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00:00It is one of the greatest love stories ever told, and one of the biggest war epics in human history.
00:10It is a tale of gods and heroes, of the world's greatest warrior, and the world's most beautiful woman.
00:19It's the tale of a Trojan horse and a thousand ships.
00:25But how much of it is true?
00:28Did the Trojan War really happen?
00:31And what secrets lie under this hill in western Turkey?
00:35Could this be the great lost city of Troy?
00:39It's a modern detective story that unearths an ancient mystery.
00:44The story behind the epic.
00:47A story of stolen gold, buried skeletons, and crumbling empires may be even more fantastic than Homer could have imagined.
00:58The story of T-22 E.
01:03The story of T-22 E.
01:22This gold treasure is nearly 4,500 years old, and it comes with a strange story that leads to a lost civilization known as Troy.
01:36This gold has been stolen, hidden, won in battle, and lost again.
01:44Nations have fought over it. Empires have fallen around it.
01:50April 1945. These gold artifacts, containing more than 10,000 individual pieces, are housed in a museum in Berlin.
02:04But Russia's Red Army is advancing on the Nazi capital. The city is in panic.
02:10Museums are looted, valuables are carted off, and the gold vanishes. What happened to it?
02:20For years, it was assumed that this gold had been melted down, lost forever. But it wasn't lost. It was hiding.
02:32No one knows exactly how. But sometime that summer, the gold was loaded onto trucks and snuck out of devastated Berlin. It traveled east, deep into Stalin's Soviet Union.
02:46First, the gold arrived here, at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. But it was not for display. Instead, it was locked in the basement for 50 years. Until another empire fell. This time, the Soviet Empire.
03:02In 1993, the Russians admitted they'd stashed the gold. Three years later, it finally went on display. Now, nations are again fighting over this treasure.
03:14Russia, Russia, Germany, Greece, Turkey. Claims that revive ancient rivalries, stretching back to the age of heroes.
03:24Is this the gold of Homer's Troy, a city legendary for its wealth and riches?
03:30The story of the Trojan War is told in Homer's Iliad and continues into his Odyssey.
03:36It's been retold in art, plays, and books.
03:42It's a story so powerful that Hollywood can't resist it.
03:48The story of the Trojan War is a compelling saga. It has elements that both women and men like. It's a love story. It's a buddy flick. And it's got universal themes.
04:00Man's mortality, love, requited and unrequited. I mean, Hollywood's had a fixation with it again and again and again. It's just a story that won't die.
04:11It's the story of two great civilizations. The Greeks under King Agamemnon and the Trojans led by King Priam.
04:21It's the story of how Paris, a Trojan prince, runs off with Helen, a Greek queen. But stealing a queen carries a heavy price.
04:32King Agamemnon, overlord of one of the world's largest militaries, must defend his kingdom's honor.
04:40He launches a thousand ships across the Aegean Sea to get Helen back.
04:47The Greeks lay siege to Troy for ten years, but cannot scale Troy's enormous walls.
04:55The most famous warriors, Achilles of Greece and Hector from Troy, engage in mortal combat. Hector is killed, but the walls still stand. Until the Greeks invent a trick. They wheel a huge wooden horse to the city walls. The Trojans think it's a gift, but instead it's filled with Greeks who carry off Helen and burn Troy to the ground.
05:24Troy is destroyed, but the story lives on to this day.
05:28There are any number of cliches that come out of the story of the Trojan War, most of which people don't even realize came from there.
05:35We have, for instance, Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, the face that launched a thousand ships, with Helen being that face. And of course we have, then, Achilles' heel.
05:47Homer managed to hit on some kind of eternal themes of humanity. The sacrifices that are required by a soldier to fight on behalf of his land, to follow orders of his king.
06:02The sense of strong relationships between men and women, seeing them pulled asunder on the field of battle. These are themes that carry on through the remainder of Western literature.
06:14The story has been around for almost 3,000 years. But is it true? Was there even a Troy at all? Did the Trojan War take place?
06:27The Trojan War supposedly occurred 1,300 years before Christ, a time when writing was virtually unknown, and there was no recorded history.
06:40It was 400 years before the tales from Troy were finally written down in books, called the Iliad and the Odyssey.
06:49They are not history. Rather, they are entertaining fables from another era. Fiction with a dash of historical fact, by a man named Homer.
07:00But who was he? And did he deserve the credit?
07:03The Iliad and the Odyssey were attributed to a blind poet from Western Turkey named Homer, already in the Greek period.
07:10But recent research has shown that we're not necessarily justified in linking the two epics to a man named Homer, nor are we necessarily justified in assuming that he was blind.
07:21Some people have suggested that it's not a person, that Homer is a profession, that one is a Homer.
