New Study on Life in Troy “Rewriting Wine History”

In many parts of the ancient world, for 5,000 years, the wine They were regarded as a luxury intended only for the elite, a privilege of the upper class, but a new study reveals that its powerful ancient city Troy was the exception and comes to support a case stated by the famous archaeologist Henry Schliemann in the 19th century.

The great ancient Greek poet Hostagein his epics, often refers to wine. These references have given us a lot of useful information about wine in antiquity today. This information is now being completed by a new study of German scientists, who conducted a chemical analysis in pottery containers discovered in a settlement ruins in Western Turkey.

Their findings prove that almost everyone in Troy – whether they belonged to the upper classes or not – were winemakers.

The findings ‘Rewrite the history of wine’

“In the early Bronze Age, about 5,000 years ago, wine, although the most expensive drink, was not intended exclusively for the rich and the powerful, but also for the ordinary people in the city of Troy.”said the author of the study, professor Stefan Bloomarchaeologist at the University of Tubigen, Germany.

“It is clear that wine was a daily drink for ordinary people.”

In 1871, the German archaeologist Henry Schliemann discovered the legendary Troy in western Turkey, near the Aegean coast.

During the excavations, Schliemann found several hundreds of gold and silver objects in Troy, such as jewelry, masks, buttons, head covers, weapons and sculptures.

But he ‘coincided’ a more ‘humble’ object referred to in Homer’s Iliad as the “Duple Amphitheater”a characteristic glass of the Bronze Age, with two handles.

“Schliemann discovered many double handle cylindrical cups, which were used either for wine offers to the Olympian gods or by the royal elite for drink, as Homer describes.”Professor Bloom said in a reference to The Conversation.

“These ceramic vessels were often made of pottery wheel, a technological innovation introduced from the nearby east during this period.”

According to archaeologists, More than 100 of these cup features From 2500 to 2000 BC, they have been found to date only in Troy.

Probably the characteristic double handles allowed the cups to easily pass from one another to a ceremony or concentration as they sat next to each other.

‘Daily drink’

Analyzing the fragments of the vessel, Professor Bloom and his colleagues found high concentrations of fruit trace traces (electric and pyruvate, which occur only when the grape juice is kneaded) as “Indicative of regular wine consumption”.

But even more interesting is the fact that the same fruit acids were also found in remnants of simpler cups and glasses than the Troy used by people lower social classes, suggesting that wine consumption was widespread in all classes.

Bloom still believes that farmers, craftsmen and other poorer people living in the outer settlements of Troy, far from the strong, fortified city, consumed wine as ‘Daily drink’.

This could be linked to religious practices, rituals and public symposiums or simply to daily enjoyment.

Another very interesting conclusion from the study of fragments is that for wine, any type of glass could be used.

Written sources suggest that wine was considered particularly “valuable” during this period, according to Professor Bloom.

However, Troy was in an area where wine production was favored, which means that it could be widely available.

The new study, which was published in American Journal of Archaeology, It shows for the first time that consuming wine in ancient Troy was not only for the upper classes as it was believed so far.

The authors of the study will try to conduct further research in other locations to find out if a larger variety of cups was used for wine consumption and to draw safer conclusions about controversial theories about distribution and consumption of wine during the third millennium eg.

The legendary Troy

The findings to date shed quite a lot of light in life in the city of Troy, which was believed to be purely mythical until it was discovered by Schliemann.

The inhabitants of Troy, according to Homer, fought in the Grand Trojan War against the first Greeks, who cheated on them with the famous “Trojan Horse”.

The “Trojan Horse”, the wooden horse that the Trojans welcomed them unknowingly within the walls, was full of hidden Greek warriors who were able to enter the city and destroy it, ending the war.

Homer wrote the Iliad 400 years later and together with the Odyssey are the oldest rescued texts of the ancient Greek secretariat. Their stories have influenced the shaping of literary and philosophical thinking throughout the history of Western culture, and have inspired various “spinoffs” by Aeneas (an epic written by the Roman poet Virgil at the end of the 1st century BC), up to Trojan and Chrysida (his theatrical work William Shakespeare probably written in 1602) and the great French opera The Trojans (The libretto was written by the Hector Berlioz in 1856).

Source: dailymail.co.uk