Troy

A place-name in the Hittite records, Truwiša (also read Taruiša), written ta-ru-i-ša, that some scholars connect with the Greek Troía. It appears alongside Wiluša in a Hittite text listing lands of western Anatolia, which is part of what makes the equation attractive: if Wiluša is Ilios, a neighbor named Truwiša could be Troia. The identification is far less secure than that of Wilusa, however, and the reading and the connection are both debated.

Truwiša is the more fragile of the page’s two Bronze Age threads, included because the symmetry it would complete is so striking: that Homer’s two names for the city, Ílios and Troía, might both survive from the Hittite archives, as Wiluša and Truwiša. The first equation is firm enough to anchor the Trojan question; the second is a tantalizing possibility, offered here with the caution it deserves. Together they suggest that the doubled name of Troy is not a poet’s invention but an inheritance, two ancient names for one citadel carried down from an age before Greek was written.

The name of a kingdom of northwest Anatolia in the Hittite diplomatic archives, Wiluša, written URU.wi-lu-ša and generally identified with Troy. It appears across two centuries of Hittite records, most famously in the treaty by which the Hittite Great King Muwatalli II bound its ruler Alaksandu of Wiluša, and in the Manapa-Tarhunta letter that mentions troubles around the land. Its location in the far northwest, in the region the Hittites called the Šeḫa River Land and Arzawa, matches the Troad, and its name matches the Greek.

Wiluša is the single most important entry on this page, because it is the same name as Homer’s Ílios. The meter of the Iliad shows that Ílios was once Wilios, with an initial w, the digamma, exactly the consonant of Wiluša; and the treaty-king Alaksandu bears, in Hittite cuneiform, a name all but identical to the Greek Alexandros, the alternative name of the Trojan prince Paris. That a clay tablet from the Hittite chancellery names a king of “Wilusa” called “Alaksandu” is the closest the documentary record comes to touching Homer’s Troy, and the strongest reason to believe the epic remembers a real Bronze Age place.

One of the two Greek names of the city, Ílios (also neuter Ílion), the form that gives the Iliad, the poem “of Ilios,” its title. Greek myth derived it from Ilus, the legendary founder, son of Tros. The meter of the Homeric poems repeatedly requires an initial consonant that the classical spelling no longer shows: the word was once Wilios, beginning with the digamma, the lost Greek w, and it is this older form that matches the Hittite Wiluša.

Ílios is the Greek end of the oldest thread in this atlas, a name carried in oral verse from the Bronze Age to Homer and matched, across the gap of writing systems, against a Hittite tablet. The very irregularity that puzzled ancient grammarians, the gaps in the meter where a vanished consonant once stood, turned out to be the fossil of the name’s true antiquity: the silent w of Ílios is the audible w of Wiluša, and the epic kept it without knowing why.

The other Greek name of the city, Troíā, used by Homer beside Ílios and derived in myth from Tros, the eponymous founder and grandfather of Ilus. Where Ílios names the citadel proper, Troíā often names the city with its surrounding land, the Troad, much as Sparta and Lacedaemon name a town and its territory; but the two are used freely as synonyms, and the war is fought as much at Troíā as at Ílios. It is the form that gives English Troy, through Latin.

Troíā is the name that won. Of the city’s two Greek names it is Troíā, not Ílios, that became the ordinary modern word, surviving in Troy, the Trojan War, and the proverbial Trojan horse, while Ilios lives on mainly in the title of Homer’s poem. The pairing of the two names, a feature already old in Homer and perhaps older still if Truwiša stands behind Troíā, is the page’s central pattern: one city, two ancient names, both carried out of the Bronze Age into the languages of Europe.

The Latin name for the city, Ilium, taken from the Greek Ílios in its neuter form. It is the name Virgil uses throughout the Aeneid for the fallen city from which Aeneas escapes to found the Roman line, so that for Rome Ilium was not a foreign ruin but the ancestral home, the burning citadel whose survivors became, through Aeneas, the forefathers of the Romans. The adjective Iliacus and the patronymic Iliades fill Latin epic.

Ilium carried the older of Troy’s two names into the literature that founded Rome’s own myth of itself. Through Virgil, the name that began as the Bronze Age Wiluša became part of Rome’s family history; the Romans traced their descent to the city of the digamma, and so the silent w of Ílios stands, at the far end of its journey, behind the Roman claim to a Trojan past. A name on a Hittite treaty became, two thousand years later, the cradle of the Aeneas legend.

The Latin name for the city, Troia, taken from the Greek Troíā and standing beside Ilium as Latin’s pair of Trojan names, just as in Greek. It runs through the whole of Roman epic and is inseparable from the founding legend: Troiae qui primus ab oris, “who first from the shores of Troy,” opens the Aeneid, and the Romans held themselves descendants of the Troiani. Through Latin and the Romance languages the form became the English Troy.

Troia is the western terminus of the name that the modern world chiefly uses, the one English took as Troy. The Latin pair Troia and Ilium preserved to the end the doubleness that the Greeks had and that the Hittite records may push back to the Bronze Age. A city whose oldest certain name lies in a Hittite treaty thus reaches the modern world under a Latin form of its Greek twin, the same citadel that was Wiluša to Muwatalli’s scribes remembered as Troy in every European tongue.