07:28Whoever Homer was, his story can be mined for clues to find the real truth behind the epic war between Greece and Troy.
07:38The tale begins in the Late Bronze Age, more than 3,000 years ago, at a lavish dinner between kings and commercial rivals.
07:47King Priam of Troy and King Menelaos of the Greek city of Sparta command competing trade routes and are celebrating their new partnership.
07:57But there is a problem. One of Priam's sons, Prince Paris, is distracted from his diplomatic duties.
08:05The distraction? His host's wife, Helen, said to be the most beautiful woman in the world.
08:12But King Menelaos does not notice Paris' infatuation.
08:17Menelaos, who's apparently not the brightest of bulbs, goes off and leaves Paris and Helen alone.
08:27Menelaos goes off to Crete on a business trip. And while the cats away, the mice play.
08:32Helen and Paris meet eyes and fall in love.
08:36They begin an illicit affair.
08:46Paris takes Helen back with him to Troy.
08:50There are two versions. The Greek version said that Helen had been kidnapped and had been taken away.
08:58The Trojan version said that Helen had actually fallen in love with Paris and had left voluntarily.
09:04Either way, Helen winds up back in Troy.
09:07When Menelaos comes back, he finds his wife is gone.
09:11In any era, taking a queen is a scandal and an insult.
09:16In the 13th century BC, it is an act of war.
09:26King Priam refuses to return her to Greece.
09:29Helen is now kept at the royal court of Troy.
09:32But was there ever really such a place?
09:35Homer's description of Troy tantalizes.
09:38In past days, men told tales of Priam City, rich in gold and rich in bronze.
09:45Priam City, Troy, rich in gold.
09:51That promise has lured treasure seekers through the centuries.
09:55Find Troy and you will find gold.
09:58And that is where this gold comes back into the story.
10:04In 19th century Germany, an eccentric businessman took up the hunt for Troy's riches with a vengeance.
10:11That man was Heinrich Schliemann.
10:14He was obsessed with the Iliad and believed every word of it.
10:19To him, Troy, Helen, the horse were real history.
10:23But for hundreds of years, scholars had seriously doubted Troy's existence.
10:30To them, it was a fictitious city, an Atlantis, a Shangri-La.
10:35Schliemann refused to believe them.
10:39A man obsessed, he embarked on a wild quest that became the first serious attempt to find Troy.
10:46But discovering the truth about Troy is made all the harder because Schliemann, like Homer, readily mixed fact and fiction.
10:55In an age when showmanship guaranteed lavish press coverage, Schliemann was destined to become the archeological P.T. Barnum.
11:04Heinrich Schliemann is the father of archeology.
11:07He's also a scoundrel.
11:10He is almost completely untrustworthy in terms of his personal life, his private life.
11:18And therefore, one wonders how much we can trust him in terms of his professional life.
11:23He's not really a man you would have wanted to invite home to dinner.
11:29And at the very least, if you did, you would take his stories with the proverbial grain of salt, if not the whole shaker.
11:37Schliemann was determined to find proof of the Trojan War and make himself famous.
11:43But first, he had to get rich.
11:46Starting in Russia, he sold arms to both sides in the Crimean War.
11:51Then, to finance his search, he turned his eye to gold.
11:55In 1849, there was only one place to chase it.
11:59He then went to California in the 1849 gold rush.
12:03He was a 49er, but he didn't get his hands dirty.
12:06Instead of mining for the gold, he was a go-between, buying the gold dust and the nuggets from the miners and selling them to the banks.
12:14Apparently, he had his thumb on the scale.
12:16And so, he was nearly run out of town.
12:19With his newfound wealth, it was time to search for Troy.
12:23But before he did, the eccentric Schliemann needed one more thing, his very own Helen.
12:30He engineered a divorce.
12:32He then wrote to the head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Athens and said,
12:36I want to come to Greece, and I want you to find me a Greek wife.
12:40His interviews produced 17-year-old Sophie in Gastromenos.
12:46Greek, young, and beautiful, she became the new Mrs. Schliemann.
12:51He had found his Helen.
12:53Now, to find Troy.
12:55The only question, where?
13:00Homer's writings are like a treasure map, full of tiny hints.
13:04He describes the Trojan plain as a windy land dotted with sturdy oak trees perched on the edge of the ancient Hellespont waterway.
13:14This sent Schliemann to northwestern Turkey in 1868, where the purported grave of Achilles lies near the town of Beshek Tepe on the Aegean coast.
13:25If Homer is to be believed, Troy has to be nearby.
13:30Schliemann then turned to a man with a credible theory of how to unravel this mystery.
