Aerial Drones Reveal Elevation Changes in the Plain of Troy

It has been difficult to find a photo or video online that shows the plain of Troy.  There are lots of photos looking north from Schliemann's trench, but few looking west, into the plain.  I finally got the bright idea to search for drone footage and found some.  So, I now have a small collection of westward looking shots, and a lot to say about them.  

The common photos looking north from the trench usually show the village of Kumkale on a ridge across the Dumbrek valley, and a slope ascending to the left, going uphill onto the mound in the plain.  Below are two drone views looking north over the trench, showing the same souvenir view lots of travelers took home, but from a much elevated position.  

The footage above can be found at Shutterstock, and shows a white van going uphill in the plain.  

The above view of Hissarlik looking ENE shows the same road and valley that we just saw rising as they approach the mound in the plain.  Behind that you can see the valley coming down from the mountains.  It should continue downhill and head out to sea to our left.  Instead, it rises.  

So, the valley north of Hissarlik rises as it passes the citadel.  

Now I want to establish that the ground directly in front of Hissarlik also rises.  Walking west from Hissarlik is an uphill walk.  

The photo above creates four markers, the Marsh, the Tree between Hissarlik and the marsh, a Bridge and Field 1.  Field 1 has a road curving around its south end that then turns east toward Hissarlik.  It is at one end of a row of small fields on the east side of the canal that has the bridge at its other end.  

The following pictures demonstrate that Field 1 is elevated above the foot of Hissarlik.  

If you walk down to the front of Hissarlik and continue west into the plain, you must climb a hill.  The road from Hissarlik to Field 1 runs uphill, just like the road to its north that reaches the bridge.

Field 1 is not "below" Hissarlik in the plain. It is on a hill in the plain across from Hissarlik. From the SE corner of Field 1, you can go downhill in two directions: to the south or to the east.  There are slopes in both directions.  Furthermore, the entire strip of fields starting with Field 1 and leading all the way to the bridge, are elevated.  One has to go uphill to reach them from the east.  

If the photos above have established that the road from Hissarlik to Field 1 runs uphill, we can move on to a further topic.  Examine the land behind Field 1, and notice that it continues to climb. 

From Hissarlik one must walk up 5 segments of incline to reach level 6, where the Tree sits in front of the marsh.  

From Field 1, you have to walk uphill through levels 4 and 5 to reach the marsh on level 6.  So, Field 1 is uphill from the foot of Hissarlik, and the marsh is significantly uphill from there.  

It is indisputable that the ground runs uphill from the foot of Hisarlik to the west.  Furthermore, as these final four photos show, the marsh in the plain of Troy is significantly elevated above even Field 1, which is itself elevated above the foot of Hisarlik. 

The marsh is a low spot in a mound.  

The mound is unnatural and should be investigated by science.  The fact that the marsh is growing suggests that the mound could be collapsing.  

Going west from Hisarlik, one walks uphill from section 1 to section 6, where it might be pretty level, until you approach section 7, where you go downhill into a marsh. You then go uphill again out of the marsh in section 8, and downhill again in sections 9 and 10. You should just go downhill from Hissarlik into a valley that is headed out to sea. But you do not. If you walk west from Hissarlik, you climb an unnatural mound to an unnatural marsh, and then climb out of the marsh and go down the other side of the mound to the river.  

All of that is unnatural, and all of it needs to be explained. The simplest and most obvious explanation is that there is a city in the plain causing the mound.  

FWIW, the unnatural elevation change west of Hissarlik has been captured in art.  

Video Links: 

https://videohive.net/item/ruins-of-the-ancient-city-of-troy/37437553 

https://videohive.net/item/troy-ancient-city/26120383 

https://videohive.net/item/troy-city-overall-view/38111624 

https://www.airvuz.com/video/Troia---Assos?id=5b922c54edb5b27a3040f008

Documented Growth of the Marsh in the plain of Troy

Historical satellite pictures at Google Earth prove that the marsh in the plain in front of Hisarlik grew larger between 2016 and 2019. 

The photos above are dated in their top left corners.  The first photo is from June, 2016. The second photo is from February, 2019. In the later photo, the marsh has grown a tail at its south end that reaches nearly to the bottom of the photo. This tail still exists in the October, 2020 photo below, which is the latest image available from Google.  The extended portion of the marsh does not occur in any of the earlier images, which go back to 2006. 

I don't have an interpretation of this.  I would expect a marsh that is being drained like this one to shrink rather than grow, but I can't really justify my expectation.  

Perhaps water is undermining the mound. I think the marsh is on top of a buried city, so, I wonder if the land is settling into the ruins below.  But surely marshes expand for reasons other than water and buried ruins.  

