[egyptian music] [non-english singing] NARRATOR: In northern
Turkey, there is a place where the
wind blows ceaselessly. It fills the landscape
with a restless quality, with expectations. It blows across the
countryside today as it has since the
beginning of time. This is the Trojan plane where
myth collides with history. The air is charged with ancient
memories of an illicit love affair that let loose
the winds of war. This Titanic struggle between
the Trojans and the Greeks is set in human memory. The story of the Trojan War
handed down by generations of oral poets was so powerful
that 500 years after it is believed to have happened,
it was set down in writing, forever immortalized by
the Greek poet, Homer. His epic called "The Iliad"
is believed by some scholars to be based on historical fact. But was it fact
or was it fiction? Now, the goddess Dawn climbed
up the Olympus heights, declaring the light of day to
Zeus and the deathless gods as the king commanded heralds
to cry out loud and clear and muster the long haired
Mycenaean's to full assembly. "The Iliad: Book 2." [egyptian music] Any evidence that would
verify Homer's work as history has eluded scholars. Surely there was a city that
flourished on this spot. The proof is here
in these stones. But were these people the heroes
of Homer's Iliad or was it just another
ancient civilization whose homes and remnants
are being unearthed here? This is the true
mystery of Troy. [egyptian music] When the civilization that lies
buried here was flourishing, it was a time before history. It was a time when you could
stand here in this place and watch chariots charge across
these plains, the glint of sun on bronzed armor. If you listen carefully, you
can hear the clash of sword on sword. Scholars searched the pages
of "The Iliad" for clues to the elusive connection
between this physical site and Homer's mythic Troy. [music playing] According to Homer, ancient
Troy was a glittering city. It was beautifully wrought. It had palaces of gold and
great walls all around. The sun shown and the
crops were bountiful. The rivers commander,
lifeblood of Troy, flowed through the
plains to the sea which lay at the gates of
the city home recalled Iliad. And Zeus, the immortal Greek
god, smiled down on the Trojans from Mount Olympus. Of all the cities under
the sun and starry skies, wherever men who walked
the earth have dwelled. I honor sacred alien most
with my immortal heart. "The Iliad: Book 2." The great mystery of
Troy is whether or not the site that we gingerly
identify with Troy has any association whatever
with the site of the same name, which the Homeric epics recount. The community of Troy back
at the end of the Bronze Age, around the 13th
century BC, seems to be a fairly
sophisticated kind of place, like the late Bronze Age
palaces all the way from Greece to Mesopotamia. CAROL THOMAS: The
citadel of Troy must have been
very, very lively. It seems to have been a port
of entry, a port of trade. It was a very wealthy site. It was well known by
cultures as far away as the south--
southeastern Mediterranean. NARRATOR: Homer's
epic tale is spun out of 500 years of oral history. It begins with the telling of
the story of the Trojan Wars, when Paris is sent by his
father, King Priam, ruler of Troy, across the Aegean Sea
to the city-state of Sparta. He is to form a truce
with the Greeks. His mission would result
in anything but peace. Paris attends a banquet given by
Menelaus, the ruler of Sparta. There he falls instantly in
love with the wife of Menelaus, Queen Helen, said to be the most
beautiful woman in the world. Dazzled by her
extraordinary presence, Paris abducts Helen and spirits
her across the sea to his home to Troy. Once there, she renounces
her husband and children, and abandons herself
to her love for Paris. The kidnapping sets
in motion conflict between the Greek city-states,
the likes of which the ancient world had
never before known. J. NORMAN AUSTIN: One question
that comes up for-- for just about everybody in connection
with the Trojan War is the question about Helen. Was there a real Helen, and
was the war fought for Helen? We today would believe that
there are many economic factors that would have
led to such a war. However, women
were major factors in these conflicts
between cities and between one
king and another. So it's quite possible there was
a Helen over whom the war was fought. [music playing] NARRATOR: Agamemnon, the
brother of Menelaus and ruler of Mighty Mycenae
in ancient Greece, is the field Marshal
