Late Bronze Age Troy
Troy in the Late Bronze Age was a thriving coastal city consisting of a steep fortified citadel and a sprawling lower town below it.
[2][3][4] Troy VI–VII was a major Late Bronze Age city consisting of a steep fortified citadel and a sprawling lower town below it.
It had a distinct Northwest Anatolian culture and extensive foreign contacts, including with Mycenaean Greece, and its position at the mouth of the Dardanelles has been argued to have given it the function of regional capital, its status protected by treaties.
[5] Aspects of its architecture are consistent with the Iliad's description of mythic Troy, and several of its sublayers (VIh and VIIa) show potential signs of violent destruction.
Archaeologists believe there may have been a royal palace on the highest terrace, but most Bronze Age remains from the top of the hill were cleared away by classical era building projects.
[6](pp 58–59)[8][10][9](pp20–21) Troy VI's walls were overlooked by several rectangular watchtowers, which would also have provided a clear view of Trojan plain and the sea beyond it.
These include huts, stone paving, threshing floors, pithoi, and waste left behind by Bronze Age industry such as murex shells associated with the manufacture of purple dye.
[8][12][9](pp22–23) The lower city was only discovered in the late 1980s, earlier excavators having assumed that Troy VI occupied only the hill of Hisarlik.
Its discovery led to a dramatic reassessment of Troy VI, showing that it was over 16 times larger than had been assumed, and thus a major city with a large population rather than a mere aristocratic residence.
The archive would likely have been housed in the citadel's innermost precinct, whose remains were pushed over the northern side of the hill during 3rd century construction.
Damage in the Troy VIh layer includes extensive collapsed masonry and subsidence in the southeast of the citadel, indicative of an earthquake.
The builders reused many of the earlier city's surviving structures, notably its citadel wall, which they renovated with additional stone towers and mudbrick breastworks.
[8][6](p 59) The city was destroyed around 1180 BC, roughly contemporary with the Late Bronze Age collapse but subsequent to the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces.
[8][10][6](pp 66–67) One of the most striking finds from Troy VIIb1 is a hieroglyphic Luwian seal giving the names of a woman and a man who worked as a scribe.
The seal is important since it is the only example of preclassical writing found at the site, and provides potential evidence that Troy VIIb1 had a Luwian-speaking population.
Proposed explanations include the possibility that it belonged to an itinerant freelance scribe and alternatively that it dates from an earlier era than its find context would suggest.
[8][10][6](p 118) Troy VIIb2 is marked by dramatic cultural changes including walls made of upright stones and a handmade knobbed pottery style known as Buckelkeramik.
These practices, which existed alongside older local traditions, have been argued to reflect immigrant populations arriving from southwest Europe.
No new buildings were constructed, so its existence is known primarily from artifacts found in the West Sanctuary and terraces on the south side of the mound.
Strikingly, the Terrace House was not renovated when it was adopted as a cult center and thus must have been used in a ruined state, potentially suggesting that the occupants of Troy VIIb3 were deliberately re-engaging with their past.
