Eric Cline’s book The Trojan War: a very short introduction (Oxford, 2013) argues that the classical Greek myth of the Trojan War is based on a historical conflict. Previously we looked at chapter 3, where Cline argues that the Homeric Iliad portrays Bronze Age events in a Bronze Age setting. As we saw, all the claims cited as evidence turned out to be unrepresentative, baseless, or simply untrue.
Chapter 4, ‘The Hittite texts: Assuwa, Ahhiyawa, and Alaksandu of Wilusa’, looks at Bronze Age evidence to argue that Mycenaean Greeks were involved in armed conflict in Anatolia in the 14th century BCE. Cline thinks this is the historical conflict that led to the Trojan War myth. This chapter is deeply flawed too, but in a less straightforward way. Cline doesn’t present outright falsehoods as fact here: but he takes a selective approach, keeping silent about some inconvenient points, and distorting others.
Wilusa (pp. 54–55), Ahhiyawa (pp. 56–57)
Cline gives an overview of Wilusa, on the edge of the Hittite empire, later called Ilios/Ilion in Greek; the name of one of its rulers, Alaksandu, which appears to be a hittitised form of a Greek name, Alexandros; and a state called Ahhiyawa somewhere in the west, which most scholars correctly identify as somewhere in the Greek-speaking world.
Cline’s account is mostly accurate. One part does ignore a key point. Cline wants to equate the 13th century BCE Alaksandu with the character Alexandros (also called Paris) in the Iliad, and — like many scholars — thinks the names are unlikely to be a coincidence. One minor point is that, contrary to what Cline says, Alexandros in the Iliad is not Troy’s ruler, and he’s certainly not in a position to be committing Troy to being the vassal of another Anatolian state, as the historical Alaksandu did.
The more important omission is: why does a king of Hittite-era Wilusa have a Greek name? This is a difficult question. But there is actually a potential answer, as explained by Bachvarova (2016: 333–342), to do with a Wilusan-Ahhiyawan dynastic marriage (which Cline mentions on p. 61, in a different context). Perhaps Cline does not try to link this marriage to Alaksandu himself because it would raise more questions than it answers: the Trojan War myth, where Alexandros is a full-blooded Trojan, is too dissimilar what we know of this marriage to be convenient.
(Cline also never asks how it came about that Homer never mentions the historical Hittites, Mira, Seha, or Arzawa, and instead talks exclusively about 7th century BCE ethnic groups. But this objection is probably better aimed at chapter 3, on Homer.)
Madduwatta and Attarissiya (pp. 57–58)
Cline discusses a Hittite document known as the Indictment of Madduwatta (CTH 147; late 15th-early 14th century BCE). The Indictment discusses a warlord named Attarissiya, who becomes Cline’s archetype for a Greek leader attacking western Anatolia.
Cline claims:
- the Indictment describes Attarissiya as ‘“the ruler of Ahhiya” (Ahhiya being an early form of the word Ahhiyawa)’;
- Attarissiya ‘came to the western coast of Anatolia and fought against Hittite troops.’
Claim 1 is doubtful; claim 2 is half false.
On claim 1: the Indictment does refer to Attarissiya as ‘ruler of Ahhiya’, but Cline omits three important facts.
- Attarissiya is a ruler (LÚ), but other Hittite documents consistently refer to rulers of Ahhiyawa — the Greek-speaking state — as a ‘king’ (LUGAL). Attarissiya was no king.
- The name ‘Attarissiya’ is linguistically Anatolian, built out of elements seen in other names such as Attarimma (a town in Lukka) and Sarissiya (a mountain), elements with no analogues in Greek of any period.
- When Hittite texts refer to ‘Ahhiya’ they invariably use a city determinative, transcribed URU, classifying it as a city and not a country (twice in CTH 147, once in CTH 571.2).
Cline casts Attarissiya as a Greek king of Ahhiyawa the country, when the text really seems to point to a Lukkan ruler of Ahhiya the city. (In practice URU does sometimes get used for countries as well, but it would be tendentious to assume that has happened in both CTH 147 and 571.2 when its identification is in doubt.)
