Troy's Lesson: Ambition Ate Its Own Foundations

There is a moment in the archaeological record at Hisarlık — the hill in northwestern Turkey where Heinrich Schliemann decided, with the particular madness of the self-taught, that Homer was a journalist — where you can read environmental collapse directly in the soil. The Bronze Age city we call Troy VI, the grand one, the walled one, the one that matches most closely the city Priam ruled in the *Iliad*, shows signs of serious deforestation in its surrounding landscape. The timber went into ships, into houses, into the great walls themselves. The topsoil, unanchored, began to move. A civilisation that had endured for centuries was quietly eating the ground beneath its own feet before any Greek soldier arrived to finish the job.

This is the detail that stops me every time. Not the siege. Not the wooden horse, which is almost certainly a later embellishment — a Greek poet's way of saying *the city was taken by cunning*, which is its own kind of truth. What stops me is the slower story: that Troy's prosperity was, in part, its undoing. The wealth that made the city worth besieging was built on an extraction rate the land could not sustain. When the crisis finally came — whether from earthquake, as some archaeologists now believe, or from the Mycenaean coalition the myths preserve — it arrived into a landscape already weakened.

I think about this whenever I walk through Mdina. The Arabs understood water management in a way the Normans who replaced them partially forgot. The Knights understood fortification in a way that was magnificent and expensive and ultimately irrelevant to the cannon that made walls obsolete. Every civilisation builds for the threat it can see and ignores the one accumulating in the soil, the aquifer, the atmosphere.

The Guernsey manuscript fragments uncovered this year — seventeen pieces of medieval vellum, identified with support from Dr David Rundle of Kent — tell a quieter version of the same story. A small island community, literate and connected to the wider European world, leaving traces that only survived because someone thought a piece of old skin was worth keeping. The monks who copied those texts did not know they were archiving. They were just doing the work. And the work lasted.

Troy lasted too, in the only way that matters: as a warning so perfectly preserved that three thousand years later, we are still reading it. The question is whether we are reading it as literature or as instruction.

Look at the soil. The soil always knows first.