I have already suggested on this blog that the entire story of a fortified Greek Camp might just be a myth. In this entry I will argue at length about the unlikelihood of the whole story. In that prior post, I suggested that a small mound NW of the great mound in the plain of Troy might be what Strabo had in mind when he said that the Greek Camp was 20 stades or about 2.2 miles from the citadel on Hisarlik. In this post I do not focus on satellite images. I am far more interested in the pure idea itself.
The more you think about something the more problematic it becomes, say the philosophers, and I have been thinking a lot about the Greek Camp for the past couple of years. It is a lynchpin in many a theorist's thinking about how Homer fits or does not fit Hisarlik. Homer is often like a straitjacket on the study of Troy, and ideas that threaten almost all Homeric takes on the place are not likely to be popular. What I am saying below probably will not be popular because it denies one of the most favored, most cool parts of Homer, namely, the Greek Camp. I cannot say that I am fully convinced that the fortified camp is a myth. But I will develop my best case for thinking that it is highly unlikely that any such thing ever existed.
Walter Leaf, Troy, A Study in Homeric Geography.
There is no trace in the Iliad of any inland expedition farther than the three miles which separate the walls of Troy from the shore. We often speak of the "siege of Troy" ; but there is no siege of Troy in Homer — the only action that can be called a siege is the attempt to storm, not Troy, but the Greek camp. p 316
Question 1: Is there a good reason to have a Walled Camp in the first place?
In a proper siege, you surround a city. No one gets in or out. So, there is little or no reason to protect the ships on the beach from city dwellers because passage in and out of the city is completely controlled by the invaders.
In the specific case of an invasion of the Trojan plain, invaders would probably want to control all movement in and around the plain in addition to the entrances to the city.
Now, if the city still had supplies coming in, or armies coming in, then the Greeks simply were not fully in control of the situation.
If they knew that Troy was part of a larger coalition, such as the Assuwa League or the Hittite Vassals, the Greeks may have feared reinforcements arriving from the country side or from the sea.
This makes the Greeks look like they are not merely fighting the city, they are more like an outpost in hostile territory, dug in on a beach, with enemies in perhaps all directions, including both in the city and outside it. Under such a condition, maybe the Greeks feel a need to defend their position. So perhaps there is an actual reason to fortify (build a fort at) the beach head.
One question about the fortified camp is this, when did they build the walls and ditches? Did they build them right away, as soon as they landed? Or did they try to take the city, fail, and then conclude that they needed a fortified position? It makes a difference.
If your intention is to sack the city and leave, you would not bother with fortifying your position would you? Furthermore, if you were there to sack a city and leave, you would not bring with you the tools and supplies necessary to cut stone or wood, nor even the tools to dig ditches. One would bring those tools only if you expected to use them right away. In the Excidium Troiae, the Greeks get off their boats and immediately build walls and a temple. I find that utterly unrealistic, but it lays in relief the question as to the strategy of the fortified camp. If you attack the city and fall back and then build a fort, there is time for resupply, and the resupply could include tools and materials for building.
If you came to besiege the city, you would not need a camp unless it is a camp forming a ring around the city.
Still on the matter of the rationale for having a fort on the beach, one thing is certain: one need not keep one's boats on the beach. One can keep them off shore. And quite frankly, the boats on the beach seem hugely unlikely.
Just landing large boats upright and level on a beach is hugely unlikely. If they hang 10 feet below the water line, they would touch land when the water is still 10 feet deep around them. But in the movies, the boats seem to have unproblematically glided all the way up onto the beach somehow, undamaged, upright, and not tilted. In Homer, the crew have a jolly conversation about who will be the first to touch Trojan soil. No one is worried about the ship toppling over. They expect to jump out of the ship and land on dry land, and then they do.
The shipwreck at Uluburun, estimated to be from the 14th century bce, had no oarlocks or oars and very little of the hull remains. Nevertheless, it is estimated to be around 2.5-3 meters from keel to gunwale (the top edge of the hull). That is 8 to 10 feet. It rode around 3-4 feet below the water line when fully loaded. It had low sides to allow for loading and unloading, and it was not a deep sea faring vessel. It was a shore line traveler.
The ships that would have hauled 50-100 Greeks across the Aegean would have been much larger than the Uluburun boat, with both a sail and lots of oars, possibly two decks of oars. They would have stood between 6 and 10 meters above the water line (20-30 feet). They would have hung at least 1.5 meters (5 feet) below the water line. So, once they were on shore, the Greeks would have had to jump down around 25 feet or more if they went over the side down to the ground.
Nobody did that. It's like leaping down from the roof of a two story house. Homer's story about soldiers fighting over which Greek would be first to jump out of the ship onto Trojan soil is pure farce.
If you think about it, it is just plain unlikely that anyone would simply beach their huge boat full of soldiers and kings. Too risky. There would be lots of bruises and broken teeth at the bumpy finish of their ride, and the ship would tilt onto one side or another once it hit dry land, and everyone on the top deck would be thrown overboard. Oars on the downward side would become lethal missiles inside the ship.