On claim 2: the Indictment states that Maduwatta’s territory is the valley of the ‘Siyanta’ river, an unknown location but somewhere in southern Anatolia. Madduwatta had at one point been attacked by Kupanta-Kurunta of Arzawa (§§8–9), and later by Attarissiya (§12). We know Arzawa was in western Anatolia. But for Attarissiya the only geographical reference point is in §36, which shows that Maduwatta and Attarissiya had both attacked Cyprus (Alasiya) at the same time. Cyprus is about 100 km south of the Anatolian coast, 100 km west of Ugarit, but 700 km from the west coast of Anatolia by sea, and 900–1,000 km from Troy or mainland Greece. The text certainly does not have Attarissiya attacking ‘the western coast of Anatolia’.
If we were to interpret these points without assuming the identification Ahhiya = Ahhiyawa in advance, we would certainly conclude that Ahhiya was a Lukkan city, probably on the coast facing Cyprus. That would put it in or near what is now the Turkish province of Antalya (ca. 250 km from Cyprus). Interpreting Attarissiya as a Greek king attacking the west coast of Anatolia requires ignoring most of what the text actually says, and substituting an imaginary scenario in its place.
The Assuwa ‘rebellion’ and Tudhaliya’s sword (pp. 58–60)
In the late 1400s BCE, according to the Annals of the Hittite king Tudhaliya (CTH 142), Tudhaliya attacked western Anatolia. It was a fairly standard practice for powerful Bronze Age states to launch raids from the edge of their territories every now and then and head back home. It was a way of projecting power, to remind neighbours who not to attack. Following Tudhaliya’s war, many places in western Anatolia formed a defensive alliance to resist further Hittite aggression: the ‘Assuwa alliance’. Tudhaliya promptly came straight back and crushed the alliance.
Tudhaliya’s Annals name Wilusiya — Troy — as a member of the Assuwa alliance. But the alliance was probably centred on what would later become the heartland of Lydia, around the Küçük Menderes river: that is where later Greek sources put Asiē, a name derived from Assuwa. (So ‘Assuwa’ is also the origin of the modern continent name Asia.)
Cline relates these events very differently. He casts the conflict as a ‘rebellion’: Mycenaean agents provocateurs roused the peaceful Assuwans against their lawful Hittite government, and Tudhaliya was forced to respond by fighting the Mycenaeans. This, Cline thinks, is the context for Mycenaean armed conflict with the Hittites in western Anatolia.
That is not what Tudhaliya himself describes. The Assuwa alliance needed no external encouragement. It is perfectly clear that it was formed in response to Tudhaliya’s aggression. Saying the Assuwans ‘rebelled against Hittite overlordship’ is like describing NATO as rebelling against Soviet rule. This was a defensive agreement, not a rebellion.
Cline wedges Mycenaeans into the story by means of a piece of material evidence: a sword found at Hattusa in 1991, inscribed with a dedication commemorating Tudhaliya’s victory over Assuwa.
 |
| Pride of place in Cline’s argument: a sword with a dedicatory inscription purportedly demonstrating Mycenaean military action in northwest Anatolia in the 1400s BCE. (Source: Genz 2017) |
In 1996 Cline cautiously suggested that this sword might possibly be a variant of an Aegean type.
... it may well be a variant of an Aegean Type B sword, but might reflect only Mycenaean influence rather than outright manufacture.
However, the identification of the Hattušas sword as Aegean Type B is not as cut-and-dried ... and strenuous objections to such an identification have already been raised.
... a connection with the legendary earlier Mycenaean raids in Anatolia may certainly lie within the realm of possibility. ... If such were the case ...
It is certainly plausible to suggest that the Mycenaeans and the Trojans were at one time allies, not foes ...
Cline 1996: 137, 138, 149, 150 (my emphasis)
So the sword might be Greek; lots of scholars think it isn’t, but if it is, then it’s possible it might suggest a Mycenaean presence in Assuwa; and if there were Mycenaeans there, then it’s possible they might have been there as allies.
Cline’s tone changed drastically in his books of the 2010s.
[T]his is not a typical sword for anyone to have been using in Anatolia at that time, for it appears to be a type of sword specifically made and used by the Mycenaeans of mainland Greece only during the late fifteenth century BCE.
Cline 2013: 59–60[T]his is not a sword of local manufacture. The sword is of a type used primarily on mainland Greece during the fifteenth century BC.
Cline 2014: 36
The problem is that everyone except Cline is perfectly clear that the sword isn’t Mycenaean. It’s Anatolian.
