The Lost City of Troy | Full Documentary | TRACKS

for centuries archaeologists have tried to find the legendary city of troy but without success troy is famous as the scene of the trojan war the fight for the world's most beautiful woman helen and the ruse that won her back the trojan horse it's a story that's been told and retold by poets and actors for thousands of years but is it real did the city of troy actually exist a century ago a pioneer archaeologist claimed he'd found the site of troy but while the public was satisfied the experts were not they said it was impossible to match the clues in the ground with a story that may only be fantasy now a team of archaeologists has returned to the same site in a dig that spans the past 15 years they've made discoveries which are both dramatic and controversial but at the heart of their work one question persists have they found the lost world of troy [Music] [Music] at first glance it doesn't look like much nestling among remote farmland a small hill baking in the mediterranean sun but this hill is in fact a gateway to the ancient past [Music] this is hisarlak in northwest turkey it stands near the dardanelle strait a few miles from the scene of the world war one gallipoli campaign every year thousands of tourists come to hisalak in the belief that they're visiting one of the most famous sites of antiquity the city of troy but many experts take a different view they say no one knows if troy ever existed and even if it did there's no proof it stood here [Music] for 15 years an archaeological team has worked at hisalek their findings may resolve the issue once and for all investigating the site is not easy it involves uncovering multiple layers of human settlement these date from 3000 bc the early bronze age to late roman times around 600 a.d it's a delicate task excavating layer upon layer of remains in charge is eminent german archaeologist manfred kaufman it's a kind of operation what we are doing sometimes i would compare it with a heart operation of a brain operation troya is a difficult place with all these layers and with all these expectations of every scholar in the world and everybody knows it better and wants to advise kaufman's work at hisalak attracts such attention because it relates to one of the oldest and most famous stories in european literature the story of troy was first set down over two and a half thousand years ago in a work called the iliad part poem part drama the iliad was originally performed by actors in the theaters of ancient greece credit for writing the iliad belongs to the greek poet homer but no one is sure whether it was a work of imagination or whether it was based on real historical events the story goes like this troy is ruled by king priam priam has a son called paris paris falls in love with the world's most beautiful woman a greek princess named helen when the trojan elders first saw helen they softly said to one another small wonder that trojans should for such a woman suffer hardships marvelously she is like an immortal goddess to look upon but helen is already married paris abducts her from greece and takes her home to troy the result is war [Music] the conflict rages for ten long years no chance of victory in sight the greeks pretend to retreat leaving a gift at the gates of troy an oversized wooden statue of a horse inside the horse a group of warriors sits nervously waiting what follows is probably the most ingenious and unlikely example of siege breaking ever recorded the unsuspecting trojans bring the horse into the city the soldiers hiding inside creep out and open the city gates the greek army pours in helen is rescued but troy's fate is sealed the iliad gives a haunting account of the destruction and massacre that followed forthwith the greek heroes hewed the trojans down on every side their dying groans rose hideous as a sword smoke them the river ran red with blood and it seemed as though all troy was burning utterly in fire homer was writing in the 7th century bc some 500 years after the events he described were supposed to have taken place that meant the iliad could be a work of complete fantasy whether there was anything like the kind of war that homer described with a vast greek army besieging the city for 10 years for particular reasons under particular leadership all that must be very speculative the homeric myths are a composite of many traditions built up over time there are many wars and there are other sites like troy um in that part of the world so whether the iliad is actually true as a series of events or not i don't think can ever be proven in the iliad homer described the city in some detail its size its surroundings its wealth for centuries scholars and historians tried to find a place that matched homer's description but their efforts came to nothing then in 1871 adventurer and self-proclaimed archaeologist heinrich schliemann claimed he had found troy here at hisalak in northwest turkey schliemann first got the idea from this man british amateur archaeologist frank calvert critics later claimed that schliemann stole both calvert's research and the credit for the find archaeologist donald easton has spent five seasons at the hessalic dig and has made a special study of schliemann's life and work it's often said that schliemann did enormous damage to this site and in some ways that is true his initial work was unbelievably crude i mean he was winching down great vertical chunks of earth using crowbars and winches and battering rams at first schliemann dug down to the lowest part of the mound in the process he carved a massive