13:37He was Frank Calvert, a diplomat and amateur archaeologist.
13:42Frank Calvert said to him, you know, on my land, there is a site named Hiserlich, and I've been excavating there.
13:49I believe it's Troy. Why don't you come and take a look and dig, and if it's Troy, we can work something out.
13:56Hiserlich was not much to look at.
14:02Literally, a grassy lump, 220 by 160 yards, rising from the flat farmland of Turkey's Anatolian coast.
14:12Calvert convinced Schliemann that this unassuming mound in the middle of nowhere was once the cosmopolitan civilization of Troy.
14:27Schliemann began to dig where Calvert had suggested, and he wasn't dainty.
14:32Believing that Homer's Troy was at the bottom, he carved a mammoth north-south trench over 40 yards wide, straight through the middle of the hill.
14:42Schliemann was not patient or careful. If it wasn't about Homer's Troy, he tossed it aside.
14:49If one had to describe in a nutshell how Schliemann dug at Troy, it would be very easy to describe. He dug badly.
14:55At the time in which Schliemann began his work, archaeology was really a very new discipline.
15:00We think of it as a very old one, but in fact, in the second half of the 19th century, it was quite new.
15:05Schliemann had no formal training in archaeology at the point when he began his excavations, so he wasn't exactly sure how to go about it.
15:13On May 31st, 1873, Schliemann would literally hit pay dirt.
15:20In his own words, Schliemann said, I came out one morning, the workmen were already excavating,
15:25and as I walked over, one workman was uncovering a huge chest, and I could see the glint of gold.
15:32And so I quickly announced that I had forgotten it was my birthday, Schliemann says, and I gave them the day off on the spot.
15:40After the workmen had left, I then called over my wife, Sophie, and together we excavated this great chest and associated treasures.
15:49My wife gathered up the objects, the gold, the silver, the bronze, in her apron and carried them off back to the house,
15:55where we quickly collected them and catalogued them and wrote them up.
16:00Thousands of pieces of gold, large and small. It was, Schliemann claimed, the treasure of Priam, the Trojan king.
16:09The riches he'd spent years trying to find.
16:13Schliemann had promised the Turkish government that he would not take the treasure out of the country.
16:18So for him, there was only one choice. He would sneak it out.
16:23According to Schliemann, one night, he and his wife smuggled the gold out of Troy by boat, back to his adopted home in Greece.
16:32Unfortunately, we have a problem with this story. The problem is very simple, that Sophie wasn't there.
16:39In Schliemann's own diaries and other accounts, it turns out that his wife Sophie was in Athens the day that this treasure was reportedly discovered.
16:47So the whole story was made up. And in fact, Schliemann was confronted with this later.
16:53And he said rather sheepishly, yes, it's true, Sophie wasn't there.
16:57I inserted her into the story in order to try and get her more interested in what I do.
17:02It would get stranger. With the gold in hand, Schliemann could complete the creation of his own personal Helen.
17:11After Schliemann smuggles the gold out of Turkey and back to Athens, one of the first things he does is dress his wife Sophie in all the gold and take a picture of this.
17:22It's not something you do. On the other hand, given the day and the age, who could have resisted?
17:28I mean, the gold is there. It's just him. It's just his wife. He puts it on. She looks gorgeous. It's a wonderful photograph.
17:34Who does it hurt? Well, you're not supposed to do that.
17:38For Schliemann, his lifelong dream had finally come true. Or so he believed. Treasure it certainly was. But it wasn't Priam's.
17:51Schliemann's own assistant, Wilhelm Dorpfeld, found that the gold was not from the time of the Trojan War, the 13th century BC.
18:00It was, in fact, much older. More than a thousand years older. Amazingly, by accident, Schliemann had discovered a lost civilization. One that dated to about 3000 BC. Older than anyone had imagined. It was a discovery for the ages.
18:19In spite of himself, Schliemann had discovered not one Troy, but nine. Piled one upon the other, sacked or destroyed, the nine levels of Troy span a period of almost 4500 years.
18:36Schliemann found nine cities, and he was then faced with the dilemma he hadn't expected. Which of the nine cities was the city of the Trojan War?
18:47In his rush to dig, Schliemann had, in fact, destroyed much of the very civilization he sought.
18:54Homer's Troy, Troy 6 and 7, resides in the middle levels, not the bottom, where Schliemann reckoned it was.
19:04Despite the confusion and destruction, Schliemann had clearly established the existence of Troy. The discovery made him famous.
19:15Schliemann announced his results, forgetting to mention, deliberately forgetting to mention the name of Frank Calvert. Calvert's name was lost to history, and Schliemann claimed credit for finding Troy.
