Was Troy real, and what did Schliemann really find?

Troy was real: it was a city in present-day Turkey, and Heinrich Schliemann was among the people who dug it up. What is not clear is whether the Trojan War happened as Homer tells it. As one summary puts it, the exact relationship between myth and reality remains unclear, and there is no definitive evidence for a Greek attack on the city.

The Greeks and Romans took Homer's Troy as a fact. Alexander the Great visited the site in 334 BC and made sacrifices at tombs associated with Achilles and Patroclus. Frank Calvert, who owned a farm nearby, surveyed the hill, identified it with classical Ilion, and convinced Schliemann that Homeric Troy lay beneath it.

Schliemann, a German businessman who claimed he had declared at the age of seven that he would dig up Troy, did exactly that. The hill held nine cities, each built on the ruins of the previous. On 15 June 1873, the day before digging was to stop, he found gold which he took to be Priam's Treasure.

He was wrong about the date. That layer is now thought to be from 3,000 to 2,000 BCE, too early for the Trojan War as Homer describes it. And his methods included removing features he thought insignificant without studying them first.

Later excavators looked at later layers. In one of them, Troy VIIa, destroyed around 1180 BC, the destruction layer shows evidence of enemy attack, including scorch marks.