2511 AM · 1250 BCE · world history
The Trojan War
The war Homer sang of, whose traces archaeologists found at Hisarlik.
Greek tradition tells of a coalition of Achaean kings besieging a city at the mouth of the Dardanelles for ten years. Long dismissed as pure poetry, until Schliemann dug at Hisarlik and found nine layered cities, one destroyed by fire at roughly the right date. The history was smaller; the story became Europe's founding epic.