Troy Was Real

For centuries scholars dismissed Troy as pure myth. Then in the 1870s, amateur digger Heinrich Schliemann cut into a mound at Hisarlik in modern Turkey and found not one city but nine layers stacked over each other.

• Troy VI — a rich, fortified city that fits Homer's grand description
• Troy VIIa — destroyed by fire around 1180 BCE, with arrowheads and unburied bodies in the rubble

Something violent clearly happened here, near the time the legends point to.