I have confessed on this blog once already that I find Homer's silence about a Trojan navy, and Trojan naval installations, such as ports or quays, suspicious. The Greeks do not take over a riverine port on the Dardanelles of the sort that probably existed. Instead, they land on an unprotected beach and build a naval station.
One of the things that makes it possible for the world to still believe in Homer as a war correspondent is the fact that archeology has never found anything naval at Troy; not an oar, pully, anchor, fishhook or port. Nada. I think this is mostly due to the fact that the archaeology has been pretty much restricted to the top of the ridge at Hisarlik (where there are, by the way, lots of sea shells, mostly of the nutrition related kind, but in Troy VI of the purple dye making kind as well). Ilhan Kayan found no evidence of port facilities in his study of Besik Bay, but this was restricted to a handful of drill cores. The plain, the beaches and the lagoons have not been examined closely.
I doubt that Besik Bay was a port because it is too shallow. The same goes for the Trojan Bay that may have existed at the north end of the plain in the Bronze Age. It would have been too shallow for large sea faring ships. Only wide bottomed shore crawlers and river ready craft would have been able to dock at the riverine port of the Scamander. The Uluburun ship, hanging only 4 feet (1.4 m) below the surface, probably could have gone up stream some distance in the Nile delta, but not very far in the port of the Scamander. The favored craft at Troy would have been more canoe like, maybe of the sort that the sea peoples and the Egyptians are using in the image from Medinet Habu. These are wide bottomed riverine craft with low sides, a sail and the men stand on decks. Such boats have so far only been found, to my knowledge, in the Danube area on the Black Sea, around 450 miles, or 720 kilometers north of Troy.
A nautically related oddity to note in the story of the Trojan War is that the Greeks fabricate a huge horse that is meant as an offering to who? Athena? Isn't that more appropriate for Poseidon? Horses are sacred to Poseidon, not Athena.
Another oddity worth mentioning is the story of Erichthonius.
Dardanus had a son, king Erichthonius, who was wealthiest of all men living; he had three thousand mares that fed by the water-meadows, they and their foals with them. Boreas was enamoured of them as they were feeding, and covered them in the semblance of a dark-maned stallion. Twelve filly foals did they conceive and bear him, and these, as they sped over the rich plain, would go bounding on over the ripe ears of corn and not break them; or again when they would disport themselves on the broad back of Ocean they could gallop on the crest of a breaker. (Iliad 20, 217 ff)
Three thousand mares with their foals in the marshes would be around 6k horses. And how do you get 3000 mares anyway? A lot of stallions would have to be born to get to that number of mares, so, there are around 3000 stallions missing from this account who are nevertheless biologically implied by it. That would make around 9k horses.
If Boreas "covered" all of the mares, there would have been around 3000 more foals. Could it be that only 12 were fillies? At least we know that 60x50 makes 3000, and that a mere 50 stallions could "cover" 60 mares apiece to get Erichthonius 3000 foals.
I suggest that the 3000 mares, if not fully absurd is close to it given that the Citadel and its associated Lower City on Hisarlik together housed between 4k and 7k people. So, a mere two years of owning 3000 mares will get you more horses than people at Hisarlik.
In addition, horses can do well in marshy areas, but they cannot live 24/7 in marshes.
On the other hand, horses are sacred to Poseidon. Perhaps the horses in the marshes are ships. Perhaps the early kings of Troy had an inordinate number of ships, not a comically large number of female horses. The reference to Boreas (the north wind) could indicate swift sailing vessels. A female horse brings forth new horses. Trading vessels bring other stuff. Homer even compares the horses to ships: "when they would disport themselves on the broad back of Ocean they could gallop on the crest of a breaker."
I think it might be possible to read Homer as though the work engages in mytho-poetic compression of Troy's maritime economy, including its fleet and naval power, to the level of mere symbols. Perhaps these famous horse men living on a maritime crossroads were actually famous sailors.
There are several reasons to believe that Troy had a maritime economy:
Troy's coastal location on a naval crossroads argues for sea faring.
Archaeology at Troy indicates extensive trade.
The far-flung Trojan allies listed by Homer suggest connections by sea.
Paris, according to Homer (and other authors), went to Sidon after picking up Helen in Sparta, which indicates long distance sea travel.
In addition, the plain of Troy is too small to sustain the inhabitants of Hisarlik. Grain would have been a major Trojan import. The Orman and Lissos river valleys in Thrace were likely grain providers to the Trojans. But that would have required supply by sea. The plain of the Granicus is another likely source and while grain from that area could have arrived in Troy by land, it would have been more efficient to bring it down the Dardanelles by boat.
