AHC: Reverse Trojan War

[Agatho]

DISCLAIMER: I (along with, as far as I can tell, everyone else on this board) am well aware that the Trojan War as depicted in Homer's Iliad is less than factually accurate, and the POD I'm looking for will have nothing to do with the specific events described therein.

That being said, there was a real war between Schliemann's Troy and Mycenaean civilization that led to the city being sacked, but could the situation have been reversed? Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have Schliemann's Troy (or a culturally similar analogue in Anatolia) sack a great city in Greece, become the dominant power in the Aegean, and then have the Dorics or Hellenes or whoever invades later write an epic about it. What would Aegean civilization look like if this were to occur? Bonus points if the city destroyed is Mycenae herself!

 

[robertp6165]

DISCLAIMER: I (along with, as far as I can tell, everyone else on this board) am well aware that the Trojan War as depicted in Homer's Iliad is less than factually accurate, and the POD I'm looking for will have nothing to do with the specific events described therein.

That being said, there was a real war between Schliemann's Troy and Mycenaean civilization that led to the city being sacked, but could the situation have been reversed? Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have Schliemann's Troy (or a culturally similar analogue in Anatolia) sack a great city in Greece, become the dominant power in the Aegean, and then have the Dorics or Hellenes or whoever invades later write an epic about it. What would Aegean civilization look like if this were to occur? Bonus points if the city destroyed is Mycenae herself!

The big problem is that the Hittites were constantly meddling in western Anatolia and every time a local power began to rise there which could have possibly become involved in Aegean power politics, the Hittites would come and smash them, sack a few of their towns or force them to pay a heavy tribute in exchange for leaving them alone. Wilusa itself (thought to be Schliemann's Troy) was a Hittite vassal most of the time, except for short periods when it was a vassal of the King of Ahhiyawa (thought to be Mycenae or some other power on the Greek mainland). It's a bit like asking Belgium to become a great power and burn Paris or Berlin. It's probably not gonna happen.

 

[Oracle of Sobek 𓆋]

One way would be to have the Hittites themselves leading an invasion of Mycenaean Greece with Wilusa as an important ally (maybe the Hittites are interceding partly on Wilusa's behalf - using a dispute between their vassal and Mycenae as a cassus belli). Of course, that requires the Hittites having a strong enough presence in western Anatolia to mount such a campaign in the first place, AND having the desire to control the Aegean. To get the Hittites interested in the Aegean, you have to limit or eliminate their entanglements in Syria, which is rather difficult to do... In Syria, the Hittites are challenged by Egyptians, Mitanni, and Assyrians, with the first being an especially dangerous threat early on, and the last becoming increasingly threatening over time. The Hittites also have a far greater interest in maintaining hegemony over Syria rather than the Aegean, as the region is criss-crossed by the main overland trade routes that provided the bulk of the Hittites' wealth.

Alternatively, you could have Mycenae sacked by a Wilusa that plays an important role in a far more prominent kingdom of Arzawa - a western Anatolian state that was something of a league/coalition of smaller kingdoms. Arzawa rose to power during a time of Hittite weakness, a period that was only reversed by Suppiluliuma I. Suppiluliuma came to power in a coup by deposing his brother, Tudhaliya the Younger, so if that coup fails and Suppiluliuma is executed, it's likely that Hatti could continue to spiral downward and that Arzawa will fill the power vacuum as the main Anatolian state. Arzawa is on the Aegean, and has much more to gain from controlling that region rather than sending military expeditions all the way to Syria. It's not hard to imagine Wilusa/Troy being easily folded into a powerful Arzawa, and then any conflict between Wilusa and Mycenae would bring the full power of Arzawa down on Greece.

 

[Mongo]

This event may have actually happened -- albeit a thousand years before the time of the "Trojan War".

I no longer have the documents, but I once made a time chart containing each region of Greece and western Anatolia, from the start of the Neolithic to the start of the Iron Age. There were a number of very interesting correlations across the region, but one I still remember is that for a time in the Early Bronze Age, the archaeological culture centered in northwestern Anatolia suddenly expanded and within a short time (less than a century) had covered almost all of Greece and the Aegean, before eventually retreating back to the area around Troy.

This should be no surprise, really. There are literally hundreds of town names in Greece that are of West Anatolian form (such as town names ending in -ssos or -nthos, which are typical West Anatolian suffixes), indicating that at one time proto-Luwian speakers held political dominance, probably in the form of an elite upper crust.