The site was abandoned after its destruction, and the great trading city that had been a center of Bronze Age civilization for centuries simply ceased to exist.

The Troy Connection

No discussion of the Sea Peoples can entirely avoid the question of Troy, because the period of the Sea Peoples overlaps with the period in which the Trojan War is traditionally placed, and the connection between the two phenomena has been the subject of centuries of speculation.

Homer’s Iliad describes a great war between the Greeks (Achaeans/Danaoi) and the Trojans (Teucrians), set at a city at the entrance to the Dardanelles straits in northwestern Anatolia.

The historicity of the Trojan War has been debated since antiquity, but the excavations at Hisarlık (Schliemann’s Troy) have demonstrated that there was indeed a significant Bronze Age city at this location that was destroyed and rebuilt multiple times.