of the troops. And out he marched leading
the way from council. The rest sprang to their feet. The scepter kings obeyed
the great field Marshal. Rank and file stream behind
and rushed like swarms of bees pouring out of a rock hollow,
burst on endless burst, bunched in clusters, seething
over the first spring ruled. The troops assembled, the
meeting grounds shook. "The Iliad: Book 2." The Greeks set out in
hot pursuit of Paris and they abducted Helen,
mounting a huge flotilla of more than 1,100 ships
carrying 100,000 men. When they arrive at
the coast near Troy, the Greeks set up encampments
at the edge of the water and lay siege to the city. [dramatic music] In the 10th year
of the Trojan War, the Greeks hatch a plot
inspired by one of the greatest military commanders. Odysseus, also known as Ulysses
conceives an ingenious plan. He orders the construction of
a large horse made of wood. We have no direct
evidence for a Trojan horse. I think probably most
specialists would at least raise an eyebrow over this. Just a little bit skeptical. NARRATOR: The labor
takes three days. When the beast is
finished, the Greeks wait for night and
deposit the horse outside the gates of Troy. It is designed to seem
like a peace offering. Trojans regard the
horse as a sacred beast, but unbeknownst to them, it
is filled with Greek soldiers. [music playing] The Greeks then
retreat to the coast, and by all appearances
set sail for home in the few ships that remain. The Trojans awake
to find the trophy and are overjoyed with the
apparent retreat of the Greeks. They drag the wooden
beast through the gates and into the city never
suspecting the mortal danger hidden inside. A drunken feast of celebration
follows and continues far into the night. Exhausted, the Trojans
collapse in the streets filled to bursting
with wine and feasting. [music playing] As the night waits
for the break of day, so do the Greek soldiers hiding
in the great wooden creation, a creation that forever will
be known as the Trojan horse. [dramatic music] Finally, the rays of the
new day break over Troy. The warriors secreted in
the belly of the beast crawl out of their hiding
place and throw open the gates of the city. The Greeks slaughter the
startled Trojans without mercy, killing the men, enslaving
the women and the children. Makes no sense to us the
war ends with this big horse that the Trojans are so foolish,
they don't even open the doors on the side to look inside it. Cities tend to get taken in
Greek stories through trickery, and in actual Greek history too,
through trickery rather than through a direct assault. A
disuse is the master trickster of ancient Greek
history, therefore it makes sense that he would
come up with a master trick to take the city. NARRATOR: When the carnage
is over, Helen is left alive. Her husband, Menelaus, is about
to kill her, but is so dazzled by the beauty of
her naked breasts, that he drops his sword and
falls to his knees at her feet. This is the story of Troy
as recounted by Homer. Is it history or is it myth? STEPHEN L. GLASS: Mysteries
of Troy evoke intense interest on the part of classicist
and archaeologists. Even those who are just faintly
interested in the literature of the period because
this story is so good and the heroic characters are so
interesting in their own right that nobody wants
the site itself or the story itself
to be pure fiction. NARRATOR: A glittering
city on a Turkish hilltop; a woman so beautiful that her
face launched 1,000 ships; and a mysterious weaver of
the legend who wrote it all; parts of a puzzle that seemed
to get more complicated with each piece that
is put in place. [dramatic music] Perhaps there is no better
place to ask about the origins of "The Iliad" and
its immortal author than here at the archaeological
site in Western Turkey, believed to be ancient Troy. But the search for the origins
of the poet known as Homer would take us back,
far back in time, to the 13th century
before Christ, when the legend of
"The Iliad" was born. The stories of the Trojan
War and all his glories were passed in oral form
down through the ages from singer to singer
until the 8th century BCE. At that time, they were set down
by a poet many called Homer. CAROL THOMAS: Homer is an
incredible personal genius, and his particular telling,
this particular singing of "The Iliad" and perhaps
also of "The Odyssey" made everybody's
hair stand on end. They couldn't forget it. Someone was able to capture
it in writing, and did. It was not in my
view Homer himself. NARRATOR: Although
