Trojan War

The Trojan War is the legendary conflict, most famously recounted in Homer's epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, in which a coalition of Greek kingdoms besieged and ultimately destroyed the city of Troy in northwestern Anatolia, traditionally dated by ancient chronographers such as Eratosthenes to around 1194 to 1184 BCE. According to the legend, the war was triggered when the Trojan prince Paris abducted Helen, wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, prompting Menelaus's brother, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, to lead a ten-year siege that ended when the Greeks took the city by the ruse of the Trojan Horse. Archaeological excavation of the site identified as Troy, at Hisarlik in modern Turkey, has revealed multiple destruction layers, with the level known as Troy VIIa showing evidence of violent destruction by fire in a period roughly consistent with the traditional dating, though scholars remain divided on how much of the Homeric narrative reflects a real historical conflict, or a composite memory of several Bronze Age conflicts, transmitted through oral tradition before being written down centuries later.