19:28He had found Troy. But one thing bothered him. Troy was not very big. And Schliemann could not understand why such a great war was fought over so small a town.
19:42To prove there was a Trojan War, he had to produce a bigger, more powerful Troy. One that was sacked and burned. The trail Schliemann had been following for so long had finally grown cold.
19:57So he turned his attention back to Homer's Iliad, across the sea, to ancient Greece.
20:04There are many individual kingdoms in Peloponnesian Greece in the Late Bronze Age.
20:11But they all answer to one kingdom, Mycenae, and to one king, Agamemnon.
20:17It was Agamemnon's brother, Menelaos, whose wife Helen had been taken. She is still in Troy with her lover, Paris. But in this insult, Agamemnon sees opportunity.
20:31He calls together the rulers under his control, and enlists their support. The mission, retrieve Helen, and loot Troy, the city rich in gold.
20:42The secret weapon, Achilles, the greatest warrior in Greece, whose agility and fighting skill have been bestowed by the gods.
20:52With the largest fleet, and the greatest warrior, how can he lose?
20:57King Agamemnon, with a head and face like Jove, the Lord of Thunder, a waist like Mars, and a chest like that of Neptune, stands peerless among the multitude of heroes.
21:12Agamemnon, king of the great city of Mycenae. Could this have been the kingdom which led the Greeks against Troy?
21:21In 1876, Schliemann went to the site where Mycenae was thought to have existed.
21:27People would have taken him right there and said, this was the home of Agamemnon, this was Mycenae.
21:33At these unexcavated ruins, Schliemann began digging again, hoping to find Agamemnon, and another lead to the Trojan War.
21:42Mycenae, a place of wealth and violence.
21:48Unlike Troy, Mycenae's existence had never been in doubt.
21:52But no one had ever systematically excavated the site, until Schliemann arrived.
21:58And what he uncovered here was stunning.
22:01You go into the citadel of Mycenae, you go along a wall, and you go through a gateway, and over top that gateway is a huge stone lintel block.
22:14And over top of that is a roughly triangular piece of stone, which has a carving on it of two lion-like creatures facing each other with a column in between.
22:25Lions, what could they mean?
22:28In ancient times, lions were the symbolic guards marking a royal establishment.
22:34The Lion's Gate is one of the oldest monumental sculptures in Europe.
22:39To Schliemann, it was the entrance way to Agamemnon's court.
22:43Schliemann began to excavate, and what he found was a circular space that resembled a meeting place or town square.
22:52But when he began to excavate there, he found it wasn't a meeting place.
22:56It was a monumental area in which there were graves.
23:00Graves.
23:02Instead of a town square, Schliemann had found a cemetery.
23:07And he found a number of deep shafts that had been cut down through the ground and into the bedrock.
23:13And at the bottom of each of those shafts was a rectangular chamber, which he found a great number of bodies.
23:21Schliemann dug deeper, convinced that he would uncover the body of Agamemnon himself and unlock new secrets of the Trojan War mystery.
23:31In each grave were large quantities of very precious objects of gold and silver, large quantities of exotic objects that have been brought to Mycenae.
23:41Gold.
23:43Incredible as it seems, Schliemann had struck gold again.
23:48The most remarkable pieces, golden masks placed on the faces of the dead.
23:53A sign of a treasure-laden afterlife.
23:56Schliemann had seen enough.
23:58He sent telegrams to major newspapers announcing that he had looked upon the very face of Agamemnon.
24:06The European press gobbled it up.
24:09But Schliemann never let the truth get in the way of a good tale.
24:13The original mask that Schliemann had found was the round-cheeked, friendly face of your next-door neighbor.
24:20The king of Greece came to see this, but in the meantime, Schliemann had found an even better mask.
24:26And so when the king showed up, he showed the king that second mask.
24:30And this is the one with the curly Q mustache and the beard, which looks much more regal.
24:34It looks like a Victorian British gentleman.
24:38And so some people have suggested he took a golden mask and had a friend, a jeweler friend perhaps,
24:45actually add the beard and mustache to it.
24:49Perhaps Schliemann was not above altering the very face of Agamemnon.
24:54But it wasn't Agamemnon.
24:56It was 300 years older.
25:00Once again, Schliemann's insatiable search for the Trojan War had made a remarkable discovery by pure luck.
25:08The mask was from an earlier Mycenae.
25:11But Schliemann was still looking for the Mycenae that reached its zenith in Homer's Iliad.
25:17In the following years, archaeologists would uncover a remarkable link to Homer,
25:22a boar's tusk helmet that precisely matches a description in the Iliad.
25:28And over his head he set a helmet made of leather.
25:32The gleaming teeth of a white-tusked boar ran round and round in rows stitched neat and tight.