Homer's persona looms large on the map of history,
he remains as much a myth as his characters. Some scholars question
if there ever really was one person
responsible for the epic. A field that "The Iliad" is
an amalgamation of the best of the oral telling of
the Trojan War story set down by a scribe. This ancient journalist may have
used Homer as a nom de plume. IAN MORRIS: The traditions had
it that he was a blind poet, that he was inspired
by the muses, by the gods of poetry
and music and so on, and they put all this
poetry into his head. NARRATOR: Sing to
me now you muses who hold the halls of Olympus. You are goddesses. You are everywhere. You know all things. All we hear is the
distant ring of glory. We know nothing. "The Iliad: Book 2." The young Homer
would attach himself to some great oral poets. He would spend many years
hanging around listening to the poet doing his stuff. Would gradually
start to remember a lot of the expressions
that the poet used. But what he was
doing is not so much memorizing poetry as learning
a technique of improvising poetry. Homer it seems by
general agreement was just by far the
best of these poets. NARRATOR: Of all the
characters of "The Iliad," Helen is perhaps
the most enigmatic. She appears infrequently
in the stories, yet she is the force that
drives the legend forward. Who was the woman who
brought nations to battle? The woman with the face
that launched 1,000 ships. J. NORMAN AUSTIN: Then we have
this mysterious figure of Helen for whom both the Trojans and
Greeks were willing to fight. And the Greeks of
the historical period were themselves perplexed as
to why they would have fought so long for-- for the woman. [dramatic music] NARRATOR: In "The Iliad,"
Paris is challenged by one of the Trojan War
lords to give Helen back to the Greeks and
end the slaughter. Paris answers, this way. Now, I say this to our
stallion breaking Trojans. I say no straight out. I won't give up the woman. But those treasures I have
hauled home from Argos, I'll return them all and
add from my own stores. "The Iliad: Book 7." Over the ages, myth
has built upon myth. IAN MORRIS: There is a story
recorded in the 6th and 5th centuries that says that
Helen never actually went to Troy at all. That at the beginning
of the war what happens is Paris loads
them into his boat. He's about to sail off to Troy. The gods decide we
can't have this, and they intervene and they
spirit Helen away to Egypt and send a phantom
to Troy instead, and the Greeks spend 10 years
besieging this city that she's not even in. And they only find
out afterwards that she was in-- in
Egypt the whole time and the whole war was just this
ridiculous joke the gods played on them. NARRATOR: For some, Helen
is not a human being, but a personification
of the fertile plains surrounding Troy. [music playing] Here overlooking
the Dardanelles, we can almost envision Homer
and the heroic characters who inhabit the pages of his Iliad. We can almost see
them here at Troy on the hill called
Hisarlik restored to all their former glory. Whether real or mythic, we
can almost feel a kinship with the people who lived and
loved, fought, and died here. What can all the
ancient artifacts tell us of this city that
vanished so long ago? Archaeologist at Troy continue
to uncover the bones of people and animals. [dramatic music] Troy today. An archaeologist gingerly
extracts the delicate spear point from the accumulated
debris of three millennia. [music playing] This is the first human
contact with this remnant from another age in
more than 3,000 years. It was buried here 1,200 years
before the birth of Christ. If I were at Troy and
knelt down and picked up an arrowhead or a spear
point or something like that, it would probably overwhelm me. And I have a feeling
that what would happen is that many of the
stories that I'm familiar with from "The Iliad"
would come flooding back sort of into my mind, and I would
almost be recreating for myself a lot of the events that
Homer talks about in the poem. NARRATOR: This spear chip in
all the implements of this time were made of an alloy of
copper and tin called bronze. This metal gave his
name to an entire age. The Bronze Age encompasses the
years from roughly 3,000 BCE to 1,100 BCE. [dramatic music] This city, which is called Troy,
was settled in the early part of his age and Homer's Trojan
Wars, if they ever truly occurred, marked
the end of a era. [dramatic music] The early Trojans were a
combination of two peoples. The Phaeacians came to Troy from
what is now continental Greece and Turkey across