It seems certain that agribusiness would be making money on that land if they could. They used to make money from it. All of the historical pictures show planting and harvesting going on in that area, until 2019.  There must be a good reason they are no longer using that land to make money.   

There are no Google images for any years between 2016 and 2019.  Whether the productivity of that land was lost gradually or suddenly we cannot be sure.  The story of how it happened can be known, however, because people involved in agriculture in that area are still alive to be interviewed.  Finding out what happened would be a good topic for a young researcher who speaks Turkish.  

Why would a marsh grow like that? 

A Theory about the Greek Camp in the Iliad

Perhaps it is a myth

Perhaps the idea of the camp is based on looking down from Hissarlik and seeing shapes and even standing stones in the plain. It comes from a time when the existence of the city in the plain had faded from memory, and the citadel on the hill was all that anyone knew for certain.  One explanation for the irregularities and blocks in the plain was that a city had existed in the plain, the other was that the Greeks had built walls and lived behind them for ten years while besieging the city. Eventually, the heroic untruth won out over the boring truth, and Trojan constructions were thought to be Greek after that. 

The Greeks made up war stories to explain large fossil bones.  Perhaps they made up war stories to explain wreckage in the plain of Troy. 

I have been wanting to write about an anomaly in the plain of Troy that is not among the 17 so far discussed on this blog.  This seems like a good place to bring it up.  There is an unnatural looking, 800 meter long, isolated hill NNW of the great city in the plain.  

This isolated mound lies NW of the citadel around 1.7 miles. The ancient geographer Strabo (1st century bce) tells us that the Greek camp was 20 stades from Troy, which is around 2.2 miles.  The far end of the anomaly lies 2.1 miles from the citadel.  

I don't know what this mound looked like in Strabo's time. But perhaps it seemed more like a construction than a mound at that time.  Before that, it was perhaps a ruin, perhaps a wrecked tower and supporting structure.  This would have challenged imaginations to explain it.  Once the idea that the Trojans had lived in the flood plain had been lost, the idea that the ruins in the plain were Greek was easier to accept.  With that, the utterly unlikely story about invaders getting off their boats and building walls and towers could gain currency.  

The alleged Greek camp is not the only theory that might have been invented to explain irregularities in the plain.  The theory of the Fort of Heracles might also have originally gained life as an explanation for an irregularity in the plain, maybe the one we see above.  Below are two quite different translations of Iliad book XX, line 144f; first by Andrew Lang and Walter Leaf, then by A.T. Murray.

Thus spake the blue-haired god, and led the way to the mounded wall of heaven-sprung Herakles, that lofty wall built him by the Trojans and Pallas Athene, that he might escape the monster and be safe from him, what time he should make his onset from the beach to the plain. There sate them down Poseidon and the other gods, and clothed their shoulders with impenetrable cloud.

 

So saying, the dark-haired god led the way to the heaped-up wall of godlike Heracles, the high wall that the Trojans and Pallas Athene had builded for him, to the end that he might flee thither and escape from the monster of the deep, whenso the monster drave him from the seashore to the plain. There Poseidon and the other gods sate them down, and clothed their shoulders round about with a cloud that might not be rent; and they of the other part sat over against them on the brows of Callicolone, round about thee, O archer Phoebus, and Aries, sacker of cities.

The Fort of Hercules was supposed to have been built with divine assistance to protect Hercules when he fought a sea monster in the bay of Troy. Could the idea of such a fortress have been based on the mound in the pictures above? It would have been much closer to the shoreline in Homer's time.  

The problem of Kalifat and Kumkale

Two small villages, Kalifat and Kumkale appear in the plain of Troy on old maps. 

There should be no villages in a flood plain, because they will be wiped out by flooding.  

Yet these two villages lasted in the plain at least a hundred years, from the 1840s to the 1950s, after which they were moved onto the prominences overlooking their old locations.  

I suspect that those two villages could endure in the plain only because they were on high ground.  

This is clearly the case with old Kumkale.  It sat on the northern end of what Walter Leaf thought was the Throsmos, or swelling of the plain, mentioned by Homer.  The location is marked on Leaf's map below, just northwest of Troia.

Below is a map from Heinrich Schliemann.  It places Kum-Kioi where Leaf puts the throsmos.  Nearby is the Burial mound of Illus.

Below is a photo looking northwest over the top of Troia, toward the mound Leaf had in mind.  The mound is visibly rising at the top of the frame, where a canal goes around it.  Nearer to Troy a road climbs the mound from right to left.  