trench right through the center of the site it was a typically drastic approach he drove this enormous north-south trench through the mound digging it out with the object then of widening out and opening up the whole area so as to be able to expose the city of prayer but schliemann could never have imagined what he was about to find [Music] as he dug at various times over the next 20 years he uncovered not one city but nine different settlements each built upon the other dating back more than 5 000 years to 3000 bc there has been continuous human occupation here longer than almost anywhere else in the world archaeologists still marvel at the prospect here we can get a really nice picture of the layer cake that is troy because down at the bottom we've got the remains of troy one from about 3000 bc you can see there um the side of schliemann's north south trench which he cut through in the early years then up the side here is a gradual build up with a platform laid out in about 2500 bc on which troy 2 was built and there if you look at those unexcavated pinnacles of earth up there if you were to dig into those you would find remains of troy three and try four and that's what makes this place such a such a wonderful rich site this this great accumulation of ruins over such a long time but the site turned out to be rich in more ways than one as he finished digging his great trench schliemann literally struck gold [Music] buried in the earliest layer the layer he believed dated to the time of the trojan war schliemann uncovered a fabulous treasure he claimed it belonged to the trojan leader in homer's story king priam for schliemann the treasure proved beyond a shadow of doubt that the troy of legend really existed and that the sight of his salak was it the treasure was put on display in the berlin museum it caused a sensation triumphantly schliemann even dressed his wife in some of the more spectacular pieces and published her picture in the press [Music] but stylistic analysis by schliemann's colleagues revealed that the treasure belonged to a much earlier period the early bronze age a thousand years before the time of homer's story the treasure could have had nothing to do with the troy of legend it was simply too old it has nothing really to offer us for the second millennium bc when the trojan war should have taken place it has no connection with king priam if king prime ever lived it had no connection with the trojan war if the trojan war ever happened by the time of his death in 1890 schliemann had been forced to admit the collapse of his claim to have found troy after schliemann's death the treasure went on to have an adventurous career in 1945 during the last days of world war ii invading soviet troops poured into the city where the treasure was stored berlin as the third reich collapsed the soviets took the treasure away for safekeeping it promptly vanished and stayed vanished for decades only 50 years later as the soviet union in its turn was crumbling did the treasure reappear hidden in the cellars of moscow's pushkin museum once again the public were able to feast their eyes on a marvel of antiquity schliemann's treasure is without doubt a fantastic horde of early bronze age jewelry yet it brings us no closer to confirming the existence of troy but new findings made by the latest expedition to his salak may change all that [Music] time is running out for archaeologist manfred kaufman he's spent 15 years digging at his sarlacc in northwest turkey the supposed site of ancient troy and this is his final season kaufman is one of the world's leading experts on the archaeology of ancient turkey and has spent 30 years in the region he's come to believe in the face of academic skepticism that isalek and troy are one in the same kofman's operation is called project troyer it ranks among the largest most expensive archaeological digs ever mounted each day dozens of local labourers work the site artists meticulously record the exact position of thousands of found objects restorers carefully piece them together while a 70 strong team drill and scan and dig for more kauffman faces the same challenge faced by his 19th century predecessor heinrich schliemann how to solve the riddle of troy in the face of critical scrutiny but kaufman remains confident we are in the position of putting the excavation of schliemann in a right context because we are here and seeing the walls of schliemann understanding them better thinking about them and having this huge work with a lot of workmen better under control the hisalex site consists of nine layers dating back five thousand years the excavation centered foremost on layer number six the three thousand year old late bronze age settlement this had stood at the time the trojan war was supposed to have taken place but layer 6 was nothing like the city described in homer's epic the iliad [Music] that prompted skeptics to claim it was simply not big enough to qualify as troy indeed the entire site was little bigger than the tower of london but kaufman like schliemann suspected there was more here than met the eye the late bronze age attracted us because there were a lot of hints that troy is much bigger than uh thought before by schliemann he wished it to be bigger he wanted it to be bigger at ground level kaufman's team could discern little more than schliemann had done so they turned to a relatively new process magnetic prospecting by measuring fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field the prospector detects objects buried deep underground [Music] its deployment led to a breakthrough evidence that isalak