The ships are usually represented in movies as perfectly level, and serve as storage or something. In ten years was there never a serious storm that would have blown one or two of those boats off their cradles? And where do the tripods and cradles come from that hold up the ships? How did they get under the beached ships before they tilted in the first place?
And how do you get those huge ships back in the water after you beach them?
Ok, so, let's suppose they used smaller boats as landing craft.
Again, the one thing that is certain is that you don't need to keep your ships on the beach once you have a beach head. You can put your entire navy away from shore, so it cannot be burnt by Trojans. All you really need to protect is your army and your way of supplying them from the sea. The army is living in tents.
So, if you are going to build a fort, it just needs to protect the army camp and its port or quay.
If we have discussed the rationale of the camp enough, let's discuss the reality of building a fort like the one Homer and others imagine.
Question 2: Is building the Fort plausible?
A ditch and a palisade, eh? Or are there stone foundations with mud brick on top? Homer seems to think both kinds of construction were present. Let's analyze some of this.
In Homer's tale, the Greeks actually build the ditch and palisade after Hector makes threats. But this is allegedly the 9th or 10th year of the war. Seems pretty late in the game to finally need a fort. Why haven't Hector and the Trojans thought of fighting their way to the ships in all those prior years?
A palisade requires wood shaped into logs. So, cutting down trees is not enough, you have to process them into useful and very similar shapes to make a palisade. There are hardly any trees in or around the plain of Troy. And with a large city in the area, even less would be available than is there now. So, the landing party will have to get their lumber further up the slopes of Mt Ida or have it supplied by sea. Both are unlikely. Shipping the logs is more likely however, because soldiers who march uphill for 10 miles or more to cut wood on Mt Ida are soldiers who are worn out and easy to kill. In addition, sending troops up Mt Ida divides one's forces, unless you send all of them, which would just expose the ships on the beach to the Trojans. How many do you send then, half your force? You are inviting the Trojans to attack one half of your army with their whole army, either the half on the beach or the half walking up the plain. If you send a quarter of your force, you are inviting the Trojans to destroy with their whole army the quarter you have isolated.
An army is at its strongest when all of its parts are together in one place. Concentrated violence, concentrated defense. When you divide your force, both parts are weaker than the whole was.
Well, then perhaps they send slaves up the plain to cut and transport trees. If I was Priam, I would attack the slaves too. Wouldn't you? If I was Agamemnon, I would value my slaves far too much to risk their lives on a wood-cutting mission in hostile territory. The loss of a single slave weakens the whole.
The lumber, let us say, is not cut by warriors or their servants, but delivered to the beachhead from the sea. If that is our hypothesis, then my next question is when? Overnight?
It is pretty much impossible for the Greeks to just react to a threat by building a palisade because they cannot supply the processed lumber fast enough. It would take a year or more to get that stuff delivered from Greece. It would take a significant amount of time to fell 50 trees and process them into logs even if they were growing right on the side of the plain near the building site. With transport from Mt Ida added in, you are looking at a huge project with logs being transported through the plain right past a city full of enemies. I don't know how many they need, but they supposedly had 1200 ships. If a quarter of those are on the beach, they need to protect 300 ships. Sounds like a pretty long palisade. If they each take up 20 feet of space, that is 6000 feet, which is over a mile (5280 ft). A typical school bus is 8.5 feet wide. The ships with their oars had to be wider than that, let's say they are 10 feet across with five foot oars sticking out on each side. Then 20 feet to a ship is about right if they are next to one another on a beach.
As for the ditch, well, they would need tools to dig that. I am unsure what they would use, I suppose they could improvise some baskets and wooden shovels. A ditch is much more likely than a palisade.
But again are you really talking about not needing a ditch for 9 years, then creating one after Hector makes threats? And how long is this ditch? A mile long trench does not appear quickly.
Homer eventually tells a story about washing away the walls and towers that the Greeks built. Zeus and Poseidon attack the Greek walls with 9 rivers and many days of rain. This makes it sound like the walls have stone foundations. You don't need a lot to take out a wooden palisade and ditch. Surely you don't need 9 rivers.
So, if they are going to cut stone to make walls, what will they cut it with? Did they bring the tools to cut and transport stone with them in addition to their camping and war making gear? Axes, saws, picks, shovels, trowels, chisels, hammers, prying bars, buckets, ladders, scaffolding, rope, wheelbarrows. Seems like a lot to haul.
How far away is the stone quarry, and how will the cut stones be transported to the building site? Who will do that work? How long would it take?
Stone walls seem really unlikely, even more unlikely than a palisade.
But to save the theory one last time: perhaps they built stone defenses gradually, not all at once. Then later on, they added the palisade and ditch, but Homer unfortunately makes it sound like they started fortifying late in the war. That still seems unlikely and all of the problems outlined above are fully relevant here. Warriors cutting stone? Warriors are supposed to pound iron stakes and wedges all day? And if not them, then who? And just as important, where, how far from camp? Someone cut down trees and made logs out of them and transported them? Who and where? And in both cases, with what tools?