Below is a more recent view to the northwest from Troia.  Again, the rise Leaf was talking about is visible where the canal goes around it on the right and the road climbs the mound in the center. Out beyond the canal is the new village of Kumkale. 

Below is another view to the northwest.  The rising land below the "corbis" watermark in this photo is pretty dramatic.  At the top of the photo you can see the canal going around the end of the mound. 

Below is yet another pic looking northwest across the excavated area at Hissarlik. The new village of Kumkale is clearly visible on the prominence beyond the canal which is curving around the obvious mound on which it formerly sat. A road climbs the mound from right to left.  

Below is another map from Heinrich Schliemann.  It places Kum-keui near two other place names, Ilus and Polion.  It's as if there were three distinct villages there.  

There can be little doubt that the villages in that area were on top of a mound.  The layout and curvature of the roads on Schliemann's map make the huge mound in front of Hisarlik very distinct. 

The original location of Kalafat is harder to discern.  It sat near the pointed, southern end of the great mound in front of Hissarlik. As long as it was on that mound, it would have had some height above the floor of the valley.  Schliemann's map above places it at the meeting place of two roads. The map below places "Kalifatlee" in a similar location.  

The map below seems to agree on the location of old Kalafat. 

The map from Thomas Spratt below also puts Kalifatli on the edge of the winter channel of the Scamander. 

Finally, on the map below we have Eski (old) Kalafat Koy (village) Yeri (location) marked right next to the Scamander.  This map places the original location of the village in what Spratt called the winter channel in which the Mendere/Scamander runs today.  

I think it is easy to say why Kumkale survived in the plain (it was on a mound) but I cannot say why Kalafat survived in the plain, because it does not appear to have been on the mound.  It appears to have been either in the winter channel or right next to it.  

If Kalafat was not on a mound, then how did it survive floods? 

Below is a modern satellite photo with the approximate locations of the old villages marked.

The two villages used to sit at opposite ends of the great mound in front of Hissarlik.  Whether Kalafat was actually on the mound is questionable.  Perhaps part of it was.  Somehow Kalafat survived floods for over a century or more.  If it was not saved from flood destruction year after year by being on a hill, then perhaps the mounds around it protected it.  In other words, perhaps the ancient flood control works in the plain protected the old location of the village.  

How the Trojans Diverted Kamer Creek

After my recent speculations about the diversion of the Scamander, I went searching with Google Earth for a place at which the Trojans might have diverted Kamer Creek to form Lake Judan. I did not expect to find anything, but it turns out there is an anomaly right next to the creek at the crucial point along the creek where it needs to turn to form the lake.    

A yellow line encircles a long, straight berm-like anomaly.   It tapers into the rocky prominence on the left.  Kamer creek passes along its right edge.  

In the photo below, Kamer Creek is diverted into the berm-like anomaly, and then around the rocky prominence.  

Light blue dashes indicate the rest of the current course of Kamer Creek.  

In the diagram above, the yellow lines represent dams.  Blue dots are reservoirs.   A lake at the area of the dot on the right would get the creek to flow around the prominence on the left of the dam, and then to run down to the plain in the direction of Judan Lake, which is the dot on the far left.  

So, the Trojans could have diverted Kamer Creek with a berm and a dam spanning two prominences.  

In the diagram above, light blue lines represent dams.  Blue dots represent probable reservoirs.  Dark blue lines represent diverted water ways. Blue circles represent known marshes, and possible reservoirs. Yellow circles mark the citadel and the greater city in the plain of Troy.  

Below is a map from Heinrich Schliemann.  It uses the name Old Scamander twice on the eastern edge of the plain.  Once where the Kalifatli Asmak reaches the sea, and another time near the top of the plain, where he seems to be only labeling the eastern most fork of the drainage from lake Judan.  

If the Trojans diverted Kamer Creek to form lake Judan and then to flow past the eastern side of the city in the plain, and under Hissarlik, it would explain the deep bed that Schliemann appealed to when he argued that the Scamander used to run in front of Hissarlik.  He argued for that on the basis of the very deep bed at those points along the Asmak.  

So, my theory seems to explain two things.  It explains how the beach at Besik Bay was created by diverting the Scamander into the Pinarbasi Su.  It also explains the deep beds that Schliemann saw.  Those could have been made by Kamer Creek.  

It seems unlikely that the Scamander could have been diverted to both sides of the plain.  It is unlikely, in other words, that the Scamander both made the beach at Besik Bay and made the deep beds described by Schliemann.  What seems most likely is that the Trojans found another water source after they had diverted and controlled the Scamander.  If they diverted and controlled Kamer Creek, their work must have lasted long enough to create the deep beds at the top of the plain that Schliemann described.  