was indeed bigger than previously thought like a magnetic radar the prospector generated images of city streets from both the bronze age and roman times but the survey also revealed a major structure running around the bronze age portion of the town excavation uncovered the structure a massive ditch cut into the bedrock it was very exciting because everybody thought this might be the fortifications of the late bronze age lower town so you have to imagine a ditch here that would have been about four meters wide and four meters deep there's a break here where the late bronze age occupants had left a causeway through the ditch but the ditch then continues from there onwards and it's been traced right around now the south side of the lower city they've been there's evidence for it running up the west side of the lower city now and also it's likely that it runs up the east side the ditch turned out to enclose an area many times larger than the original site was this the great city that schliemann had missed the ditchville includes rubble from buildings bits of brick bits of building stone bits of pottery too which indicates that here we had not simply a defensive system and then an open area but quite close to the ditch probably buildings so i think it's pretty clear that between here and the citadel there was a complete built-up area it wasn't simply a little citadel the size of the tower of london it was a great city the excavation had revealed a city that now matched homer's description in one important respect at the time in question this place was the right size so what could this bronze age city have been like troy is about 13 times larger in extent than known before so we have a rough idea about how many people lived in this city let's say about five to ten thousand comparison between the excavation here and at other bronze age sites reveals how the layer six settlement might have looked the stone battlements towers and multi-storey buildings all convey an impression of a remarkably sophisticated city three thousand years ago one of the wonders of the world if these ruins alone from the fortification would stand in bulgaria or romania or yugoslavia poland germany you always would say oh it is the center of the balkan it's the center of europe so people coming to this place would be very astonished to see something of high culture which they never had seen to before such a city the inhabitants would have needed a sophisticated technological basis to their culture that in itself is a sign of an advanced society in fact the stone masons here were sufficiently skilled to make the city's towers earthquake proof look at this beautifully made masonry all fitting closely together cut without the use of iron tools look at how this stone is wider at the outside and narrows towards the center of the tower the same is done in reverse behind me and the total effect is that the weight of the stones is pushed towards the center of the tower so that if it were shaken by an earth tremor or an earthquake it wouldn't tend to fall apart it would tend to collapse into itself and if anything gets stronger so the ruins at hisalak indicate a city big enough and sophisticated enough to have been troy but one thing that his salak did not fit homer's description the site's location in houma's two and a half thousand year old account of the trojan war the iliad the city of troy is described as a wealthy port but the modern excavation site at hisalak in northwest turkey is over four miles inland from the sea in an effort to resolve this contradiction archaeologist manfred kaufmann brought in a man with a machine [Music] [Applause] this is a deep bore drill it belongs to turkish geophysicist ilhan kiyan has extracted hundreds of soil samples in an effort to analyze the geological history of the area this is like a book each layer each laminae each sheet of sediment gives you what was the place at that period for instance when we go down about 20 meters if we see there marine sediments this means this place was marine surprisingly beneath the farmland that surrounds ishalak kyan has found marine sediments proof that these fields once stood under water kyan has concluded that three thousand years ago during the supposed time of the trojan war the coast here would have looked very different isalak stood much closer to the sea about half a kilometer let's say away from the citadel the area was covered by uh sand and silt and it was land but it was a swampy land this means they were closer to the sea at that time if kion is right the sea reached inland to a giant lagoon around the lagoon a belt of swampy terrain hisalak stood on the edge of this swamp access to the sea would have given the site access to trade and wealth and its reason for being then as now the dardanelle strait was a very busy waterway the main trading route to the black sea and beyond that to central asia three thousand years ago hisalek was a wealthy port and that brings it another step closer to matching homer's you had its access to the trading networks of the aegean and perhaps of the black sea enabling troy to import and export importing perhaps copper tin maybe gold maybe silver exporting perhaps things we can't see in the archaeological record such as textiles maybe slaves we don't know this is what bronze age troy could have seemed like a dynamic city a busy port filled with visitors and traders drawn from the four corners of the known world something not that dissimilar to the modern turkish city of istanbul if you were coming out of europe it must have been enormously impressive and arriving here