the Dardanelles. The Phrygians, whose homeland
was east in Asia and Turkey, had migrated west. The first habitation at
Troy dates to 3,200 BCE, fully 2,000 years before
Homer's legend takes place. [dramatic music] The city was situated at the
edge of Asia Minor on the mouth of the Dardanelles. Through the centuries,
they enjoyed the benefit of a strategic location. [dramatic music] Today, as then, this
narrow neck of water is the gateway from the
Aegean to the Black Sea and the riches of the east. A strange combination
of tides and winds, which prevail in the
Dardanelles to this day, forced sailors of
the late Bronze Age to wait in the shadow of
Troy for favorable seas. Even when conditions were
right, passage to the Black Sea was a treacherous proposition. It was the 13th century BCE when
seafarers had not yet learned to sail against the wind. If you go to Troy now,
it's quite a long way inland, several miles inland. It's very possible though
that back in the late Bronze Age in the 13th century BC
that the coastline in fact came in a lot closer. When Homer describes
it, the coastline is basically a brisk walk
from the walls of the city. [dramatic music] NARRATOR: Today,
the digs at Hisarlik are about 10 kilometers
from the shore. The bays Homer describes
have soldered in, and what were once
marsh lands are now fields of oats and cotton. The Hittites with a dominant
civilization during the Trojan era, and their written records
may provide a missing piece of the puzzle. The Hittites were in some
ways their culture seems to be rather like the
Mycenaean culture, and they kept lots of records
and small clay tablets. And some of these refer
to a great kingdom to the west called
Ahhiyawa, which sounds very similar to the ancient name
for the homeland of the heroes, Achaea. And so some people think
that Ahhiyawa is referring to Mycenaean Greece are here. NARRATOR: It is also
from the Hittites that we possibly have the
first written confirmation of the existence of
the people of Troy. The clay blocks which have
come to be known as the Hittite tablets date between the
18th and 13th centuries BCE, and make brief mention
of a place called Wilusa. Some scholars speculate that
if the W is dropped from Wilusa to Ilusa, you are closer
to Ileon or Ilium, which is Homer's name for Troy. CAROL THOMAS: Another fact
that we have from the Hittite tablets, there is a particular
important person at Wilusa whose name is Alexandross,
and Alexander is another name for one of the most important
people in the Trojan War, namely Paris. So is that coincidental? Is it like saying, well, Smith? You find the name of Smith
at two different sites, thus they must be connected. But it's another
piece of the puzzle. NARRATOR: By 18th century BCE,
forces were introduced to Troy by the Phaeacians who
lived to the north across the Dardanelles. Recent excavations at Troy have
unearthed hundreds and hundreds of horse bones. Though the significance of
the find is not yet clear, they could serve to confirm
Homer's label of the Trojans as horse tamers. Little in this world unfolds as
we predict that Trojans could not have foreseen the
contributions they would make to the chain of humanity. They created various sporting
games using their horses, including head stands and
acrobatics which they performed before admiring crowds. By the Renaissance
in The early 1300s, these performances had
spread throughout Italy. It would become the foundation
for the earliest form of the circus. [dramatic music] Popularity of the
circus in Europe would rise, eventually
spreading overseas, where in 1868 a famous clown
dressed in red, white, and blue would be the inspiration that
came to symbolize the United States Uncle Sam. [dramatic music] By 1260 BCE, the
city of Troy sat high on the hill called Hisarlik,
which had been formed by the ruins of several
civilizations being buried one on top of the other. Each of these layers has given a
Roman numeral from one to nine. Homer's Troy is generally
assigned to layers six or seven. CAROL THOMAS: Troy 6
is a magnificent sight. It's a wealthy site. It's a site that
is clearly known by a lot of other cultures for
its goods, as a trading center, uh, whatever its value may--
may have been, enhance, a site worth taking. Troy 7 is a rather miserable
contracted site and not so well worth taking, but it does
show signs of cluttering-- of clustering of people who have
come in from outside, who have embedded in the ground
large storage jars in-- in the very floor of