25:38Suddenly, Homer is more than just a poet.
25:45Finally, the mythology and the archaeology come together, and Agamemnon's city comes into focus.
25:52Like Troy, Mycenae was positioned atop a hill, dominating the trade routes below.
26:00And like Troy, Mycenae became a wealthy place.
26:03It was also reputed to have a long history of dynastic violence.
26:15Agamemnon's grandfather killed his own brother here, and fed the body to his children.
26:22In Agamemnon's time, this city is on a war footing, the fate of Mycenae hanging in the balance.
26:31As the great fleet prepares to sail, Agamemnon makes a desperate act.
26:46He sacrifices his own daughter to beseech the gods for favorable winds to Troy.
27:03Could a fleet of a thousand ships have really crossed the Aegean to attack northwest Turkey?
27:09If so, how?
27:14Fifty oarsmen on a single-decked ship could reach speeds up to eight knots.
27:19With 260 miles between Mycenae and Troy, it would take Agamemnon's fleet three days or more to cross Homer's wine-dark sea.
27:29Whether it was the gods, Agamemnon's sacrifice, or his able seamen, it worked.
27:36The Greek fleet crosses the Aegean and arrives on the Turkish coast.
27:45But then, Agamemnon's luck would run out.
27:49In a petty quarrel over a slave girl, the great warrior Achilles refuses to fight for the Greek army.
27:57Agamemnon will have to take Troy without him.
28:01The Greeks camp on shore at the Bay of Troy and plan their assault on the Trojan city to rescue Helen.
28:10But they would not be the last army to fight for this land.
28:14In World War I, nearly a quarter of a million Allied soldiers died here in the Battle of Gallipoli.
28:25In 1452 A.D., the Ottomans conquered Constantinople up the river.
28:31In 332 B.C., Alexander the Great brought an army of 20,000 here.
28:38Why have men fought on this coast so many times over the centuries?
28:45The answer is its unique location.
28:48In Homer, Troy is situated on the edge of the Hellespont, what is today known as the Dardanelles, the drainpipe-shaped waterway that separates the Black Sea from the Aegean and which separates Europe from Asia.
29:05The coast has always been dotted with small fishing villages.
29:12But just offshore, there have always been the great ships of world commerce.
29:21Much of the ancient world's wealth passed through these narrow waters.
29:40If Homer's Troy were here, it would be in a powerful spot.
29:44A prevailing northeast wind still whips this spot, then as now.
29:54It is a wind that helped make Troy a wealthy city.
29:59The winds and the currents frequently were going the wrong way and the sailors would have had to put in at the port for up to six weeks at a time.
30:09And Troy, the rulers of Troy probably would have taxed those ships.
30:14Troy would become a sort of Bronze Age toll booth, and the wealth flowed in.
30:22Outside the walls of the citadel are farms and herds of goats and sheep, the sort of quiet pastoral life Homer described in the Iliad.
30:43Inside the citadel, the city is regal and magnificent.
30:52Trojan court life is centered within the walls of the citadel, where the king, Priam in Homer's Iliad, exacts tolls and taxes from passing trade ships.
31:02At this time, Troy is probably quite the international city.
31:06I would think it had almost a cosmopolitan feel.
31:11There are a number of foreign objects, imports, found at Troy.
31:16Undoubtedly, there are foreign embassies and delegates coming.
31:21Two cities, Mycenae, rich in trade, and Troy, rich by taxing trade.
31:28Could this rivalry between Greeks and Trojans be the real reason that spawns a Trojan war?
31:37We certainly know there were wars in the Bronze Age involving all of these parties who were involved in trading networks in the Eastern Aegean.
31:45And it's not surprising, given Troy's location, that it was pulled into this network.
31:50In the Late Bronze Age, there is only one way to attack a fortified city. Head on.
31:57And in Homer's story, that is exactly what the Greeks prepare to do.
32:01They gather in front of the city gates.
32:03But Paris, fearing a bloody battle over his woman, steps forward and offers to settle the score in single combat with any one of the Greeks.
32:13The deal? If he wins, Helen stays in Troy. If he loses, she returns to Greece.
32:21Menelaus, Helen's husband thirsting for revenge, rises to the challenge.
32:31And quickly gets the upper hand.
32:34Paris retreats in fear.
32:37According to Homer, it is the gods who whisk him from the battlefield, as if he had simply disappeared.
32:47His retreat takes him to Helen's bedchamber, where she scolds him for his cowardice.
32:54But not too harshly.
33:07A handsome coward whose romance endangers a civilization?
33:15Was there really a Prince Paris of Troy?
33:18Is there any evidence he really lived?
33:22Tantalizing clues come from the people who lived just west of Troy.