by sea must have been very similar to such a person to your arrival as an immigrant in the 1930s and getting that first fantastic view of manhattan [Music] so the bronze age remains at hisalak seemed to indicate a large city that stood close to the sea the match with homer gets better but it still doesn't prove that his salak is troy the excavation continued crucial to the archaeological hunt for troy of course was evidence of warfare in his great work the iliad the ancient poet homer had described a war before the walls of troy that lasted ten years only by using the trojan horse to trick their way into the city had the greeks finally won now among the ruins of his harlock the project troia team began turning up signs of a major war firstly the team uncovered a layer of charcoal evidence perhaps of a city-wide fire does this match homer's description of the burning of troy radio carbon dating of the charcoal places the fire at about 1250 bc the time believed to mark the end of homer's trojan war next the team began finding lodged in the city walls the well-preserved remains of bronze spear and arrowheads [Music] in the ground they uncovered more [Music] did these spearheads reflect homer's descriptions of large-scale battles before the walls of troy may be and the team found one more proof of war even more dramatic bones both of horses and of humans were these the skeletons of stallions and the graves of their riders the charcoal the spearheads the bodies kaufman has no doubt about what he's found we have a lost war signs for a lost war we have people killed we have weapons and a conflagration all over this area here were signs of warfare occurring at about 1250 bc the right date for the trojan war combined with the newly established size of the city and its strategic position near the coast this evidence steered kaufman closer and closer to one conclusion that three thousand years ago during the late bronze age the city of troy had actually existed as homer had described but did this mean the trojan horse king priam and helen of troy had really existed too as an archaeologist kaufman had always said he had not set out to find the scene of the trojan war nor to prove that homer's troy had actually existed there was no chance of finding the wooden horse or the remains of helen or king priam we never as archaeologists can say there was a trojan war there was helen in troy there was prime in troy because we have no proof for that we have proof for wars but we do not have the proof for the trojan war but years of painstaking archaeology combined with a high-tech scientific investigation had thrown up a combination of clues that both the city and the war were real this meant troy was a real place and it stood here at isalak it seemed an innocent enough claim but it caused a storm critics began to accuse kaufman of exaggerating his fines their doubts were fueled by the fact that project troyer had hefty commercial backing the temptation to please sponsors with dramatic discoveries said some must be irresistible maybe kaufman had succumbed and put too much weight on too little evidence the problem in troy is particularly acute because the uh the ruins such as they are have been damaged even in antiquity to the point where precisely the parts of the site that we would like to be able to see are just not there anymore um the side of troy which uh homer seems to refer to when he described the greeks attacking troy um was already destroyed in antiquity kaufman hit back his critics couldn't accept his interpretation he claimed because of their own vested interests people who have learned and who have taught their students in ancient history and so on that all this is invention are in a difficult situation or maybe in a difficult situation and they are looking now to counter arguments to stay to their old established views but the criticisms didn't let up if this was the troy where were the royal tombs the burial chambers for king prime and the others where were the remains of the ten-year-old greek army camp i would like to see the greek camp excavated and laid out we know from homer that the greeks were there for 10 years they we know that they had temporary encampments more detailed excavations of of that kind of site would convince me that the sight of his salic and the troy of homeless legends are one and the same the row rumbled on it seemed as if kaufman was destined to tread the same controversial path as his predecessor forever trying to convince his colleagues that he'd found troy [Music] linking his salak to homer only provoked criticism after all the iliad was a work of fiction it was written 500 years after the events it described were supposed to have taken place what was needed was some kind of contemporary reference bronze age writing that could be tested against physical evidence at the site today for decades scholars had looked for references to troy in archaic greek writings but they'd found nothing at isalak archeologists had drawn even more of a blank no writing at all no tablets no inscriptions then kaufman's team made an astonishing discovery among the ruins not of layer 6 but of the settlement that followed it layer 7 built around 1100 bc a small bronze seal inscribed with two names this was an exciting find so far the only piece of writing discovered at the site and it was to give help to kaufman's cause from an unexpected quarter the hieroglyphs on the seal belonged to a now obscure language used in western turkey during the second millennium bc luvian the luvians had lived under a people who dominated central turkey the hittites and