Who Wants To Be A (not real) Millionaire?

because even if someone forgot it all the odyssey/iliad and greek mythology that we read in school two of the answers are basic geographical impossibilities which leaves it a 50/50 at best and one is right across a narrow sea whereas another is on the opposite side of europe so most people could just guess it correctly for that reason

but, the part that really bothers me is there's literally zero evidence supporting that site is actually troy

troy does not exist in the archaeological world, in fact it's not even mentioned in greek or roman history - it's mentioned, but never as a real and physical place - those people adored the classics and would have regularly mentioned troy whenever relevant - you see that a lot with a lot of romans who were obsessed with ancient greece and made sure to visit all the important places, they never visit troy

ie there's no maps that say troy on it anywhere to be found

what happened was in the 1800s when a classical education was all the rage, westerners (mostly english) decided they wanted to find troy so they literally used the book as a guide - ie in the illiad there's a river and the river floes into the ocean so it's near the ocean and just off the shore is an island in the ocean where the gods would watch and observe the conflict - so this place where the gods were became used as a proxy

aside from treating a work which has gods and superheroes as main characters as a work of historical non-fiction (lol) any attempts to find the coastline as described in the books would be foolhardy since over that length of time the shoreline would have changed dramatically - so many ruins are now submerged or former coastal cities are now quite a bit inland etc etc

but they went ahead anyway, they began digging and lo and behold if you dig pretty much anywhere in the general region of where a river would have been in the ancient eastern eediterranean then you're to come across ruins galore

upon finding ruins that were sufficiently old to pass the sniff test, it was declared that troy had been found

in the ensuing years, we've since changed our mind and the current accepted version of troy is the 3rd one we've called troy

mind you, there's not a single shred of any evidence confirming it to be troy, it's just a settlement which, is plausibly old enough and in the general area of the world where it could be troy and that's if troy actually ever existed, something we're not even sure about

importantly, the site we chose as troy remained a settlement through the greek and roman period - yet they never once referenced it as troy despite talking about the idea of troy a lot - there's zero chance in my mind if it were troy or troy were real and a city of theirs that would have gone unnoticed and unspoken

so i really hate stuff like this which just assumes it is indeed troy when we truly have no evidence supporting that claim, we just really really wanted to find it so we found something that could work

it's not quite true that there is no evidence that the generally accepted location for the ancient citadel known to us as Troy. While nothing will ever be 100% when dealing with things that old, there are many clues that Troy/Illium of the Illiad did exist and existed at the spot we think it is. It was a city of the right size, in the right place, at the right time. The walls found are consistent with the descriptions of the Illiad, including a weak area mentioned in the story. It was destroyed, probably after an earthquake brought down the walls, letting the Mycenaeans in. Hittite records are consistent with Mycenaean meddling in that area at that time, and refer to a city which would have been referred to as Illios in Greek. There are references to a royal person called Alexandros, which corresponds to Homer's other name for Paris; as well as descendents of Atreus (like Agamemnon and Meneleus were).

Did Homer make up most of the story? Certainly, but there is enough in the archeological and historical records to believe he/they based it on something real. The most likely place for where this happened is the place commonly held to be Troy.