The fortress city of Homer's Iliad in the extreme northwest corner of Asia Minor overlooking the strait of the Dardanelles; also the land of Troy or the Troad, with Ilium as its chief city.
Ancient Troy was found near the western entrance to the Dardanelles, in modern Turkey, as described in the Iliad.
Troy was identified as early as 1801 by Edward Clarke, a British scientist. Later, during the 1850s and 1860s, Frank Calvert, U.S. consul at the Dardanelles, also convinced of this identification, probed the mound at Hissarlık and encouraged Heinrich Schliemann to commence extensive excavations. Schliemann’s fervor, personality, and discoveries (from 1871 to 1873 and 1878 to 1879) catapulted ancient Anatolia onto the international scene, leaving an indelible mark on the history of archaeology.
These excavations were continued by Wilhelm Dorpfeld, who discerned nine main periods of occupation at Troy (dating from Neolithic to Roman times), a sequence that was refined in the 1930s by Carl Blegen and his U.S. team.
Today the ruins of Troy are being reexamined by a joint German-U.S. expedition, led by Manfred Korfmann, that resumed work in 1988 (Korfmann and Mannsperger 1998). New information on the landscape around Troy over the millennia and the extent of the lower town at the foot of the citadel is that this ancient stronghold was a far larger, more important city than the archaeological record had previously revealed.
The tale of the siege of Troy is a conflict shrouded in mists of mystery and myth, but it is also the greatest secular story ever told. It has captured the imagination of the Western World for some 3,000 years, sprawling across cultures, time and geography.
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