Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
For a long time, Troy belonged to poetry rather than to any map. That changed in 1870, when a German adventurer named Heinrich Schliemann began digging into the hill of Hisarlik and found not one city but a stack of settlements sitting one on top of another. In one of them, he pulled out nearly nine thousand objects, called them the Treasure of Priam, and missed the date by about a thousand years.
This video sets the myth—as told in the Iliad and the Odyssey—next to the archaeology. We look at what the Greeks said about Ilion, Priam, Paris, and Achilles, and what actually stood on that hill: fourteen settlements across almost five thousand years, a wealthy trading city with walls up to nine meters high, earthquakes, fires, and a slow decline. We also go through the Hittite tablets, which mention a city called Wilusa, its rulers Alaksandu and Walmu, and a long war between the Hittites and the Ahhiyawa. That looks like the raw material the legend of a ten-year siege grew out of. Troy was real. Its actual history simply turned out to be much bigger than the war the Greeks put at the start of their own past.
0:00 A City Most Scholars Called Fiction
1:34 Myth or Reality: The Questions
2:03 The Iliad and the Poems That Were Lost
4:19 Paris, Sparta and the Abduction of Helen
5:58 Achilles and the Prophecy of His Death
8:21 A Siege That Could Never Close the City
10:19 Where the Iliad Actually Begins
11:53 The Death of Achilles and the Wooden Horse
13:13 Priam's Treasure: Doubts, Berlin and Moscow
14:50 Fourteen Cities Under One Hill
16:45 Troy VI: Nine Meter Walls and Five Gates
18:50 A Luwian Seal and the Language of the Trojans
20:07 The Hittites Call It Wilusa
22:44 Piyamaradu and the War With the Ahhiyawa
25:32 What Probably Really Happened
28:42 1180 BC and the Bronze Age Collapse
30:53 So Did Schliemann Find Troy?
#odyssey #troy #history #agamemnon
For a long time, Troy belonged to poetry rather than to any map. That changed in 1870, when a German adventurer named Heinrich Schliemann began digging into the hill of Hisarlik and found not one city but a stack of settlements sitting one on top of another. In one of them, he pulled out nearly nine thousand objects, called them the Treasure of Priam, and missed the date by about a thousand years.
This video sets the myth—as told in the Iliad and the Odyssey—next to the archaeology. We look at what the Greeks said about Ilion, Priam, Paris, and Achilles, and what actually stood on that hill: fourteen settlements across almost five thousand years, a wealthy trading city with walls up to nine meters high, earthquakes, fires, and a slow decline. We also go through the Hittite tablets, which mention a city called Wilusa, its rulers Alaksandu and Walmu, and a long war between the Hittites and the Ahhiyawa. That looks like the raw material the legend of a ten-year siege grew out of. Troy was real. Its actual history simply turned out to be much bigger than the war the Greeks put at the start of their own past.
0:00 A City Most Scholars Called Fiction
1:34 Myth or Reality: The Questions
2:03 The Iliad and the Poems That Were Lost
4:19 Paris, Sparta and the Abduction of Helen
5:58 Achilles and the Prophecy of His Death
8:21 A Siege That Could Never Close the City
10:19 Where the Iliad Actually Begins
11:53 The Death of Achilles and the Wooden Horse
13:13 Priam's Treasure: Doubts, Berlin and Moscow
14:50 Fourteen Cities Under One Hill
16:45 Troy VI: Nine Meter Walls and Five Gates
18:50 A Luwian Seal and the Language of the Trojans
20:07 The Hittites Call It Wilusa
22:44 Piyamaradu and the War With the Ahhiyawa
25:32 What Probably Really Happened
28:42 1180 BC and the Bronze Age Collapse
30:53 So Did Schliemann Find Troy?
#odyssey #troy #history #agamemnon
