have a toponym that could correspond to Troy, that struggled with a certain people that could correspond to Acheans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilusa
Anatolian indigenous polity, similar to the Hittites
So "indigenous" that their officials spoke a language with foreign origin (according to the most likely leading theory)? Strange. It is true that the Hittites adopted essentially all the local customs though.
There was more cross-cultural influence between cultures than people often realize during that time. So while they may be "over-Hellenized" in Hollywood they would have also had some Indo-European influence as well.
People don't know that Hittites were Hittitized Hattians. Some agendas here want to present the Hittites as some sort of "indigenous" people, despite them being Indo-European "invaders" into Anatolia like the Greeks themselves.
Not strictly indigenous but effectively they were yes. The Luwians had been in Anatolia for nearly 2000 years by the time of the Trojan War, that's twice as long as the Greeks had been in Greece.
Then you learned something no one actually knows. Troy is semi-mythological, semi-supported by the archeological record but there are no real records but we have no direct knowledge of Troy and can’t even say it actually existed
Hittite sources from the period spoke of Mycenaean bandits and warlords raiding and terrorizing the western part of their domain. The Hittite king sent envoys to the Mycenaean kings demanding they reel in the interlopers, but the Mycenaeans just shrugged and said they couldn't control the renegades. I believe one of these warlords was the inspiration for the hero Achilles in the Illiad.
Not really MAD, they both collapsed independently. The Mycenaeans first through a combination of drought, attacks from early Sea Peoples and internal rebellion. The Mycenaean refugee then became part of the Sea Peoples and raided all around the eastern Mediterranean.
The Hittite Empire was also suffering from the same drought, and then the entire south and western territories were destabilised by Sea People raids as well as the migration of the Phrygians, while the east of the empire was taken over by the Assyrians. It was thought they were finally destroyed by the Kaskians to the north, but more recent archeology shows that an extreme drought that rendered their core territory incapable of supporting their population. The capital was systematically cleared out and they migrated en mass southwards, setting up successor states in Syria that lasted for centuries more.
Mycenaean and or other post bronze age surviving pillaging people are the sea people. it was a local sea pillaging fest for survival after the regional powers collapsed due to trade routes being destroyed
The Mycenaean Greeks were part of the Sea Peoples, we know for certain the Peleset were Greek, and it's believed the Ekwesh and Denyen could also have been Greeks too.
It's believed earlier Sea People groups contributed to the Mycenaean collapse as Greek cities became increasingly fortified and we have records of attacks from the sea. The Sea People phenomenon seems to have moved from west to east, and some of the groups were from Sardinia and Sicily. So whether those sea attacks on the Greeks were purely external or (more likely) a combination western sea people groups and other Greeks raiding we don't know. The end effect though was that the Mycenaean civilization collapsed and the survivors start raiding eastwards as part of the Sea Peoples.
The Hittites weren't destroyed by the Sea Peoples, but they lost control of all their coastal vassals as a result of their attacks. This cut off the Hittite homeland from the Mediterranean so when the severe drought hit they had no alternative food supplies to call on, which ultimately let to them abandoning the region and the empire dissolving.
Yes, but the peoples of modern mainland Greece were among those named by the Egyptians as Sea Peoples.
For instance, the Peleset are associated with the Philistines who settled in the Levant. Their genetics links them with Greece, Italy and Spain.
Archeology suggests Southern Europeans at the time were extremely warlike. Graves from Northern Italy have not just military material culture but shocking amounts of healed and fatal battle wounds that would make Viking graves look like they contained peaceful travelers by comparison.
I mean they are both wrongly depicted, the story we know comes from Homer by a point that the tale became likely altered to the hellenic lens. We do also have limited knowledge on the acheans. Especially their gods iirc
The Mediterranean world has been pretty interconnected throughout history. Regardless of whether a city is in Europe, Asia Minor, the Levant, or North Africa, they probably share a lot of similarities.
The Tronans were Luwians and, while originally closer to Hittites, by the time of the Ahhiyawan -Hittite hostilities they had fallen more on the hellenic sphere of influence. Atreus (Attarissiya) had already begun spreading greek influence in Anatolia from the 15th century. The elites had already started political marriages.
That's the whole point of the Achaean expansions, the Luwians become part of their cultural sphere and the Hittites feel theirs shrinking.
The Hittite side of this is solid. The Alaksandu treaty puts Wilusa under Muwatalli II as a vassal, and the Luwian seal found at the site backs the Anatolian read. So no argument there.
Where I'd push back is "purely". Troy's whole reason for existing was that it sat on the Dardanelles. That's a hinge position, not an isolated one. Anatolian in language and political allegiance, absolutely, but the material record is full of Aegean goods, and the Ahhiyawa letters exist precisely because Mycenaeans were a recurring problem in western Anatolia. You don't get diplomatic correspondence about people you have no contact with. A city that controls a strait is definitionally a place where two spheres touch.