Taracha (2003) tidily sums up the evidence for and against, a decade before Cline wrote the above statements.
- The overall shape, tang, and riveting method have parallels in Aegean Type B swords.
- However, the Aegean riveting method is in turn based on Syrian practice, with parallels in Cilicia (southeast Anatolia).
- Tudhaliya’s sword has multiple ribs along the length of the blade, something not seen in Aegean swords. The closest parallel is actually found in Romania.
- We have continuity of evidence for the development of early thrusting swords in Anatolia, but not in the Aegean; and that implies that, if anything, the influence was the other way round — the Aegean style was based on Anatolian techniques.
More recent commentators take it as read that the sword is Anatolian in origin (Bryce in Beckman et al. 2011: 138; Genz 2017: 87). Only Cline is keeping this myth alive.
Wilusa and Ahhiyawa in various Hittite texts (pp. 60–65)
In these sections Cline documents interaction between the Hittites, Wilusa, and Ahhiyawa continuing through the two centuries after Tudhaliya crushed the Assuwa alliance. In this section Cline mentions the Ahhiyawan marriage that Bachvarova draws on to explain the presence of a Greek name in the Wilusan royal family in the 1200s BCE (see above).
I have no real complaints here, except to note that it is not exactly surprising to find international interactions at the boundary of Hittite territory. The sheer quantity of Hittite references to Ahhiyawa that Cline presents is bound to impress general readers as if they are some kind of gotcha.
If any hittitologist were to name the main locus of Hittite-Ahhiyawan interaction in this period, they would never pick Troy. They would point at Miletos (Hittite Milawata), with secondary zones of interaction nearby at Iasos and Müskebi, and further afield at Ephesos (Hittite Apasa).
The reason we do have books on The Trojans and their neighbours, and we don’t have books about Bronze Age Miletos, isn’t because Troy was more important. It’s because there is no famous classical Greek epic about a war at Miletos.
‘Steep Wilusa’ (pp. 65–67)
In the 1980s Calvert Watkins pointed to the phrase alati ... Wilušati, ‘(from) high/steep Wilusa’, in a collection of first lines of Luvian cult songs at Istanuwa (CTH 772.1). Some formulas in Homer have a similar meaning: Ἴλιος αἰπεινή, Ἴλιον αἰπύ ‘high/steep Ilios’; Πριάμοιο πόλιν ... αἰπήν ‘Priam’s high/steep city’. Cline cites this to suggest continuity between Hittite sources and Homer.
On one level an overlap in poetic diction is unsurprising. Many formulas in Homer go back a very long way, some perhaps even to pre-Greek poetic traditions. That doesn’t suggest that a given story with these phrases is describing a historical event.
In this case, we would at best be talking about a calque, not an inherited formula. The phrases have similar meanings, but Greek αἰπύς is not linguistically related to Luvian ala-. Some Homer scholars have pointed out that the Homeric formulas are not used to indicate motion from a place, as in the Luvian poem, but are linked to the city’s mythical destruction. This link is sometimes in the context of another formula, αἰπὺς ὄλεθρος ‘sheer destruction’.
| Note. Sale 1987: 35–36 n. 28; Létoublon (no date) n. 21. On αἰπὺς ὄλεθρος see Létoublon in the section ‘αἰπεινή “lofty”’. |
For a robust and general treatment of the relationship between Hittite and Greek poetic devices, it isn’t enough to focus on a single phrase. The fullest treatment is by Mary Bachvarova (2016). She shows that the clearest continuity between Bronze Age Hittite texts and Homer is to be found in Near Eastern story patterns about the fall of a city, not in records of specific events — that is, in fiction tropes, not in history (2016: 354–356).
Conclusions
Cline imagines a 15th century conflict prompting a stream of stories about Mycenaean conflicts in Anatolia over 750 years, reframing and recontextualising the conflicts, but always set at Wilusa/Ilios. Proximate causes are always going to be a more robust explanation. The Greeks did imagine their story taking place in the spot where Hittite Wilusa had once stood. But as we saw in talking about Chapter 3, the Troy of the Iliad is the Greek colony of the 600s BCE. (Remember, Hittite Wilusa had no cult of Athena Ilias.)
I will not write a separate critique of Chapter 5, since it spends more time presenting material evidence than interpreting it. But I will observe that, like many scholars, Cline is overly prone to talking about Troy’s ‘destruction’.