the small little hovels that they've thrown
up very quickly. It would indicate to
many-- it does to me. --signs of siege, signs of
people who regularly live outside of the fortification
wall being driven inside, their conditions not being
very good, but living in those conditions
far preferable than the alternative, which--
would which would be death. NARRATOR: Ultimately,
the story of Homer's Troy is a story of war. [dramatic music] Archaeological evidence
shows two bird layers of this city we call Troy, which
roughly corresponds to the time in which Homer's epic is set. These layers together
with the artifacts point to a great conflict, a
war and siege which many choose to call the Trojan War. What is there to positively
connect the hill of Hisarlik to Homer's Troy? Scholars keep returning to
survey these ruins searching for clues. STEPHEN L. GLASS:
The site of Hisarlik is a reasonable site for
Troy because in a general way it obeys the mandates
of the Homeric-- the Homeric poems. It is a-- a city of some
dimension which is high walled enough to
require a siege take it. It is close enough
to the sea to enable the Greeks to get to
and from their ships in reasonable order. And it has a stream, uh,
running through the plain which corresponds to the stream-- this commander
which-- which Homer mentions in his-- in his poetry. [dramatic music] NARRATOR: Had it not been
for Homer's great epic poem, would so much attention
have been brought to bear on this Bronze Age settlement? One man forever
changed our perspective on this place and this poem. In 1870, a German
self-made millionaire set out to find the lost city
of Homer's Troy, a well fund copy of "The Iliad"
tucked under his arm. With brutal fervor, he
excavated what was then an ordinary hilltop, and
in the process pried open the lid on one of the
world's most compelling ongoing mysteries. [dramatic music] Until the 19th century the
only place Troy could be found was in literature and in
our collective imaginations. But Troy seemed destined
to forever be located only in the pages of Homer's "Iliad." Then in 1872 a prosperous German
merchants set off for Turkey, armed only with a
copy of Homer's book and a personal quest to find
the legendary city which fell to a great wooden
horse 3,000 years before. His name was
Heinrich Schliemann. IAN MORRIS: Some people
think Schliemann was one of the world's great frauds. He was certainly one of the
world's great psychotics. Whether he was a fraud
is another matter. STEPHEN L. GLASS: Heinrich
Schliemann in the past several years has had a fairly bad press
about his honesty and the way he conducted his
scholarly affairs, vis- -vis his colleagues. Nonetheless you cannot dispute
the fact that insofar as Bronze Age archaeology is concerned, he
kickstarted it into existence. NARRATOR: Schliemann spoke 12
languages, including Greek. This facility and
a keen business sense that turned him into a
millionaire at a young age. All of his accomplishments
in commerce were merely a prelude to what
he considered his destiny, to find the lost city of Troy. Despite the fact that mid 19th
century scholars considered a belief in the physical
Troy to be folly, Schliemann never gave up
his stubborn contention that the real Troy lay buried
somewhere in Western Turkey. In 1869, Schliemann made his
home base Athens, Greece. There he met and married
a beautiful young Greek named Sophie. [dramatic music] Then in 1872 he
set off for Turkey. JOHN FLEISHMAN: When Schliemann
arrived, it was the boonies. There was nobody there
other than the Turks. There were ruins everywhere. I mean, it's very
hard for an American to-- to visualize this, but
that whole part of the world there are ruined cities every
few kilometers who come along. And you'll see just
lying out of a field, you'll see a Corinthian
column or something like that. NARRATOR: While
traveling through Turkey, he met an English expatriate
named Frank Calvert. Calvert tells Schliemann of
his theory about a hill known as Hisarlik. Schliemann begins applying his
litmus test to Hisarlik and two or three other hills which were
equally promising candidates. [dramatic music] Using "The Iliad"
like a treasure map, Schliemann eliminated all but
Hisarlik, a mound about 130 feet high and 700 feet across. [dramatic music] Reasonably convinced that
Hisarlik matched the Troy Homer was writing about,
Schliemann secured a permit from the Turkish government
and hired an army of shovelers, which sometimes numbered
as many as 100 men. [dramatic music] Using clever literary detection