How the Trojans Diverted the Scamander River

What I am about to discuss is purely speculative.  I cannot prove it.   But I can argue for it.  If there are so far no theories out there as to how the Trojans diverted the Scamander river, at least there is one now.

"Where the winter stream of the Bunarbashi-Su joins the Mendere, there are some immense blocks of irregular shape; they may have formed part of the wall of a small fortress" (Dr Peter Forschhammer, Topography of the Plain of Troy, p 39).  

Forschhammer, who visited the plain of Troy in 1844, tells us that he saw large blocks in the area he calls the winter channel of the Burnarbashi Su, which is a place in front of Pinarbasi where the western most rivulet in the plain can discharge eastward into the bed of the main river in the center of the plain.  That western rivulet is today known as the Pinarbasi Su.  

In the map above by Thomas Spratt, the Winter Channel of the Bounarbashi Su appears between the T and the R in Troy. That position is just a little down stream from the large eastward loop that goes around the top most anomaly pictured below. 

In the above photo, there are two raised earth anomalies across from one another, with a canal and road between them. Forschhammer saw the blocks in the area near the left edge of the lower most anomaly.   

Forschhammer suggests the blocks could be the remains of a small fortress, but that fort would have been in the middle of a flood plain, and would not have survived for long.  I think it is more likely that what Forschhammer saw were remains from a dam.  I suspect that what we are looking at in the above photo is 3000 years worth of mud covering two parts of a failed dam.  The dam is under 5-7 meters of alluvium.  Imagine a two story deep carpet covering the bronze age surfaces and structures.  

Zangger tells us that determining the age of the canal cut into the bedrock at Besik Bay "has never been seriously attempted, although Schliemann argued plausibly that the canal must have been very ancient, because it had accumulated a beach at its mouth in Besik Bay, 1 1/2 square miles in size, and it could not have done so in just a few centuries" (The Flood From Heaven, 1992, 145). In addition, the alluvium in Besik Bay does not come from the springs at Pinarbasi, it comes from the Scamander river, which runs in the center of the plain.  

It follows that the Trojans must have diverted the Scamander out of the plain and into the artificial channel at Besik Bay.  That is the only way the beach at Besik Bay could have been formed. 

How did they do it? 

If there was a dam below Pinarbasi, it would have created a reservoir behind it.  If that reservoir was allowed to flow off to the western side of the plain, it would have put the river water into the pre-existing channel of the Pinarbasi Su, running down the western side of the plain.  

So, I propose that the redirection (or partial redirection) of the Scamander/Mendere was achieved by damming the river, and letting its reservoir flow off in a new direction.  

In the diagram above, the yellow arrow points to an area where the reservoir of the Mendere flows off into the channel of the Pinarbasi Su.  The light blue line represents the dam.  The yellow circles mark the citadel and the greater city of Troy. Blue dots represent reservoirs. 

So, how did the Trojans divert the Scamander river?  They dammed it to form a reservoir which they allowed to flow out into the Pinarbasi Su.  Some or all of this water then made its way to Besik Bay, at the bottom of this photo, via the channel cut into the bedrock that is still there today.  

The dam must have lasted for a long time to have created such a large beach at Besik Bay.  If it was built during the era of Troy II and lasted until around the time of Troy VI or VII, it would have had perhaps1400 years to build up the beach (2600 -1200 bce).  

6 more Anomalies in the Plain of Troy

I have listed the Top 10 anomalies in the plain, by which I meant the most obvious and important ones.  On this page I will list some of the less obvious anomalies in the plain.  

1 The canal cut into the bedrock at Besik Bay 

I mentioned this in my entry on Pliny the Elder.  Today there is a canal leading from the springs at Pinarbasi all the way to the Hellespont.  But it was not always like that.  At Besik Bay, there is a cut into the bedrock that for a long time diverted some or all of the spring water running in the Pinarbasi Su out of the plain and down a slope toward Besik Bay.  In the 1840s enough spring water was being diverted to run mills in Besik Bay, as shown on old maps from the time.  

I have seen no confident statements about the age of the cut there.  It might be ancient, medieval or modern.  

According to Zangger, recent excavators concluded that the beach at Besik Bay was made up of alluvium from the Scamander/Karamendere, not from the Pinarbasi Su.  This suggests that ancient people diverted the Scamander into Besik Bay because it has built up a significant beach.  

In the above image there are two canals marked in blue on the left.  The short one at Kesik Tepe is the Kesik Cut and the long one to the south of that is the canal at Besik Bay. It starts just behind the baseball field shaped marsh in front of Yenikoy.  

