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ANCIENT accounts of the Greek siege of the city of Troy have been confirmed
by an American geologist.

John Kraft of the University of Delaware says he has pinpointed where the
ancient Greeks kept their boats before making their assault on the
city—just as the Greek geographer Strabo described 1250 years after the
Trojan war.

Homer elaborately chronicled the siege of Troy in his epic legend, the
Iliad, as part of the nine-year Trojan war to secure the return of Helen.
In reality, the siege was part of a trade war 3250 years ago between the Greeks
and the people of Troas, of which Troy was the centre.

Troy sat on a hilltop near a protected harbour at the junction of the Simois
and Scamander rivers in what is now modern Turkey. The protected harbour was
vital to Troy’s success, because it made the city a safe port for boats waiting
to make the treacherous passage from the Aegean Sea through the Dardanelles into
the Black Sea.

Today the harbour has silted up, and the ruins sit 6 kilometres inland, but
in ancient times water surrounded the city on three sides. By radiocarbon dating
sediments, Kraft discovered that the harbour stretched about 10 kilometres
inland 7000 years ago, but the shore had moved about 3 kilometres north by the
time of the war, leaving Troy within a kilometre of the water’s edge. The shape
of the harbour protected the shore from strong waves, creating a wide zone of
marshes and swamps near the edge.

Strabo said the embayment where the Greeks beached their boats was 20
“stades” from Troy—about four kilometres. Kraft’s findings confirm that
the embayment was open water at the time—the Greeks could have sailed in
and drawn their boats up on the shore. The land in that area slopes upward,
matching descriptions that the beached Greek ships formed three ranks, like
seating in a stadium, Kraft told the meeting of the Geological Society of
America in Boston.