O PAGINA DE ISTORIE !

1-Acest articol este copiat !

2-Istoria ramane pasiunea mea nr-1!

“Within a period of 40 to 50 years at the end of the Thirteenth and the beginning of the Twelfth Century BC, almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again.”

Nobody is certain of the dates of the great ten-year siege of the city the Latins called Ilium, which today we call the Trojan War. Shortly before the Bronze Age Collapse – a catastrophic event for the Ancient World, arguably even more destabilising than the Fall of the Roman Empire, resulting in the destruction of numerous civilisations and empires, and the Greek Dark Age – the Trojan War took place around 1200 BC. The war, the pinnacle of the Greek Mythological Age, would see a vast Pan-Hellenic coalition cross the Aegean to besiege the city of Troy in revenge for the kidnapping of the Queen of Sparta, Helen. Given the sheer length of the war, it is possible that it was one of the contributing causes of the imminent Bronze Age Collapse.

The half century betwixt 1200 and 1150 BC saw the cultural collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms of Greece, of the Kassits of Babylonia, of the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and the Levants, of Egypt’s New Kingdom. The smaller states of Ugarit, the Amorites, the Luwians, and the Canaanites would all perish. Almost every city betwixt Pylos, Greece, and Gaza, Palestine, was violently destroyed, with many abandoned. The few powerful states that did survive emerged in a state of terminal decline. Elam waned after its defeat by Babylon, before Babylon in turn was emasculated by the Assyrians, who themselves then witnessed their indomitable and brutal empire crushed by their neighbours, while territories such as Phoenecia claimed independence from Egypt. Literacy and culture collapsed, and international trade became impossible, while tales of a Golden Age, and Age of Heroes, and the disappeared city of Atlantis, all became folklore. As far removed as we are from it today, it is difficult to grasp just how damaging, and how socially traumatising, the Bronze Age Collapse was.

The story of Troy is one of myths, gods and demigods. Until the late Nineteenth Century, most scholars believed Homer’s account in The Iliad was entirely fictional. Then the excavations of German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann around 1870 shed a new light on the legends, and proved there was a factual event behind the fable. The siege of Troy was actual, lived history – although it would be impossible to distinguish the fact from the legend after over 3,000 years.

The Trojan War was strange in its duration, dragging on for over a decade. Given the lengthy wars of recent centuries – and even some of the epic earlier wars, such as the Punic Wars – it is easy to underestimate just how devastating the impact on society of prolonged war is. This was an age without professional armies, where soldiers gathered from the peasantry for a campaign and expected to return home to gather in the harvest, where kings did not have the resources to maintain an army in the field indefinitely. To thus have a decade-long war would have been ruinous for all involved, both economically and culturally. The sheer feat of maintaining a besieging army across the Aegean for a decade must have exhausted the kingdoms of the Mycenaean alliance, and thus explain why Greece plummeted into a Dark Age in the decades to follow, with the glory of the victory short lived.

Although it is a real event, the story is one of gods, monsters, heroes, demigods, and more myth and magic besides. This account will give the story (largely!) as the Greeks told it, and as their descendant civilisations would understand and believe it. Given the collapse of the Roman Empire was followed, in western Europe at least, by a “Dark Age”, we often think of the Greeks and Romans of Classical Antiquity being particularly learned and intelligent. Despite their remarkable achievements and discoveries, it is thus worth remembering that these were still a deeply superstitious people, placing deep faith in the rituals and ceremonies of their pagan religions, and placing as much stock in magic, prophecy and omens as they would in science. The entrails of animals, the flights of birds, and whether or not a chicken ate seed were all as likely to shape opinion, policy, and crucial decisions as were real-world events. Despite the mass of cities and urban living, there was also both a huge rural class and a largely uneducated population, two factors further combining to enhance the belief in the gods and superstition rather than science. Thus the story of Troy which involves gods descending into battle, heroes fighting monsters, goddesses bickering in the heavens and their brothers seducing mortals, is the one that the Romans and Greeks of antiquity would have known, and largely believed and accepted as fact.

The story is essentially one of a great Greek War. The Greeks of the Mycenaean coalition, which Homer called the “Achaeans”, which included Greek kingdoms from the mainland, the islands, and Ionian Greece (modern Turkish Coast), pitted against the Greeks of the Troad (the Biga Peninsula in northwest Anatolia), the stretch of land just south of the Dardanelles (Hellespont) and thus controlling the vital trading corridor from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. This was not one city against another, it was a grand collection of cities and kingdoms on each side. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to one side as “Greeks”, and the other as “Trojans” – though it is worth remembering that these are not two distinctly different foreign powers, these are similar kingdoms and cities with shared culture and beliefs. That will not diminish the animosity towards each other, nor the partisan support from the pantheon of gods, as the Trojan War became the defining event of the Bronze Age, and one of the greatest stories to ever be told.