CAE.019 / The War of Troy
'' Trojan Army ''
Inhoud:
Afmeting: 23mm
Prehistoric subjects are always tremendously difficult to research for obvious reasons. For a long time the only reference to a place called Troy was in epic poems such as the Iliad, which described a war between Greeks and that city. That account has been a best seller since ancient times, making the Trojan War well known down the centuries, yet to this day there is no proof that the war ever took place, and no other evidence for the existence of Troy. Nevertheless excavations at Hisarlik and new discoveries in Hittite records provide much circumstantial evidence for such a war, which is currently thought most likely to have happened in the 12th or 13th Century BCE, and we know that the Greeks had considerable contact with both colonies and neighbours in that region at the time, so regardless of the truth of the Iliad story, a set of warriors such as this from western Anatolia is an important part of the Greek/Hittite/Egyptian world of the period.
There are no known representations of these warriors, nor contemporary descriptions, so assessing accuracy must be in large measure based on what we do know of the neighbouring Greek and Hittite states. Caesar say that the design of this set was based on early period Mycenaeans with some aspects more appropriate for the 13th Century, which is probably as good a strategy as any, and also has the effect of providing some figures suitable for the early Mycenaean period.
The majority of the men wear a corselet of scale armour, with the rest wearing no more than a kilt - clearly heavy and light infantry respectively. On their head most have the helmet armoured with boar's tusks as is so often illustrated for the Mycenaeans throughout their history, with a variety of plumes and crests emerging from the top. Most of the heavies and even one of the lights have greaves on their shins, which was a device that the Mycenaeans experimented with for a short time but then seem to have abandoned. The shields are of two basic types, either round or oval with notches cut into each side. Round shields were normal at the time in the Greek world, but the second type is reminiscent of the old figure-of-eight shields which the early Mycenaeans used to carry, yet are both smaller and of a different design.
