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NEW CULTURES IN THE WEST

The Aegean coast, Phrygia, and Lydia (1200–550 BC)

In the course of the Iron Age, two Anatolian monarchies came to control large territories west of Urartu: The Phrygians with their capital at Gordion, succeeded by the Mermnad dynasty of Lydia, based at Sardis. The Aegean coast also saw an intensification of Greek settlement which culminated in the rise of city states like Miletus and Ephesus. These were first subjugated by the Lydians, and then, in the mid-6th century, became part of the Persian Empire, which for the first time brought the whole of Anatolia under a single sovereign, at least nominally (Figure 10.1).

In western Anatolia consideration of the transition from the Bronze to Iron Ages is colored by the rich legacy of myths, epics, and histories retroactively imposed on it by the Greek tradition. There is almost nothing in the way of contemporary written documentation, and although literacy was reintroduced with the Greek alphabet and related scripts like Phrygian, its testimony before the mid first millennium BC is quite circumscribed. The Assyrians knew little of this part of the world, which was well removed from the sphere in which they could assert their military power, and there were no native Anatolians writing in cuneiform on durable materials, as there had been in the time of the Hittite Empire or in Iron Age Urartu. Because the later historical record offered by such authorities as Homer and Herodotus is so rich, archaeologists have tended to use this to frame the questions they ask, but reconciling evidence from excavations with the historical memories of the Greeks is not always a straightforward process.

THE TROJAN WAR AS PRELUDE

Perhaps the best known episode in the history of Anatolia is the Trojan War. It configured the most remote historical horizon for the Greeks from Homer onward, who recognized it as belonging to the Bronze Age. It has provided a test case for the reconciliation of archaeology and

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Figure 10.1 Map of western Anatolian sites of the Iron Age and Kerkenes Dag˘

Greek legend from the 1870s, when Heinrich Schliemann began his excavations at Hissarlık. Despite its location on the periphery of Anatolia, Troy is the most intensively examined site in Turkey, and has been excavated over the longest period of time.

Two levels have been singled out for consideration as the remains of Homer’s Troy: VI and

VIIA. In some ways, the best fit for the city of the epics is Troy VI, whose prosperous citadel was occupied into the last century of Late Bronze Age. Recent exploration of the surrounding area has also identified a lower town to surrounding this citadel (Figure 10.2). This, presumably, would be the city the Hittites knew as Wilusa, which they sometimes grouped with the western Anatolian states known as Arzawa. Wilusa is a word related to an alternative Greek name for Troy, Ilion, originally written Wilion, of which the different endings of the Hittite and Greek variants have explanations in the grammar of the respective languages. Intriguingly, the Bog˘ azköy archives contain a treaty drawn up with Aleksandus of Wilusa, a personal name which appears to be identical to Alexander—a name sometimes used in Greek texts as an alias for Paris, whose abduction of Helen triggered the war in the first place. The ruins of Troy VI contained significant amounts of Mycenaean pottery indicative of at least indirect exchange with the Late Bronze Age Greek world, but the archaeology of the site otherwise suggests continuity with Anatolian traditions. One can say little for certain about the ethnicity of its

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battlefield were lost on him. The Bronze Age states of Arzawa and the existence of the Hittites had been entirely forgotten; neither did he have any conception of the literate and bureaucratic aspects of the Mycenaean polities which were their contemporaries. At the end of the second book of the Iliad, there is a list of the Trojan allies, in other words the peoples who opposed the Achaean attackers, among whom are the Thracians, Phrygians, Lycians and Carians. The principle of a coalition of west Anatolian forces may go back to a Bronze Age tradition, but the list itself, with its total ignorance of the Hittites and the powers of their day, reflects the changed world of the Iron Age.3

Troy VIIB, of which the first subphase is largely remains carried over from the conflagration that ended VIIA, contains pottery of the Mycenaean IIIC style, which is widely spread in sites of the Levant in levels following the destructions at the end of the Bronze Age. At Troy, but not elsewhere in Anatolia, a type of pottery known as “knobbed ware,” which has its closest parallels across the Hellespont in Europe, also appears.4 While it is difficult to be precise about exactly who is doing what, new peoples are clearly on the move in these obscure concluding centuries of the second millennium.

THE AEGEAN COAST

Greek-speaking peoples had been in contact with the Aegean coast of Turkey, if not actually residing there, in the Late Bronze Age, but the early Iron Age saw a migration to this area on a completely different order of magnitude. The geography of dialects is probably the best indicator of these population movements, which are otherwise difficult to date on the basis of the meager archaeological evidence. The first point to be made is that the people involved were new migrants and not simply local Mycenaeans left over from the previous era. Mycenaean Greek is most closely related to dialects in the Peloponnese, not the ones that spread in the Iron Age. By the time written records become available in the first millennium, speakers of the Ionic dialect occupy the islands and shoreline between Izmir and the Menderes (Meander) River, Aeolians were to the north of them, and Dorians to the south, so these groups occupied virtually the whole western coast of Turkey. This indicates several waves of westward migration from different locations on the Greek mainland, and its archaeological correlate is the appearance of Protogeometric pottery at sites along the Aegean Coast. At Miletus, in Ionia, the arrival of these new settlers is placed around 1050 BC or shortly afterward.5

After their arrival, these Hellenic populations on the western fringe of Anatolia maintained a self-consciously separate cultural identity from their inland neighbors, although there was obviously continual interaction between them. One follows the stylistic development of the pottery in the Ionian cities, for example, in terms that are familiar to all students of classical archaeology: geometric, orientalizing, black figure, red figure, etc. The archaeology of these coastal and island sites cannot be separated from developments on the Greek mainland. It is a vast and intensively studied subject, beyond the scope of this volume.

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