and extraordinary confidence and his own gut
instinct, Schliemann found what thousands had missed
through almost 18 centuries of searching. He located the physical site
of what we refer to as Troy. But his excavation method
was less than subtle. IAN MORRIS: What happened
when he started digging? Was it he much to
his surprise found this tremendously complicated,
tremendously deep sequence of ancient cities piled
one on top of another? And he just sort of bulldozed
to the middle of these things, yanking things
out of the ground, demolishing buildings that got
in his way, whatever struck his fancy. JOHN FLEISHMAN: The
farther down in the hill he dug, the cruder
the material became. So what he found was not
one Troy, but nine Troy's. And they were stacked up
like a wedding cake from top to bottom, from the youngest
right down to the oldest. Schliemann himself had no
idea what he discovered. [dramatic music] NARRATOR: By May of 1873,
Schliemann and his crew of shovelers had been
at work several months. One day he dismissed
the workmen early. Something had caught his eye. According to the
account in his diary, Schliemann jumped
into the trench and began clawing the earth. Shoveling, ripping material
away to get at the glimmering objects buried there. From the dust of ages, he
extracts a hoard of gold. There are cups, brooches, other
jewels, and more than 8,000 gold beads. [music playing] In the version of the story
Schliemann wrote in his diary, he handed the objects
up to his wife, Sophie, and she transported them in
her skirts to a safe place. [music playing] With their hidden treasure,
Schliemann and Sophie steal out of Turkey. Thus begins the
mysterious odyssey of what some believe were
the jewels of Helen of Troy. While in Greece, Schliemann
photographs his wife, Sophie, in the jewelry, calling
the headdress, which he himself had fashioned from the
loose gold beads, The Crown of Helen. The news flashes around the
world in bold headlines. Schliemann Finds
Priam's Treasure. His fame thus secured,
he donates the objects to a museum in Berlin. Not only is the authenticity
of the treasurer challenged, but his origin is
also in question. His account of the finding
of the treasure of Priam is full of fabrications. He said that Sophie
his wife was with him. We now have proof that she
was in Athens with her family at the time it was found. Some people think they
found records from, um, market dealings in Istanbul
to suggest that Schliemann actually bought this
treasure on the open market, took it to Troy, sent
away the workmen, buried it in the walls,
yanked it out in order to have a big publicity scoop. NARRATOR: The Treasure of Priam
remained unharmed in Berlin for the next 70 years. [music playing] And in 1943, Hitler orders
all German art treasures crated, catalogued, and
secured in various bunkers and repositories around Germany. [dramatic music] But then Berlin is
liberated in 1945. The treasure vanishes. It went to Troy in
the summer of 1993. I thought I was gonna do a
story on the archaeology there. The day before I get
there, the Russians announce that they found
Schliemann's long lost treasure of the so-called
Treasure of Priam. NARRATOR: The Russians admit
that the treasure has been found in the basement of the
Pushkin museum in Moscow. Had it always been
there or have there been other mysterious detours
for the jewels of Helen since 1945? Is it still intact or
have pieces of the hoard been filtered off? JOHN FLEISHMAN:
The reason everyone wants to get a look at it is
between the time it disappeared in 1945 and the time it
resurfaces in Russia in 1993, a lot has been
discovered about Troy and a lot has been
discovered about Schliemann. NARRATOR: But whether he
is reviled as a charlatan or revered as a
genius, Schliemann will not be forgotten. He died in Naples,
Italy in 1890. Each day archaeologists
work at Troy, they are confronted with a
ditch that in some places is 50 feet wide
and 100 feet deep. It's called Schliemann's Trench. This savage scar that tears
through the middle of Hisarlik is the legacy of Schliemann's
discovery, this ancient city that may well be
Homer's legendary Troy. [dramatic music] To the world in the last
part of the 19th century, the hill of Hisarlik was
an exotic place wrapped in mysteries and promises. It was a powerful draw for
other archaeologists of the day. One of them was Wilhelm
Dorpfeld, a German architect. Dorpfeld was no
newcomer to Troy. He had accompanied Schliemann
on two of his gigs. In 1893, Dorpfeld returned