33:27The Hittites, among the first in the world to use the written word.
33:31In those Hittite texts, we find reference to a king of Wilusa named Alexandros.
33:38Alexandros is another name for Paris, who of course was a Prince of Troy.
33:42It looks as if there were conflicts in the Late Bronze Age around Troy,
33:48and in association with this king named Alexandros or Paris.
33:52Many have interpreted this as an indication of the kinds of wars that are described by Homer in the Iliad.
33:58And the Iliad is just getting started, because the mighty warrior Achilles has rejoined the fight,
34:06after a close friend is killed by the Trojan Prince Hector.
34:15Fueled by his rage, Achilles virtually wipes out the Trojan army,
34:21and drives the remainders back inside the city gates.
34:23The Greek siege has come to the very walls of Troy.
34:28Homer described those walls in the Iliad.
34:31The great walls and gates and timber doors we hung,
34:35well plain, massive, and bolted tight, will shield the city.
34:42But was there ever a great siege of Troy?
34:44Schliemann had found no evidence of it.
34:49But Schliemann would not have the last word on Troy.
34:53In 1932, Karl Bleggen, from the University of Cincinnati,
34:58began a seven-season excavation of the mound at Hiserlich.
35:02Bleggen was not the huckster that Schliemann was.
35:05He excavated with precision and scholarship.
35:09But the goal was the same, to find proof of the Trojan War.
35:14The sixth level of Troy was the wealthy, pastoral, international city where life was good.
35:21But Bleggen's team discovered that the seventh level of Troy,
35:25the Troy that stood right at the time of Homer's Trojan siege,
35:29was a dramatically different place.
35:31They find that foreign luxury goods are gone.
35:36Signs of wealth have disappeared.
35:39Living conditions are cramped.
35:42What has happened to the once wealthy and peaceful Troy?
35:46Then, a critical clue.
35:48They find storage jars, big ones, and lots of them.
35:53The residents of Troy seem to be squirreling away their food.
35:57All of the residents, or most of the residents living in the surrounding area,
36:01had moved up into the protection of the Citadel.
36:04Then you would have had difficulty maneuvering through the streets of the city,
36:10because houses were built very close to each other.
36:13There would have been enormous storage vessels that contained large quantities of food,
36:17so that you didn't have to leave the protection of the Citadel very often.
36:20And there would have been a kind of climate of fear.
36:23Fear of what?
36:24Professor Rose believes that Troy VII was, in fact, a city under siege,
36:30just as described in the Iliad.
36:35In Homer, it is the Greeks who are besieging Troy,
36:39and the endgame would take place just outside these fortification walls,
36:43where Achilles squares off against Hester in mortal one-on-one combat,
36:51with the fate of Troy on the line.
37:06Achilles slays the great Trojan prince, but worse is to come.
37:10He ties Hector's body to his chariot by the heels, and drags it three times around the Troy city walls,
37:21as Hector's parents, King Priam and Queen Hecuba, watch in horror.
37:26Could it have happened?
37:29Did Greek aristocratic commanders square off hand-to-hand with their opposite?
37:33Again, the Hittites drop clues.
37:37There is a text from the Hittite capital in Boazkoy,
37:43which seems to refer to an aristocratic warrior from the Greek side,
37:49fighting another aristocratic warrior from the Hittite side.
37:52So, you did have these face-offs in the Late Bronze Age.
37:55In Homer, Achilles is not invincible.
38:00Like all mortals, he has a weakness.
38:03In his case, the heel.
38:06An arrow shot to the heel fells him.
38:09His killer, the once cowardly Paris.
38:13Achilles is dead.
38:15But do we have any evidence he ever lived at all?
38:18A small clue near Troy at the port town of Beshek Tepe,
38:24a cone-shaped mound that since antiquity has been regarded as the tumulus of Achilles.
38:30But excavations at the tumulus have come up empty,
38:34and the historical Achilles remains a mystery.
38:37Paris, slayer of Achilles and the cause of the war, is himself killed in battle.
38:47Paris' love affair had started the war.
38:51Could his death end it and change the fate of Troy?
38:55King Priam now has an opportunity to return Helen while saving face.
39:00But stubborn pride again tips the scales of fate in Homer's tale.
39:09Priam refuses to give up Helen.
39:12The Greeks will have to force their way into the fortress to get her.
39:17In the Iliad, it is the god Poseidon who builds the huge fortification walls of Troy.
39:23Homer has Poseidon say,
39:24I walled the city massively in well-cut stone to make the place impregnable.
39:35Impregnable walls.
39:37Ten years of siege, and the walls of Troy still stand.
39:41For such a small city, it seems unlikely.