Troy was never ‘destroyed’. We would never say San Francisco was ‘destroyed’ by the Oakland fires of 1991! In every alleged ‘destruction’ event, there was continuity of population and culture, and immediate rebuilding. Stephan Blum, a researcher on the Troia Projekt at Tübingen, recently wrote (2026):
[Architectural reorganisation at Troy] simply reflects the everyday reality of a settlement’s history: building, use, maintenance or levelling, rebuilding and repetition.
Instead, I argue that Troy’s archaeological record reveals centuries of architectural continuity, stable coastal occupation and trade networks stretching from Mesopotamia to the Aegean and the Balkans — a geography of connection rather than conflict.
It is perhaps worth mentioning in passing that the Greek myth never laid an emphasis on Troy consumed by flames — which is how it is usually depicted in modern retellings. That element of the story comes from Vergil’s Aeneid, not from any Greek source. And Vergil’s imagery was modelled on the Romans’ sack of Carthage in 146 BCE: it isn’t Greek imagery, and there’s no historical link to Bronze Age Wilusa.
The real Bronze Age Troy persisted through accidents and hiccups, as any city does. After the collapse of the 1100s BCE, some cities in the Aegean world prospered, including Miletos and Ephesos; others were abandoned; others were somewhere in between. Troy belongs to the ‘in between’ group. Its inhabitants lingered; new immigrants arrived; but the population peacefully drifted away by 950 BCE. 200 years after that, Greeks colonised the site. They created a just-so story about Troy: a story to explain why there had been an abandoned city there, and to rationalise their claim to the site, ahead of other competing ethnic groups in the area.
That story became famous. So did Troy. The city was at its height in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods: it was never powerful, but it was frequented by the powerful and the famous. It declined again after a devastating earthquake in about 500 CE. People carried on living there for a long time, but the site was again peacefully abandoned by the time the Ottomans arrived in the early 1300s. Since then there has been no urban settlement, though there has been an unbroken stream of tourists.
In the 1790s a story began to circulate that ‘Homer’s Troy’ had been in a different location. It was discredited, but it left a degree of confusion, with the result that Richard Jebb argued ferociously against Schliemann’s and Dörpfeld’s findings in the 1870s. As a result, many people today have come to think that Troy itself was once regarded as fictional, and that its discovery proved a myth true.
That has never been the case. Myths are regularly set in a real place, but they never have to be based on a real event. Not a single Greek myth is based on a historical event, so far as we know.
A myth also can’t be proven true by a book that relies on selective treatment of the facts, distortions, and false claims. It surprises me that Oxford University Press allowed such a book to go to print. It is regrettable if anyone relies on it.
References
- Bachvarova, M. 2016. From Hittite to Homer. The Anatolian background of ancient Greek epic. Cambridge.
- Beckman, G.; Bryce, T. R.; Cline, E. H. 2011. The Ahhiyawa texts. SBL ‘Writings from the Ancient World’ 28. Atlanta. [SBL]
- Blum, S. 2026. ‘Rethinking Troy: how years of careful peace, not epic war, shaped this Bronze Age city.’ The Conversation 29 Jan 2026. [Internet Archive]
- Cline, E. H. 1996. ‘Aššuwa and the Achaeans: the “Mycenaean” dword at Hattušas and its possible implications.’ Annual of the British School at Athens 91: 137–151. [JSTOR]
- —— 2013. The Trojan War. A very short introduction. Oxford.
- —— 2014. 1177 B.C. The year civilization collapsed. Princeton.
- Genz, H. 2017. ‘Regional or international? The origin and development of Hittite weapons and military technologies.’ In: Schachner, A. (ed) Innovation versus Beharrung. Was macht den Unterschied des hethitischen Reichs im Anatolien des 2. Jahrtausends v. Chr. Istanbul. 84–103.
- Létoublon, F. (no date). ‘The Trojan formulaic theater.’ Classics@ Journal 14. [Harvard University]
- Sale, W. M. 1987. ‘The formularity of the place phrases of the Iliad.’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 117: 21–50. [DOI | JSTOR]
- Taracha, P. 2003. ‘Is Tutḫaliya’s sword really Aegean?’ In: Beckman, G.; Beal, R.; McMahon, G. (eds.) Hittite studies in honor of Harry A. Hoffner Jr. on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Winona Lake (IN). 367–376.
