Somewhere around 1200 B.C. a group of Greek raiders attacked a prominent Hittite town in northern Asia Minor. After a prolonged siege, they sacked Troy and left. Shortly after returning to the Greek mainland, the victors saw their own cities suffer a similarly catastrophic destruction.

That’s about all we surmise with any certainty about the great Trojan War and its aftermath—the most famous but least known of ancient Greek conflicts, one that predated the well-recorded Persian and Peloponnesian Wars of the city-states by over 700 years.

Until recently, it was popular to believe that there never was much of a war at all.

Each generation of classical scholars has a different take on the historicity of the shadowy Trojan saga, always reinterpreting our various sources of information in light of new evidence. There nevertheless remain still three complementary branches of knowledge. First, are the Homeric poems of the Iliad and Odyssey (composed orally in dactylic hexameters around 700 B.C.), along with scattered fragments from a largely contemporaneous but lost ancillary epic cycle. Second, this literary evidence is sometimes enhanced by the ongoing archaeological excavations of both Troy and the Mycenaean citadels in Greece. Third, these literary and physical records are further augmented by the difficult translation of both Linear B (the surviving inventory scripts of Mycenaean civilization) and Hittite texts, a corpus of clay records that is occasionally enlarged by new discoveries.

Until recently, it was popular to believe that there never