Troy Was Real. Here Is What the Archaeology Actually Shows.
The debate over whether the Trojan War happened has run for centuries. Scholars who argued that Homer’s Iliad described real events were dismissed for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as romantics mistaking poetry for history. Heinrich Schliemann changed that in the 1870s when he excavated the site of Hisarlik in northwestern Turkey and found not one Troy but a layered sequence of cities, one built on top of another over thousands of years. Since then, the pendulum has swung. The city was real. The war may have been real. But proving it has always been difficult because direct evidence of organized military conflict is almost impossible to distinguish from evidence of a city burning for any other reason.
The 2025 excavation season at Troy, led by Professor Rustem Aslan of Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University under the Legacy for the Future Project, added a specific category of evidence to that record: a concentrated deposit of clay and river-stone sling stones found just outside the palace structure from Troy’s sixth phase, alongside arrowheads, charred building remains, and hastily buried human skeletons. The sling stones date to roughly 3,200 to 3,600 years ago, placing them in the period most commonly associated with the Trojan War. What does that evidence mean, and what would it take to say the Trojan War actually happened?
What Troy Actually Was
The site of Hisarlik was first occupied around 3000 BCE and was continuously inhabited or rebuilt through a succession of periods running until roughly the first century CE. Archaeologists label the main phases Troy I through Troy IX. The city that most closely fits the Homeric period in terms of dating is either Troy VI or Troy VII, depending on which destruction layer one examines and how available radiocarbon dates are read.
Troy VI was a substantial city. Its walls, still partly visible at the site today, were up to 5 meters thick and reinforced with towers. The settlement showed evidence of a ruling class, planned street layouts, and significant limestone construction. Fragments of Mycenaean pottery found at Troy VI confirm regular contact with the Aegean cultures that Homer would later associate with the Greek attackers. Hittite documents from the late Bronze Age refer to a city in the region called Wilusa, which most scholars now identify with the archaeological site at Hisarlik, and to a people called the Ahhiyawa, whom many identify with Mycenaean Greeks.
Troy VIh, the final phase of Troy VI, was destroyed around 1300 BCE. The destruction layer includes signs of a large earthquake. Troy VIIa, built on those ruins, was itself destroyed around 1190 to 1180 BCE, in a layer containing burned debris, scattered human bones, and evidence of population pressure: rooms subdivided, storage jars sunk into floors, signs of overcrowding. That destruction of Troy VIIa is the phase most frequently cited in arguments connecting the site to the Iliad.