39:44It was a puzzle that Carl Blegen would never solve.
39:49Blegen stopped his excavations at Troy in 1938,
39:52and for the next 50 years no one did anything at the site.
39:56The walls were crumbling and it was in quite bad shape.
39:59After his digs, it was presumed that the ground beneath Hisserlich had yielded all its secrets.
40:05But it hadn't.
40:07In 1992, a team from the University of Tübingen in Germany,
40:11along with a team from the University of Cincinnati, decided to dig again.
40:15This time, using the high-tech sonar devices used to search the ground for oil deposits.
40:22But they did not strike oil.
40:24They struck rock.
40:26Rock that would change our understanding of how the Trojan War may have happened.
40:30What we found was that if one goes 400 meters to the south of the main citadel of Troy,
40:37so that's about 1,200 feet, there's a rock-cut ditch that surrounded the entire lower city of Troy in the Troy VI period.
40:47A defensive perimeter, well outside the city walls.
40:52This would make Homer's Troy several times larger than previously thought.
40:57Suddenly, Troy wasn't so small.
41:00Suddenly, Troy was looking much more defensible.
41:05In order to attack the city, you would have had to have disembarked from your chariot,
41:09gone into and out of the ditch, all the while dodging arrows that were being shot at you by Trojans who were behind a wall not far in the distance.
41:19You then had to scale that wall, run through the lower city, that's 1,200 feet,
41:24and then you would have reached this enormous limestone fortification wall that surrounded the citadel.
41:30You had to get over that, and if you did that, all the while again dodging arrows that were raining down on you from Trojans on the other side,
41:36then you could sack the city. But with this dual system of defense, the settlement was nearly impregnable.
41:43They had found the larger city Schliemann and Blegen had been looking for.
41:50The case for the Trojan War had taken a great leap forward.
41:57In Homer, the siege is at stalemate.
41:59The Greeks have suffered heavy losses and need a new plan to get inside the impregnable walls of Troy.
42:07To do that, they resort to trickery.
42:11They build a large wooden horse.
42:14The Greeks roll the horse to the city walls and apparently retreat.
42:18The Trojans find the horse and believe the Greeks are bearing a gift and have quit the fight.
42:23Now the Trojans, who are apparently also not the brightest of bulbs, open up their gate, bring in the Trojan horse and begin celebrating.
42:34But it was no gift horse, and the Greeks had not retreated.
42:39Their fleet was hiding behind the island of Tenidos, near the harbor, waiting for the trap to be sprung.
42:45Could it have happened?
42:49Could one of the greatest military deceptions ever have been a historical fact?
42:55All historical Greeks know about the story of the Trojan horse.
42:59The minute they began to experiment with the representation of figures, of the human form and of animals, it's one of the first things that they draw.
43:07Why would such a story even be developed?
43:09Again, you have to remember these very strong defensive components of the city in the Late Bronze Age.
43:15So it's not surprising that the story of some sort of trick to get into an impregnable city was developed.
43:23Why a horse is harder to say.
43:26But there are some theories.
43:28In the days of fortress warfare, a besieging army would sometimes construct a siege engine.
43:34Literally a rolling battering ram with soldiers inside.
43:37This Assyrian depiction from the 7th century BC, around Homer's time, shows a horse-like siege engine breaking the walls of a fortified city.
43:48Perhaps the Trojan horse was just such a device.
43:51But maybe the walls were broken by a natural rather than a man-made force, an earthquake.
44:02A fault line runs along northwestern Turkey.
44:06And earthquakes have struck this region frequently since antiquity.
44:09Carl Bleggen's excavations in the 1930s uncovered considerable evidence that Troy was struck by a massive earthquake in the late 13th century BC.
44:21Perhaps it was an earthquake that weakened Troy and allowed the Greeks to rush the citadel.
44:27The horse or the earthquake?
44:30Can these competing theories be resolved?
44:32Now we know that the sixth city of Troy is destroyed probably by an earthquake.
44:39But you know, if Homer's telling the story, ten years of fighting, epic saga, so on and so forth, you don't want to say,
44:47and then there was an earthquake and the walls fell down and they walked in.
44:50It's ending your story with a whimper rather than a bang.
44:53But there is a theory. The horse as a symbol. The walls of Troy were reputed to have been built by the god Poseidon.
45:03Poseidon is not just the god of the sea. He's also the god of earthquakes. He's frequently called the Earthshaker.
45:11And the animal associated with Poseidon is the horse.
45:14So, if you say, earthquake equals Poseidon, Poseidon equals horse, ergo, earthquake equals Trojan horse, you've got it.
45:27The Trojan horse could simply be a metaphor for the earthquake.