it seems they shared a language lewin is is closely related to hittite as close as say italian and french and both of them are indo-european languages that means to say they're related to latin greek and sanskrit the hittites were diligent record keepers they avidly inscribed on stone tablets the daily routine of government tax accounts lists of military equipment and so on as an expert in ancient languages david hawkins had noticed that one of the hittite kingdoms a place called willusa was in northwest turkey the same region as hisaleck hawkins further noted that the name willusa sounded similar to the greek word for troy the word used by homer [Music] ilios hawkins had therefore come to suspect that both willusa and ilios described the same place homer's troy his hunch paid off he found a hittite treaty dating to 1280 bc just before the time of the trojan war in the treaty he encountered a clue that could be tested against both homer and features at the archaeological site that clue was contained in a list of willowson gods typically of hittite treaties they end with a god list of the gods are invoked as witnesses to the treaty and among the gods of willoughsa we have a reference to something which is called divine earth road that is to say um it is a way into the earth a way into the underworld and we know what these things are geographically they are where rivers uh enter flow into the underground and flow into potholes and so on so in bronze age times according to the hittites willusa was built upon an underground stream one special enough to merit divine status under the mound at hisalak archaeologists also found an underground stream a large one fed by rainwater seeping through the limestone rock native to the region this in itself was not surprising as most ancient cities were built near sources of fresh water but the excavation turned up something more channels and tunnels in the cave bore signs of construction ancient engineers had clearly extended the stream into a massive drainage system [Music] here was an underground water source worthy of worship this is the entrance to a network of man-made caves which stretch at least 100 meters underneath the lower city and the purpose of all this was to collect water as it filtered through the permeable limestone and to provide a source of water for the inhabitants of the lower city significantly in the iliad homer also referred to sacred springs running out of the side of the hill where troy stood but was this cave old enough to have existed during the second millennium bc supposedly the time of the trojan war dating of limescale deposits on the cave walls gave the answer the earliest deposits on the face of the cave go right back to the early 3rd millennium bc that means the period of troy one two or three these caves at least in origin are as old as troy itself but what it means is that there was this water producing system here both in homeless time and in hitting times for the first time a physical feature at the site linked an independent contemporary hittite inscription with a reference in homer [Music] the water system offers the strongest proof yet that his salak could indeed be the troy of legend for kaufman it was a triumph of methodical detective work but kaufman's team was faced with one more question and it was perhaps the most obvious one of all if isalak was indeed troy and was destroyed in the trojan war what happened to it next the excavation had one more secret to uncover the ultimate fate of the great city of troy [Music] [Laughter] [Music] it seems a world away from the story of ancient troy but this place offers a flavor of what troy became during the later stages of its long history this is the anzac memorial it stands atop the cliffs of gallipoli where during world war one a quarter of a million soldiers died but this region was a site of remembrance once before over two thousand years ago [Music] six miles from gallipoli archaeologists are working on another great site of homage in the last centuries of the pre-christian era people came here to pay tribute to the heroes of the legendary trojan war this is hisalek in northwest turkey it's long been reckoned that this was the site of the great city of troy recent investigations by the project troyer team have revealed the extent of the homage site superimposed upon earlier trojan settlements [Music] but five centuries after the trojan war we have layer eight a large new city so why was troy revived the answer lies in the incredible power of the legend of the trojan war and the writings of homer the um iliad and the odyssey once they're written down in the late 8th century had an enormous impact on the mediterranean world we can see this as we look at the pottery with scenes from the iliad and the odyssey that appear almost immediately and all over the eastern mediterranean and one of the reasons why these two epics had such prominence is that so many areas trace their descent their ancestry from these heroes who had fought in the trojan war the home of the trojan heroes became a holy place a place imbued with enormous mythological and religious significance a place that everyone wanted to claim a connection with in their turn the persian emperor xerxes and the macedonian warlord alexander the great both made the trek to the city but the most enthusiastic pilgrims came from rome [Music] the early roman emperors traced their descent from troy and it was of course also viewed as rome's mother city and so they pumped a great deal of money into the site many of the buildings that you see in the marketplace the aguero are as