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). 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 oars, 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)
If Boreas "covered" them all, there would have been around 3000 foals. Could it be that only 12 were fillies? At least we know that 60x50 makes 3000, and that mere 50 stallions could service 60 mares apiece to get Erichthonius 3000 foals. If that is a lot of mares per stallion, consider that 75 stallions could do 40 mares a year, 100 could do 30 mares each, and of course, 200 mares could cover 15 apiece. However you sort it out, you are looking at a lot of foals, and a lot of horses in the plain, year over year.
I suggest that the 3000 number, if not fully absurd is close to it given that one will have 6000 horses at the end of the first year. The Citadel and its associated Lower City on Hisarlik together housed between 4k and 7k people. So, two years of owning 3000 mares will get you 6k foals, making 9k horses when just their mothers are counted. That is more horses than people.
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.
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 suggests 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.
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 Caria (Lycia/Lukka) that, he says, was under the command of "Akamas of Ilion, the great enemy".
From 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 from Woudhuizen.
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 this 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 Levant 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, if not specifically sea power.
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 could maneuver in the bay of Troy, maybe all the way up to the north end of the tell in the time of Troy II. But the big boats 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 People, p 109-10
I know that the Tjeker = 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. 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 Levant. Here they would have mixed with the local population, just as the Peleset/Philistines apparently did. Perhaps the distant offspring of some of these purple dye making ancient seafarers became Phoenicians.