45:32But in Homer, the horse is real, and the trick works.
45:35At about midnight, once the Trojans have had, shall we say, a bit too much to drink, and they've all gone to sleep,
45:44the Mycenaeans inside the horse open up the trap door, climb on down, kill the guards at the gate, and open up the gate.
45:59They kill every man in Troy, including King Priam.
46:02Meanwhile, Menelaus searches for Helen, determined to kill her.
46:11But when he finds her, he's captivated again by her beauty, and carries her off.
46:18Once more, the simple beauty of a woman has profound impact on the fate of Homer's characters.
46:24But what do we really know about Helen of Troy?
46:31Could an epic ten-year war between trading giants really have been fought over the hand of a beautiful woman?
46:38The Greeks of historical antiquity loved to believe in a Helen of Troy.
46:45So for them, Helen of Troy was a very real human being.
46:50Did she exist? Got me.
46:53But certainly the role of women in prehistoric Greece, in the prehistoric Near East, in cementing alliances between kings, between empires, is really undeniable.
47:08But were women really abducted in wartime, and transported across the Aegean, as the Greeks claim happened to Helen?
47:16This stone tablet from 13th century B.C. Greece could not be deciphered until 1952.
47:25It offers surprising clues that echo Homer.
47:29It lists the names of women abducted in war, including one named Touroja, or Woman of Troy.
47:38Women of Troy suffer the same fate in Homer, as the city is looted and its wealth seized.
47:51Troy is then burned to the ground, erasing the civilization of King Priam.
47:57We now know there was a Troy, and that it was destroyed in the 13th century B.C.
48:03But was it really burned to the ground? If so, by whom?
48:09Schliemann craved proof of it.
48:12And 45 years after Schliemann's death, Karl Bleggen would finally provide it.
48:17Charring between the layers of Homeric Troy, solid evidence that Troy burned.
48:22But many cities caught fire in antiquity. How do we know that Troy was burned in a military attack?
48:36When the Tubing and Cincinnati team arrived in the 1990s, they began looking at the destroyed remains of Homeric Troy.
48:43There were quite a number of destruction levels that we found, but two in particular for the Late Bronze Age.
48:52In the second destruction phase, we find arrowheads in the destruction level.
48:57So it looks as if that city was destroyed by some sort of attack.
49:02Arrowheads, used by ancient warriors in this very city.
49:06Finally, a connection to a military destruction of Homer's Troy.
49:12Here and away.
49:15Schliemann proved there was a Troy.
49:27Karl Bleggen showed it was besieged, burned and destroyed.
49:30The Tubing and Cincinnati team found that Troy was a large city subject to a military attack.
49:38But can we say that the Trojan War, the subject of Homer's life's work, and Schliemann's obsession, really took place?
49:46So I think there was a Trojan War.
49:48We have circumstantial evidence that the Mycenaeans are fighting in Northwest Anatolia as early as the 15th century.
49:56Perhaps 300 years before the so-called Trojan War.
50:00Were there wars between the Greeks and the Trojans?
50:03It certainly wouldn't be surprising because Troy is located in this border region where the Greeks and the Hittites continually sought control.
50:12And so Troy was an attractive target for both sides.
50:16Certainly there were wars. We have the archaeological evidence for it.
50:19Is it conceivable the Greeks were involved? Absolutely.
50:22Can we prove it? We can't yet.
50:23I often wonder if the Trojan War is a process rather than an event.
50:29Could Homer have telescoped 200 or even 300 years of warfare on the Northwest Anatolian coast into one epic saga?
50:38Of course he could have.
50:44Troy's fall was the beginning of the end of the Bronze Age.
50:47One by one, Mycenae and most of the other great kingdoms of the Aegean would be destroyed.
50:54And the region would fall into a 400-year Dark Age.
50:58The cities fell, but the stories survived.
51:02The epic stories of Achilles, Hector, Helen and Paris.
51:07Of the Trojan War, the Trojan Horse, and the tragic collapse of empires under the weight of vanity and greed.
51:18Schliemann's gold moved on, residing under the rule of the Ottomans, the Nazis and the Soviets.
51:24All of them fell in turn.
51:28Everything Schliemann touched seemed to turn to gold.
51:32But everything this gold touched seemed to fall.
51:36Yet the story of the Trojan War and Homer's Iliad does not fall.
51:42Through thousands of years, societies come and go.
51:45But romance, love, greed, war, and heroes live forever.
51:55As Hector says in the Iliad,
51:58Let me at least not die without a struggle, inglorious.
52:02But having done some big thing first, for men to come to know of.
52:06To be continued...
52:07To be continued...
52:08To be continued...
52:36To be continued...
52:38To be continued...
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