Troy Was A Real City, But Was The Trojan Horse Real?
Was the Trojan Horse real? Or is it nothing more than a popular myth that has served as inspiration for thousands of years?
The story of the Trojan Horse is quite well-known, and the very first mention of it was in Homer’s Odyssey.
It describes how the ancient Greeks infiltrated the city of Troy by concealing themselves within a giant, hollow wooden horse. However, there is little evidence to suggest that the event actually happened.
Legend has it that the Achaeans spent 10 long years trying to take the city of Troy without success. Finally, they pretended to accept defeat and sailed to a nearby island.
There, they left behind an enormous wooden horse with a bunch of soldiers inside it. The Trojans mistakenly believed that the horse was an offering to the goddess Athena, so they hauled it back to town.
At dark, the Greek soldiers emerged from the horse and destroyed the city, bringing an end to the war.
So far, archaeologists have not uncovered any solid proof that confirms the reality of this military strategy.
Dr. Armand D’Angour, a classicist at Oxford University, explained that there is “archaeological evidence that Troy was indeed burned down; but the wooden horse is an imaginative fable, perhaps inspired by the way ancient siege-engines were clothed with damp horse-hides to stop them from being set alight.”
What experts know for certain is that Troy was likely a Bronze Age city located at a site called Hisarlik in what is now western Turkey.
muratart – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
The site was discovered in the 1870s by a German explorer named Heinrich Schliemann. A small number of arrowheads and signs of a fire within a layer of sediment were unearthed.
The sediment dates back to around 1200 B.C.E., which is a rough match of the timeline for the date mentioned by Homer.
It is possible that the fire indicates the occurrence of an ancient battle, but a decades-long siege is unlikely.
Also contributing to the doubt that the Trojan Horse event took place is the fact that Homer only makes a very brief mention of it in the Odyssey.
The next description of the Trojan Horse showed up in the poem Aeneid by Virgil, more than a millennium after the scheme was said to have occurred.
As a result, most archaeologists view the giant horse as a metaphorical one rather than a literal one.
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