I also want to mention the work of Fred Woudhouizen, whose reading of a tablet from Enkomi in Cyprus recounts the story of a Cyprian ship captain who battled a fleet off the coast of Lycia (Lukka) that, he says, was under the command of "Akamas of Ilion, the great enemy".
From Early Mediterranean Scripts, which is a collection of conversations between Eberhard Zangger and Fred Woudhuizen:
Zangger: We still need to speak about the Linear D document from the time
when the regular trade contacts were already disrupted and maritime
fighting was going on.
Things had changed dramatically. This is when the upheavals were caused
by the Sea Peoples, when the merchant ships were not safe anymore.
Once the trade was disrupted, we do not find any of the documents recording economic transactions anymore.
Woudhuizen: The Linear D text is a letter written by a Cypriot nauarch, an admiral,
writing from Limyra, in eastern Lycia, to inform his king in Cyprus about
what had been going on in the southern Aegean. The admiral had been
to Rhodes to seize the port city of Kameiros, and he argues that he had
a right to do so, because Hattusili III and Halpazitis, the king of Aleppo,
already maintained a stronghold there. So there was a territorial claim from earlier times which he says was still valid. From there he went on to
Samos, where he got beaten by the forces of Akamas of Ilion. Thus Trojan
ships had advanced way south. Consequently, the admiral retreated his
forces back to his first base Limyra in eastern Lycia.
This is the same kind of document that we know from the last days
of Ugarit, but this time we get an eyewitness account from someone in
an advanced position way over west.
Zangger: Those documents from Ugarit are only pointing in the direction of Lycia, saying that there is much trouble there, but with this letter we get first-hand information from someone who actually saw what was going on.
The nauarch clearly states that the Hittite king should send a fleet and
additional forces to his support, exactly as we know it from the documents in Ugarit. The last king of Ugarit says that his ships are supporting
the fleet of Suppiluliuma II in a maritime battle in the waters of Lycia.
Evidently, the admiral’s call for help was indeed received and followed
through. Unfortunately for the Hittites, this maritime battle against the
Sea Peoples was lost.
This particular document provides inside information about a thus
far dark period during the initial phase of the Sea Peoples’ invasions.
And this artifact actually exists and is exhibited in the Cyprus Museum
in Nikosia. Photographs of it have been published as early as 1971.
You are the first to have been able to read this letter and published the
translation in 2017. (Early Mediterranean Scripts, p 127f)
Early Mediterranean Scripts can be downloaded here.
For FW's reading of the Enkomi inscription, see:
https://www.academia.edu/33572468/The_Language_of_Linear_C_and_Linear_D_from_Cypru
Below is another description of Akamas from Woudhuizen, who believes the people known by the Greeks as Teukroi are the Tjekers mentioned in Egyptian inscriptions about the Sea Peoples.
Like the Philistines and Danaoi, a part of the Teukroi
evidently founded themselves new homes in the coastal
zone of the Levant. At least, in the Wen Amon story from
the first half of the 11th century BC, we are confronted
with Tjeker settled at Dor. According to Wen Amon’s
vivid testimony, they still were a maritime force to reckon
with at that time, since eleven Tjeker ships were blocking
his way from the harbor of Byblos when, having accomplished his mission, he wanted to return to Egypt. The maritime adventures of the Teukroi presumably
dating to the period of the upheavals of the Sea Peoples
call to mind the career of the Trojan hero Akamas as recorded in Cypro-Minoan texts from Enkomi and Ras
Shamra/Ugarit dated to the final phase of the Late Bronze
Age. Here we encounter Akamas at first in Linear C
texts as a representative of what appears to be the Trojan
town Malos (between Palaescepsis and Achaeium, opposite the island of Tenedos) and of Ephesos engaged in
maritime trade, receiving goods at Enkomi and delivering goods at Ras Shamra/Ugarit. Next, he turns up in
the more evolved Linear D texts as Akamu Ilu “the Ilian
Akamas” and Akamu Eleki nukar -ura “Akamas of
Ilion, the great enemy”, who in the latter instance is recorded to have defeated (tupata “he smote”) the principal of the text (-mu “me”) in what from the context appears to
be a naval battle. This last mentioned passage strikingly
correlates to the information from the correspondence between the king of Ugarit and his superior, the king of Cyprus-Alasiya, as unearthed in Ras Shamra/Ugarit,
according to which the Ugaritic fleet is stationed in the
coastal region of Lycia, but enemy ships nonetheless have
broken through the defense line and are now threatening
the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean. Anyhow, it is
clear that Akamas from Ilion in the course of events had
grasped the opportunity and turned his maritime profession
from trader into raider – a common change in the history
of Mediterranean shipping.