I don't think the sea peoples on the walls of Medinet Habu have many chisels or saws. Do you?
I know of no archeological discoveries of anything that might count as evidence of the Greek camp. And that makes sense because I strongly doubt it ever existed.
Question 3: Is the Walled Camp impossible?
It is probably just barely plausible that some invaders built some kind of fort in the plain of Troy. Perhaps a stockade made from twigs and fallen branches, or perhaps a ditch along with some kind of earthwork barriers.
At least earthworks can be done on a beach.
A palisade on a beach is not a good idea because sand shifts a lot, and the soggy ground behind the beach doesn't hold posts very well either. There would be a lot of stability issues with anything built on a beach or immediately behind it, whether it was stone foundations or posts holding up a palisade.
To avoid this, the construction would need to be on the first firm land inland from the beach, sometimes called a headland.
That will help but it will not help enough because nothing built in the valley can be expected to last due to the annual flooding that has been described on this blog many times. Until modern dams were built, the plain of Troy flooded from side to side pretty much every year. Let me drive that home: every year there was flooding that covered the entire floor of the valley from side to side (2 - 2 1/2 miles wide) for several days at least once, and in many years, two or three times.
Constructions in the plain that are not protected from flooding typically will not last an entire year.
There are, of course, two main scenarios for the invasion of Troy. In one scenario, the Greek navy and camp are on the north end of the Trojan valley on the Dardanelle Straits, which is now about 4 miles north of Hisarlik, but with a big enough bay might have been only 2 or 3 miles north of the Citadel in the Bronze Age. In the second scenario, the Greeks are anchored and camping in Besik Bay, on the Aegean Sea, about 5.5 miles SW of Hisarlik.
I think that the floods argue against constructions in both scenarios. In the first one, because the camp would be in the plain at its lowest point, where the inundations are at their worst. A camp on the Bay of Troy would literally be under two or more feet of water for around two or more weeks a year.
The second scenario must receive a similar treatment because it seems clear that the inhabitants of the plain at some point, probably around the time of Troy II, carved a channel through the inland ridge from the upper plain into Besik Bay. There is now an unnatural plain in the bay that is over 1.5 square miles. At least during flooding events, if not year round, a Greek army camped on the Besik plain would have been severely impacted by waters diverted from the Trojan plain above it.
But this raises an interesting question. If the Trojans did divert floodwaters into Besik Bay, and this made the city in the plain able to survive floods, would it not also have made it safe for a Greek contingent to camp on the plain below the city to the north? I think the answer to this depends on how much of the flood waters were diverted into Besik Bay. Depending on the size of Trojan flood walls, saving the city might have meant reducing a flood that was waist deep from side to side in the plain, to one that was knee deep from side to side, or perhaps reduce a shoulder deep flood to a waist deep one. The moral of this story is that whatever was enough to save the city was not necessarily enough to keep Achilles' tent dry and in one place.
So, even if the logistics and the rationale for the walled camp can be worked out, the floods make it all but impossible both that there was a fortified camp on the beach, and that there was an invading army in the plain for all those years. The Greek army would only have been able to last in the Trojan valley if they got out of the plain, and off the beach, and onto higher ground, at least during flood events.
Furthermore, if the Greeks built a fort at Troy that lasted for more than one year, it was not in a flood plain or on a beach. It had to be on one of the many ridges or rock outcroppings around the plain.
But of course, they can't do that unless they can supply the labor, tools and material to build.
And you don't dig a ditch on a rock outcropping or a sandstone ridge, do you? So, under this scenario, Homer must be wrong at least about the ditch.
Question 4: Is the Camp just a literary device?
The idea of the two forts, one at Hisarlik, one improvised in the plain, belongs in drama. It belongs on a stage, not in a real war. The battle between Achilles and Hector belongs on a stage with a single tower on it, with Helen looking out a window as the two heroes chase each other around the "city" three and a half times, then stop and fight. In reality, two men cannot realistically run around a city in full armor three times and then stop and fight. The limits of human endurance will prevent it. The vision of the two camps is similar. It requires two towers on a stage, with armed kings at their tops, and actors armed with wooden swords banging away between them. In reality the second fortress at Troy is hugely unlikely because the environment will not allow it.
Question 5: Is the Camp an explanation?
My personal suspicion is that there was a large city in the plain that was destroyed and then flooded. It may have gone down in the earthquake that took down Troy VI. The destroyed and flooded city in the plain was then viewed hundreds of years later, say, in the 800s BC, by poets and other people on the heights of Hisarlik. These people saw blocks and walls and buried shapes in the plain, and invented the story that Greek raiders built walls to protect their ships down there.
Like the bible supplies an explanation for the fallen walls of Jericho, the confused and threadbare tale of the fortified Greek camp supplies an explanation for blocks and shapes in the plain hundreds of years after the city in the plain was lost.
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