to the site alone. He was trying to reconcile
the small two acre area that Schliemann had uncovered,
with Homer's description of the great city
of Troy sprinkled throughout "The Iliad." You get this vision from
Homer this grand place with enormous fortification
walls, and when you get there, it's probably not much bigger
the size of a football field inside these walls of Troy. It's hard to imagine all
the action "The Iliad" taking place there. [dramatic music] NARRATOR: Both
Schliemann and Dorpfeld suspected that the city
Homer wrote about in his poem was the uppermost and innermost
ring of habitation on Hisarlik. It is called the citadel, and
it would have accommodated about 1,000 souls. Dorpfeld began excavating
outside the citadel wall. There he found larger
rectangular houses on a terraced
landscape surrounded by a magnificent masonry wall. What he didn't realize was
that beyond this second ring of habitation, it was an even
larger part of the settlements that would not be found
for almost 100 years. [dramatic music] In 1990, the current
archaeological team at Troy discovered the foundation of
the true outer wall of the city. Scientists mapped the barrier,
almost one quarter of a mile from the center of the city. They actually dug away. They didn't find a wall. They found a trench. A ditch actually cut into the
bedrock and the archaeologists now think that that was
the face of the wall. That if you want to
make a high wall, dig a ditch in front of it and
then put the wall behind it. And that makes the wall that
much higher, that much harder to climb over. And that's what
they found, and that makes Troy a much bigger place. It makes it a more suitable
candidate for Homer's Troy. NARRATOR: At last, the
true picture of Troy begins to emerge. This new find reflects a
settlement of perhaps 6,000 people. Science is closing in
on the mystery of Troy. [music playing] In 1932, a professor at the
University of Cincinnati in Ohio, Carl Blegen,
reopens the Troy digs. [music playing] When Blegen took
over the dig at Troy, it was said the site
was a ruin of a ruin. He set up the task of
organizing the very pieces of archaeological evidence that
Schliemann and Dorpfeld had unearthed. JOHN FLEISHMAN: I
mean, most laymen come to archaeological museums,
they see these pottery bits and their eyes glaze over. Carl Blegen was a master. You could dump a truckload of
pottery bits on a big table and Carl Blegen could walk
down the table sorting them out by time just by looking at them. NARRATOR: In 1939, he set
off for Western Greece, looking for the
elusive connection that would link the Mycenaean's
to the site of Troy. There he had what
has been described as the most remarkable first day
in the history of archaeology. While digging in an
olive grove, Blegen stumbled upon 600 clay tablets
in an indecipherable language, later called linear
B. These were later dated to the 13th century BCE. Could this be the written proof
that would place the Mycenaean Greeks on the shores
of the Dardanelles, and thus bring Homer's "Iliad"
closer to factual history? The tablets proved that
the people from Mycenae were indeed Greeks,
and possessed a form of writing in the
late Bronze Age, at a time that corresponds
to the Trojan War. At present, we know that there
was a flourishing civilization on the mainland of Greece
during the Bronze Age. We know that there was
contact between certain of the mainland
Greek sites and Troy, but we have to take a jump. It's a leap of faith to
have Mycenaean warriors encamped near Troy causing
any of the disturbances that we see there
during this period. NARRATOR: To this
day, there is still no direct link of the physical
Troy with Homer's story. JOHN FLEISHMAN: The current
debates about Homer, about Troy, the archaeology
and the oral and literary tradition, are very
simply unending. The poem is a
mystery in the same way that human life is a mystery. The Trojans really come
to symbolize all of us as human beings, that all
of us ultimately are going to face our own demise. Then in a sense I think
what Homer does and is able to really capture
is a sense that we all live in the city of Troy. NARRATOR: And so Homer
brings the reader full circle, from reality
to myth and back again. All roads may lead to
Rome, but even the Romans would agree that they start
here at Troy, here where evidence of the myth may be
only the turn of a stone away. One thing more, to the rest I'd
pass on this advice, sail home now. You will never set your
eyes on the day of doom that topples looming Troy. [music playing]