2 Dents west of Kalafat 

I have not discussed these yet.  There are a couple of oddities west of Kalafat that deserve to be mentioned.  I thought for a while that the river did it.  But I just don't see how a river does that.  Nor how flood waters and deposition create those shapes.  I have no deep theory about them, but I will point out that they lie between the marsh and the declivity on the west side of Kalafat.  If the marsh drained toward the center of the plain, it could drain down one of those anomalies toward the reservoir above the city.  So perhaps they functioned as a conduit for water.  

In the photo below I have marked the dents and two nearby mounds in yellow. Two other oddities are marked in orange.  West of the dents are some oddly segmented farm fields.  In the marsh west of that is a structure discussed in earlier posts.  This shot is intended merely to provide a little context for the dents.  They sit among other anomalies.  If the marsh drained toward the center of the plain, it could have drained through those segmented fields and created the large dished out area of the dents.

3 The rise in front of Lisgar Marsh 

I have not discussed this one previously. That area seems unnatural to me. It seems to be an elongated mound that curves down in front.  I don't know if there is anything under there, but one of the Spratt maps indicates that there was at one time a notably deep channel there. 

The map below clearly labels an Artificial Cut through the coastline, then to the right of the cut, Lisgar Marsh and Bushes, and then to the right of that, a Deep Bed 

In the photo below, there are two satellite pictures joined at the left. One of them is much lighter colored than the other one.  That is the way Google is right now on this location.  An arrow points to the approximate location of the Deep Bed on Spratt's map. I have partly encircled the anomaly that bothers me.  The area to the east of the Deep Bed seems raised, like an elongated mound.  

Is that mound natural?  I have no idea.  Perhaps some Lidar or other tests could be run to discover the extent of human interventions in this part of the plain.  

4 The rises below Pinarbasi 

I talked about one of these in an earlier post.   Pinarbasi is a village SSW of Kalifat and Troy. There are springs there.  

My feelings have gone back and forth on the first of these.  Is it natural or not?  I am still thinking not. 

Whatever it is, it is not farmed.  Why aren't the farmers making money off of that land?  The second rise is more complex and lies just east of the first one.  

Below are the two rises together in the plain. 

Both rises seem unnatural to me.  I cannot think of anything that might have been far from the city up in the plain like this except villages or water works.  Villages would have been destroyed by flooding.  So, I am thinking there might be water control structures underground here.  As explained below, I believe the two mounds might represent two parts of a former dam.  

5 Judan Lake 

I discussed this in an earlier post. My sense is that if there was a lake in the plain, it was probably man made.  It might have been created by diverting a stream into the plain, and damning it there to create a reservoir for the city.  The lake is circled on the map from Thomas Spratt below.  

Below is a picture of the area.  There actually seems to be a spillway there.  Perhaps there was a dam or weir here that formed the lake.  

The arrow below points to a possible source for the lake water.   Take a look on Google satellite view.  

6 The shapes at the top of the valley 

I discussed this in an earlier post.  I have no good ideas on this other than to say they are very odd, and perhaps they were part of a project to divert the stream into the valley to form Judan Lake.  They might also serve to keep the Scamander/Mendere from inundating the top of the eastern part of the plain,  

Below is an interpretation of what we have seen above.  Two yellow circles represent the citadel and the greater city of Troy.  I am thinking that the two rises below Pinarbasi might be the remnants of a dam, indicated with a light blue line.  The yellow arrow points to the place where the reservoir formed by the Scamander can flow into the Pinarbasi Su, and then out of the plain to Besik Bay.  Above Lake Judan is a stream diverted to fill the lake.  This is Kemere Creek, which meets the Scamander/Mendere just after it enters the plain.  A blue dashed line indicates its course today.  

Something like this would at least explain the alluvium from the Scamander found in Besik Bay.  There are no other anomalies in the plain that would explain how the Trojans diverted the Scamander.  The hills in front of Pinarbasi are the only possible signs of it.  

It occurs to me that a dam in front of Pinarbasi would obviate the need for flood control works lower down in the plain, such as the great berm and its surrounding mounds. There are several ways to go here.  First off, it is not necessarily the case that the dam would preclude the need for the other flood control works.  Secondly, the age of things must be taken into account.  Perhaps the great berm and its associated structures date back to Troy II, and the dam only goes back as far as Troy V.  Perhaps the dam was needed after the lower structures proved tragically inadequate.  Perhaps the dam is the older construction and the berm was built after it failed.  Who knows?  None of us.  We need science to take an interest in this.  

What seems certain is that the plain knew two major water problems, that of having too little water in late summer, and that of having too much water in winter and spring.  The reservoirs help both problems.  They control and capture excess water when it is present, and then provide extra water when the streams are low in summer.