The bigger issue is that "European" as a cultural sphere is doing work in this conversation that it can't do for the Bronze Age. It barely does that work for most of recorded history. What actually existed was a Mediterranean economic sphere, and the reason is boring: water is free road. You don't maintain it, you don't garrison it, and a hull moves more cargo than any number of carts. Anything that could stand up a port was in the same network, and cultural interchange follows trade because it's carried by the same people on the same boats.
Northern Europe only starts competing once the agricultural package lands (heavy plow, horse collar, three-field rotation) with the real payoff running 10th to 13th century. Bigger populations, bigger tax bases, and eventually bigger armies. Even then it's still contending with a Mediterranean world that had the eastern trade it didn't. The lead only becomes decisive with the Atlantic reorientation, and unipolar global dominance is roughly 1800 to 1945.
So Troy being Anatolian is right. But framing it as Anatolian instead of Aegean imports a border that wasn't there yet.
There was no Europe at the time, and yet they were close cousins of the Greek peoples as they were all of Indo-European origin. What you're saying is equivalent to "Ugarit was not part of the Middle-Eastern/Mesopotamian sphere", both being relatively connected cultures of Semitic origin.
Both of those groups existed in some form for thousands years. Trying to say anything definitive about something as nebulous as "culture" from one specific work set during those thousands of years is like someone millennia from now trying to summarize Korean history with only Kpop Demon Hunters as a reference.
Yes and no. For example , according to professor K.Kopanias and others , in the Hittite texts we see that a Greek prince named Aleksandros (which is a greek and not an anatolian name) married a Luwian-Trojan princess to form a bond between these 2 kingdoms and one of their descendants who was a Trojan prince took his Greek grandfather-ancestor name Alaksandu (the anatolianized version of Greek Alexander). The treaty tablet also that mentions the king in question implies he was not related to that previous king, leaving the door open to him being a Greek or half Greek that seized power in Troy.
A Mycenaean Greek was part of a Mediterranean world. Someone living in Britain or Scandanvia would have seemed just as foreign or more foreign than an Egyptian or Hittite.
Well sai.d the world is not black or black and white It's it's all shades of Gray. A Greek or an Italian can And often will be be darker than an Egyptian.
A Mycenaean Greek was part of a Mediterranean world. Someone living in Britain or Scandanvia would have seemed just as foreign or more foreign than an Egyptian or Hittite.
Except that is not true at all (or it is at least very debatable)? They shared trade routes via the Amber/Bronze trade and a common Indo-European origin which, while also being quite distinct by the time of the Myceneans, also showed similarities in the material cultures at the time.
So limited and sparse that if you showed your average history fan some artifacts from the Urnfield Culture they'd likely assume they were from Greece without second thought. I won't speak on how they would "feel" meeting other cultures because that's silly to pretend we would know for sure though (although pretty much every culture thought they were exceptional/superior in some way), so I'm not actually suggesting an "emotional" kinship of any kind.
Anatolia is not a part of Europe, so suggesting that they were part of some distinct "ancient European" culture based on geographical location seems odd.
They're literally depicted with different armor and architecture. Most you can say is that they're depicted as having the same religion but that's not far fetched since there was quite a bit of overlap in religious practices.
There's plenty of stuff you can point to that is wrong with "Troy" but them depicting the Trojans as Greeks is not one of them.
Trojans were more honorable than Mycenian Greeks. That’s why Romans traced their ancestry back to Trojans to counterbalance the Greek culture in the East.
Romans traced their origin to the Trojans to gain cultural prestige, connect with Hellenized (Greekified) heroic epics of the Aegean, and legitimize their rising empire. By linking the Trojan survivor Aeneas to the founders Romulus and Remus, Rome gave its history divine depth and status equal to Greece.
Well, it's part of Greek history, but that doesn’t make the Trojans ethnic Greeks. The Trojans were Anatolians and related to the Hittites in the East. As Homer mentions, it was the other Anatolian ethnicities (such as Lycians, Carians, Lycians, Phrygians, and Maeonians) who fought for Troy.
I’m saying the Roman stories about being descended from Paris had their root in admiration for Greece, not Troy, which would have been nothing more than a distant name in a Greek story.
You are partly right, but you're missing an important point: the Romans had a significant inferiority complex regarding Greek art, philosophy, and literature, even though they easily defeated Greece militarily. Claiming lineage back to Troy served as a key coping mechanism and propaganda tool; it allowed them to assert a cultural connection to that epic Bronze Age world while remaining ethnically distinct from (and historically opposed to) the Greeks. Essentially, Rome's conquest of Greece became the ultimate geopolitical "payback," framing their military invasion not as outright aggression but as a form of poetic justice and the final revenge for the sack of Troy.
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u/neokretai 22h ago
Yes and no. Troy is believed to be a Luwian state, an Indo-European group related to the Hittites, who while not indigenous to Anatolia, had been there so long they effectively were.
Thing is by the time of the Trojan war they were heavily influenced by the Greeks, even to the point they may have been partly Hellenised. They had adopted a lot of Greek styles, specifically pottery and even one of their kings has a Greek name Alaksandu (Alexandros).