grandiose as they are because of imperial benefactions but the emperors were not alone just like modern tourists thousands of ordinary greeks and romans would have ventured here seeking contact with the warriors and gods of a glorious past in effect the greeks and romans developed troy as an historical shrine dedicated to the trojan war they called it illium [Music] indeed among the ruins of william evidence of the tourist presence in greek and roman times is still visible this is the very northeastern corner of the citadel mound of troy sticking out of it you can see this great triangular block which is the remains of the old late bronze age citadel which would have stood at the time of the trojan war if there was a trojan war and the the hellenistic greeks have built up against it this staircase and i think you can just imagine the tourist guides here taking people up these steps and you could imagine them saying there now this is the one bit that still remains of the troy where our ancestors fought just touch that because here you're touching history not much of illium survives now to get an idea of how it might have looked we have to go further south along the turkish coast to another city built about the same time ephesus ephesus is distinguished by magnificent multi-story public buildings paved streets and impressive amphitheaters its grandiose architecture still delights visitors and its scale and appearance allows us to create a picture of what ilium would have looked like behind us here there would have been the acropolis with the temple of athena on top you have to imagine this stretching up oh 10 or 15 rows of seats here to uh pretty well the top of the temple platform so people could go in and out of the odeon here at the top but there was a darker side to the roman obsession with troy's legendary past as excavations on the south western corner of the citadel mound have come to reveal this area is a pagan sanctuary its large size proves the city bore witness to many cult practices one of them was an offshoot of the popular cult of athena and was in turn directly linked to the story of the trojan war the custom of the locrian maidens the custom of the locrian maidens this goes back to an episode in the iliad where ajax a greek hero dragged the trojan woman cassandra from the cult statue of athena thereby violating athena in a sense because that was a place of sanctuary ajax was by tradition a native of the greek town of lochras so every year in penance the locrian rulers sent two young women to troy their job to keep the temple of athena clean and if they were found outside the sanctuary of athena according to the ancient descriptions of the custom they could be killed after a year the women were replaced if they'd survived it continued until probably the early first century bc so at least the aliens had a clean sanctuary for nearly a thousand years and they had it free for 500 years illium enjoyed a golden age bolstered both by trade and by its strategic location the city continued to grow in size and wealth until it rivaled ephesus itself but then illium began to face a new threat mud [Music] a slow and remorseless silting up of the harbour the drove trade away and with it the wealth that kept this archaic fairyland alive and just as the sea retreat reached crisis point so illium fell from favor among the rich and powerful for rome had become christian the newly devout caesars had no interest in preserving a city so closely linked to a freshly discredited pagan past the emperors in general stopped coming in the 4th and 5th centuries a.d and the primary reason for that is christianity the money is being directed to other sites that have some sort of christian heritage as this site does not its primary associations were pagan and the benefactions that had always characterized the city during the roman empire also tend to stop earthquake and disease also hastened the end by 650 a.d ilium [Music] the excavation has begun to wind down the archaeologist who has perhaps done more than any other to reveal the lost worlds that lie beneath this soil manfred kaufman will soon face a crossroads in his life's work i will not move away from troya but i'm 60 years old there always will be excavation in toroia and my scholars my students who i have done so much work and effort in this site will continue this work i would be most pleased to look uh from that not in an armchair but to have helped and support that the the next generation can continue kaufman's team has come closest of all to understanding the real history of troy [Music] for the first time we can say that three thousand years ago here was a great city a strategic hub of seaborne trade a city that suffered war and destruction a city that underwent rebirth as a pagan shrine dedicated to the memory of that epic past the tourists still come to his salak their confidence that here stood the troy of legend can now be justified history can never confirm if homer's heroes ever lived nor whether the legendary trojan horse ever existed but thanks to modern archaeology the city in which homer placed his heroes the lost city of troy is lost no more

Channel: TRACKS - Travel Documentaries

Views: 308,977

Keywords: TRACKS, tracks travel channel, tracks travel, ancient history, documentary history, trojan war, lost city, helen of troy, documentary movies - topic, history channel documentary, trojan horse, ancient civilizations, ancient greece, tracks history, full documentary, history documentary

Id: XSSjZ5_Pi04

Length: 49min 53sec (2993 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 29 2020