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The Hellespont

Accepted10/12HighThe TroadHomeric name(s): Ἑλλήσποντος

The strait beside the war. The Achaean ships are beached on it, Achilles' funeral games are held by it, and its current is the most plausible economic reason for Troy to have existed at all.

Homer's Hellespont is where the fleet lies and where the dead are burnt. It marks the edge of the Achaean position and the boundary of the poem's world to the north-east: beyond it are Thrace and allies, not adventure.

The strait's current runs strongly from the Marmara to the Aegean, which makes the passage difficult under sail from the south and gives any settlement controlling the waiting-place upstream of it a permanent advantage. That is the strongest non-literary argument for why a city stood at Hisarlık for three thousand years.

Identifications proposed

  • The Dardanelles

    Proposed by: Universal ancient and modern identification

    Accepted10/12High

    The strait between the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara, sixty kilometres long and at its narrowest about a kilometre and a half across. The Iliad puts the Achaean camp on its shore and calls the sea 'broad' and 'strong-flowing' — a current that is a real navigational fact and a plausible reason for a Bronze Age settlement to matter at Hisarlık.

    40.2000, 26.4000· Area

    • ScholarshipThe Hellespont of the Iliad is the Dardanelles strait; the identification is universal in the geographical literature, ancient and modern
    • Primary textHerodotus, Histories 7.33-37 — Xerxes bridges the Hellespont
    • Primary textHomer, Iliad (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1924)
    Confidence
    10/12 · High confidence
    Textual
    3
    Archaeological
    1
    Scholarly
    3
    Geographic
    3

Why this class

Accepted: an unmistakable, universally agreed feature, and one whose physical behaviour the poem describes accurately.

What is disputed

Not the identification but the inference: how much of Troy's importance was actually built on controlling the strait is argued, and it was one of the sharpest points of contention around Korfmann's reading of the site.

Sources

  • Primary textHomer, Iliad (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1924)
  • ScholarshipThe Hellespont of the Iliad is the Dardanelles strait; the identification is universal in the geographical literature, ancient and modern
  • Primary textHerodotus, Histories 7.33-37 — Xerxes bridges the Hellespont