The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples, p 109. https://repub.eur.nl/pub/7686/Woudhuizen%20bw.pdf.
Akamas is like a classic pirate: both a trader and a raider. Woudhuizen gives us a hint of what we perhaps should have expected all along. Trojan sea power of both the commercial and martial varieties. Akamas was an enemy in the mind of at least this one speaker of what Woudhuizen argues was a proto-Phoenician, Semitic language on Cyprus. He could have been commanding a fleet that was not Trojan, I suppose. But it also might be the case that his name went down in history. Akamas' name is attached to a promontory in Cyprus. It might be that Acamas the Greek was invented to explain this.
The Homeric Trojans are not very impressive or threatening. They have a royal family. They have a history that we know little about. They have a citadel and an army and allies. But they have no navy. They allow the will of one prince, Alexander, to determine their fate, and never force him to return Helen to Menelaus. They are deaf to the warnings of Cassandra and other sober minds. They wait 9 years before charging the beach in their own defense. They stupidly bring the huge treacherous horse full of soldiers into their city and then go to sleep.
Perhaps the image of Akamas of Ilion fighting his way from Samos to Cyprus and then to the Levantine coast will put a different shine on the memory of the Trojans.
If there was a war in the Trojan Plain at the end of the bronze age that deserves to be remembered, it was probably about the kind of thing Akamas represents; it was probably about power, including sea power.
I figure that the deep water ports of Troy were probably not in the plain, but in places like Canakkale, Alexandria Troas, Tenedos, Lemnos and Imbros. There is a deep water port today at Akcansa, which is only 1.1 miles (1.8 k's) south of Besik Plain.
A person arriving at Troy after 2500 bce would have seen hundreds of shallow draft boats around Besik Bay, the mouth of the Dardanelles and the mouth of the Scamander. They could have seen hundreds more by visiting the mouths of other rivers, such as the Danube, Orman, Lissos, Caicus or Granicus. These boats, made to enter rivers from the sea, might have been able to maneuver in the shallow bay of Troy, maybe all the way up to the north end of the tell in the time of Troy II. But the big ships would have been somewhere else.
The expansion of the Trojans, first by means of trade
to Cyprus and Ras Shamra/Ugarit, and subsequently by actual colonization to Cyprus, again, and the Levant, is
archaeologically traceable in the distribution of Trojan
grey ware – not a widely desired export product, but evidence of real presence of Trojan traders and/or settlers.
This ware is found in concentrations on Cyprus, especially
at Kition and Hala Sultan Tekke, in Ras Shamra/Ugarit,
and Tell Abu Hawam (= Haifa) in the neighborhood of the
Tjeker town Dor, in a variety dated to the late 13th or early
12th century BC. The impetus for the Trojans to find new homes abroad is formed by the invasion of
their territory by new settlers from the European continent,
causing the destruction of Troy VIIa (c. 1180 BC) and
the subsequent (in Troy VIIb1-2) introduction of buckle
ceramic. Unfortunately, the Tjeker town Dor is not well
excavated: at least it seems clear that the site was destroyed in the Late Bronze Age and subsequently characterized by Philistine ware. As opposed to this, the
nearby Tell Abu Hawam has been better explored and
shows, next to a destruction layer at the end of the Late Bronze Age, some, no doubt subsequent, Late Helladic IIIC1b ware – the hallmark of the
settlement of Sea Peoples. If I understand Susan Heuck
Allen correctly in that the Trojan grey ware arrived in Tell
Abu Hawam already before the aforesaid destruction
layer, the Trojans evidently prospected the site in the period of their
trade connections with the Levant and hence very well
knew where to go to find themselves a better place to stay!
Woudhuizen, The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples, p 109-10
I know that the Tjeker = Teukroi = Trojans identification is disputed. I am aware that Woudhuizen's readings of the Enkomi materials are contested.
However, it is important to consider more hopeful ends for the Trojans than tradition has assigned them. Perhaps they migrated at the end of the Bronze Age. There has long been a suspicion than they migrated to Italy and especially to Etruria/Tyrrhenia. Others have them going to Ilyria, even suggesting that the word Ilion is found in the word Ilyria. Still others imagine that the Trojans were the Dorians of the Dorian invasion stories. Woudhoizen suggests that they migrated to Cyprus and the Levantine coast. Here they would have mixed with the local Canaanite population, just as the Peleset/Philistines (another of the sea peoples) apparently did.
Perhaps the distant offspring of some of those purple dye-making bronze age seafarers became iron age purple dye-making Phoenicians.
