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WonderHistory fact

Troy was a real city, on the hill of Hisarlık near Çanakkale in Turkey. The wooden horse that ended the Trojan War, however, is known only from poems. Homer's Iliad never mentions it; the best-known full account comes from the Roman poet Virgil, writing more than a thousand years after the war was thought to have happened.

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Digs at Hisarlık since the 1860s, first by Frank Calvert and then by Heinrich Schliemann, have uncovered nine main settlement layers, from about 3000 BC to Roman times, and the site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998. Hittite records of the Late Bronze Age mention a city called Wilusa, now generally identified with Troy. The horse has left no archaeological trace. Homer's Odyssey mentions it briefly, crediting the plan to Odysseus, and Virgil tells it in full in Book 2 of the Aeneid, written between 29 and 19 BC. Scholars have suggested real events behind the tale: a siege engine covered in horse hides, a ship, since some ancient ships were called 'horses', or an earthquake, since Poseidon was god of both horses and earthquakes and one layer of Troy was badly damaged by a quake. None is proven.

Türkçe oku
Troya (Truva), Çanakkale yakınlarındaki Hisarlık Tepesi'nde kurulmuş gerçek bir kentti. Truva Savaşı'nı bitiren tahta at ise yalnızca şiirlerden bilinir. Homeros'un İlyada'sında hiç geçmez; en bilinen ayrıntılı anlatım, savaştan bin yılı aşkın süre sonra yazan Romalı şair Vergilius'undur.

Hisarlık'ta 1860'lardan beri, önce Frank Calvert'in, ardından Heinrich Schliemann'ın yaptığı kazılar, MÖ 3000 dolaylarından Roma dönemine uzanan dokuz ana yerleşim katmanını ortaya çıkardı; ören yeri 1998'de UNESCO Dünya Mirası Listesi'ne girdi. Geç Tunç Çağı'na ait Hitit belgelerinde adı geçen Wilusa kenti de bugün genellikle Troya ile özdeşleştirilir. Atın ise hiçbir arkeolojik izi yok. Homeros'un Odysseia'sı ondan kısaca söz eder ve planı Odysseus'a bağlar; Vergilius ise MÖ 29-19 yılları arasında yazdığı Aeneis'in ikinci kitabında hikâyeyi bütün ayrıntılarıyla anlatır. Araştırmacılar hikâyenin ardında gerçek olaylar aradı: at postlarıyla kaplı bir kuşatma makinesi, bazı antik gemilere “at” dendiği için bir gemi ya da bir deprem. Deniz tanrısı Poseidon hem atların hem depremlerin tanrısıydı ve Troya katmanlarından biri depremde ağır hasar görmüştü. Bu açıklamaların hiçbiri kanıtlanmış değil.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Trojan Horse
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The Great Pyramid of Giza was built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2600 BC. When the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about it, around 450 BC, it was already more than 2,000 years old.

The pyramid was the tomb of Khufu, whom the Greeks called Cheops, a king of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty. Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BC, was told that 100,000 men had worked on it in three-month shifts: ten years to build the causeway for hauling the stone, and twenty for the pyramid itself. He even reports an inscription recording what was spent on radishes, onions and garlic for the workers. Modern digs tell a different story. Workers' settlements at Giza, and a workers' cemetery found there in 1990, point to thousands of conscripted labourers rather than slaves. In 2013, at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast, archaeologists found the Diary of Merer, the logbook of an inspector whose crew of about 40 men shipped limestone from the Tura quarries to Giza. It is the oldest known papyrus with writing on it.

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Woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean off north-eastern Siberia, until about 4,000 years ago. By then Egypt's Great Pyramid had already stood for several centuries.

On the mainland, the last woolly mammoths died out around 10,000 years ago, as the Ice Age ended and the cold grasslands they lived on shrank. Two island populations held on much longer: one on St Paul Island in Alaska until about 5,600 years ago, and one on Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago, around 2000 BC. Rising seas had cut Wrangel off from Siberia, leaving some 300 to 1,000 animals alone there for thousands of years. These dates come from radiocarbon dating of bones and tusks, which measures how much of a slowly decaying form of carbon is left in them. Genetic studies show that the population was inbred but stayed stable for thousands of years, so its end seems to have come suddenly. What finally killed the last mammoths is still unknown.

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Oxford was teaching students more than three centuries before the Aztec Empire existed. Teaching there is recorded from 1096; the empire began around 1428, when three city-states in the Valley of Mexico, Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, joined forces as the Triple Alliance.

Oxford has no founding date. There is evidence of teaching there in some form by 1096, and it grew quickly after 1167, when Henry II barred English students from the University of Paris. In 1209, after clashes with the townspeople, some scholars left for Cambridge and started the university there. The popular claim that Oxford is older than the Aztecs usually uses 1325, the year the Mexica people founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco, where Mexico City stands today. But the Mexica became an imperial power only in 1428, when, together with Texcoco and Tlacopan, they defeated Azcapotzalco, the city that had dominated the valley. The empire lasted less than a century: Hernán Cortés and his Indigenous allies took Tenochtitlan in 1521.

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Around 1259 BC, Ramesses II of Egypt and the Hittite king Hattusili III made peace after generations of rivalry over Syria. Egypt carved its copy on temple walls, the Hittites kept theirs on clay tablets, and both survive.

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