THE TROJAN WAR DATED BY TWO SOLAR ECLIPSES

Abstract

The Trojan War was very signifificant for the ancient Greeks and they dated historical events according to the number of years after the fall of Troy. However, there was already in antiquity no consensus as to the exact date of the war when compared with difffferent epochs. Even after the modern discovery of the ancient city, there has been disagreement among difffferent excavators as to which layer corresponds to the city mentioned in the Iliad attributed to Homer.

In this paper an attempt is made to identify the strange obscuration of the sun that occurred during the fifinal battle of the Iliad as a total solar eclipse close to the southern border of the zone of totality. There exists only one solar eclipse that corresponds to the description in the text and this is the total solar eclipse of June 11, in 1312 BC.

When I fifirst presented this date in 1986, there was a difffference of about 60 years compared with the most common archaeological dating at that time. My date is now fully supported by the latest results from the German-American excavation that identififies the fall of Homer’s Troy with the destruction of the archaeological layer Troy VIh, dated to about 1300 BC.

Further independent support is provided by another solar eclipse that dates the reign of the Hittite king Muwatalli II. This king wrote a letter to king Alaksandu in Wilusa, identifified as the Hittite name for Ilios, the most frequently used name for Troy in the Iliad. Alexander was another name for Paris who abducted Helen, the crime that resulted in the war. Muwatalli II was king 1315-1297 BC, according to the chronology for the Hittite Kingdom based on a solar eclipse in 1335 BC, during the tenth year of King Mursili II (1345-1315 BC), the father of Muwatalli II.