Archaeology used to be mainly about the material remains of the past. They stood as witnesses of events and civilisations long past and encouraged archaeologists in their main activity, namely digging to find out more. Normally, if no clues could be seen above ground, nothing very much happened. Seeing beneath the soil and knowing precisely where to put your spade has in the past years developed stupendously, as the recent work of the Armenian-German team at Artaxata has shown.

Artaxata in today’s Armenia, 30km northeast of Mount Ararat as the crow flies, just on the border with Turkey, might seem an unlikely place to look for Roman remains. Yet the Romans were here and going by the efforts they made to beautify the city they were intending to stay. That was certainly the emperor Trajan’s idea in the early 2nd century of the present era but things did not quite go according to plan. His successor Hadrian gave up on the provinces of Armenia and of Mesopotamia which the Romans could not defend against their eternal enemy in the East, the Parthians; relations were not much better later with the Sassanians.

Work has been going on in Artaxata since the 1970s, revealing among other things dwellings, fortifications, workshops and Roman inscriptions. Somewhere there must also be a military camp since we know that the Legio III Scythica was stationed here. Stamped bricks and roofing tiles, a monumental inscription of Emperor Trajan as well as munitions and weapons have been found. Among the monikers given to this legion, the one that goes ‘Operosa et felix’ (‘Industrious and fortunate’) is a good reminder that a soldier’s job was not limited to fighting. A legion of something like 3,000 to 6,000 people had its own surveyors, engineers and architects while at the same time the lower orders and the auxiliaries (the non-Roman citizen corps attached to a legion) would provide the manpower. It is very possible that the makeover of Artaxata was both intended to impress the local populace and to keep a lot of idle hands busy.

Among the building unearthed was a bathing complex with the tell-tale stacks of round bricks of the sospensura characteristic of the heating system of Roman baths. Normally baths imply a regular water supply, i.e. an aqueduct. This fact, together with stray remains of an urban piped water system, set the archaeologists looking for it. But there was nothing visible above ground; no clay or stone pipes, no stumps of arches, no holding tanks. An extensive geomagnetic survey of the area to the east of Artaxata revealed crucial anomalies set in a straight line, anomalies that upon excavation were proved to be the closely spaced foundation pillars of arches intended to control the gradient of the water arriving from the nearby mountains. The starting point of the aqueduct has not been pinpointed but the estimated total length varies between 25 and 30km, a distance well within Roman engineering capabilities.

That there were no surface remains is taken as proof that the aqueduct was actually never built. It had been carefully planned and the closeness of the foundations suggests that the engineers were well aware of the seismic nature of the area and of the dangers of building on marshy ground. Trajan would have been proud of them! But it seems as if the local people were not convinced.

By Paola Pugsley, author of Blue Guide Mediterranean Turkey

When is a horse not a horse? Nowhere in the Iliad is it mentioned that the Greeks brought the ten-year siege to a successful conclusion by tricking the Trojans into towing into their city a large wooden horse in which sufficient Greek warriors had been hidden to create havoc and set fire to the town. Nevertheless, the Trojan Horse lives on as an established fact. Visitors to the site are provided with one to climb into—with improbably large windows (excellent for photo opportunities). There is another one in Çanakkale by the harbour. It was made for the 2004 movie and is beginning to show its age.

Artistic representations of the famous artefact are known from the 8/7th century BC. The tale does appear in the Odyssey, as well as in a couple of later Greek tragedies and then again in Virgil at the end of the 1st millennium BC. By then, doubts were being voiced. In his Natural History (7:202), Pliny the Elder clearly speaks of a battering ram and he is echoed later on by Pausanias (23:8–10). Battering rams and other siege engines were known in the Middle East from the 2nd millennium BC, although there is no evidence that they were ever used by the Mycenaeans. The Hittites did in the 17th century BC. Excavators have identified, in the relevant level of Troy VII (the Troy of the Trojan War), a stretch of wall damaged and hastily repaired. Battering rams could have a skeleton crew hidden under a cover of skins, ready to jump into the breach and scale the wall. So was the Trojan Horse in fact a Trojan ram? In the Homeric story, though, we get much more than just a sense of brute force. It is a tale of ruse and deceit, in which the Trojans are shown as hopelessly gullible victims of an inescapable fate. This has led to theories that involve no battering rams or huge siege engines, but simply the smuggling of warriors into the besieged city by trickery. At the siege of Joppa (now Jaffa) in the 15th century BC, the Egyptians managed to smuggle soldiers in in pithoi, huge clay jars supposedly full of grain (the same trick used by Ali Baba and his 40 thieves). But this does not explain the idea of the horse. Animal-shaped vessels are certainly common in Bronze-Age Anatolia, where they were used for libations. Sometimes they are on wheels. The late Bronze Age relief at the Alaca Hüyük entrance gate (the original is in the Museum of Civilisations in Ankara) shows a horse on wheels with a spout on its back. Unfortunately, neither its size nor its purpose are clear. It remains to be seen whether the Trojan Horse was a real object or a poetic invention conflating various traditions.

Extract from Paola Pugsley’s Blue Guide Aegean Turkey: Troy to Bodrum, to be published this spring.