Archaeologists digging at the ruins of ancient Troy have unearthed fresh evidence of a violent Bronze Age conflict, one that mirrors Homer's Iliad.

According to Homer's Iliad, the war began after Paris of Troy abducted Helen, wife of the Spartan king, triggering a Greek siege lasting 10 years. 

The most famous scene of the tale is the wooden horse used by the Greeks to sneak into the city and destroy it from within. 

Now, a team of Turkish researchers have uncovered dozens of clay and smoothed river rock sling stones, unearthed just outside what would have been the palace walls, along with arrowheads, charred buildings, and hastily buried human skeletons.

Together, experts say, the clues paint a chilling picture of close-range fighting and a sudden, catastrophic fall, just as the ancient Greeks described.

'This concentration of sling stones in such a small area suggests intense fighting, either a desperate defense or a full-scale assault,' said Professor Rustem Aslan of Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, who is leading the excavation.

The sling stones, smoothed to aerodynamic perfection, were one of the Bronze Age's deadliest weapons, capable of cracking skulls at range when hurled from leather slings.

The stones found at the site date to around 3,200 to 3,600 years ago, exactly the period believed to match the Trojan War, which according to Greek historians took place around 1184 BC. 

For centuries, scholars dismissed Homer's Iliad as pure myth, a poetic fantasy centered on a quarrel over Helen, the 'face that launched a thousand ships,' and a wooden horse that tricked an entire city.

But the new finds suggest there may have been a real war behind the legend.

This summer's excavation, part of the Legacy for the Future Project, backed by Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism, focused on the palace, marketplace, and defensive walls of Troy, a heavily fortified city once known as Wilusa in Hittite texts.

There, archaeologists discovered a cache of war relics: bone tools, a pointed 'biz' used for piercing leather armor, and even a knucklebone likely used as a gaming die, hinting at the lives of soldiers waiting for battle.

But it's the destruction layer, first uncovered in 2024 and now further expanded, that has stunned researchers. 

It contains burned ruins, broken weapons, and human remains buried in haste, signs of a sudden, brutal attack, not a slow decline.

The team's discovery, combined with arrowheads from previous digs, strongly suggests close-quarters fighting erupted in this part of the city, a likely battleground where defenders made a final stand. It also lines up with ancient texts.

Both Herodotus and Eratosthenes, Greek historians writing centuries later, claimed the Trojan War was a real event, while Roman poet Virgil immortalized its aftermath in the Aeneid, describing survivors fleeing the burning city.

According to legend, one such survivor, Aeneas, would go on to found the line that led to Rome itself.

Ancient Troy was no backwater. Its location near the Dardanelles made it a vital trade hub between Europe and Asia, rich with goods and strategically placed to control naval access.

The city boasted stone towers, long walls, and a complex urban structure, making it a prized, and well-defended, target.

Modern archaeologists have worked the site since the 1870s, but attention has now turned to a very specific window: 1500 to 1200BC, the era most commonly associated with the Iliad.

Experts widely agree that Troy existed, but now, many also believe it suffered a real war during the Bronze Age collapse, a time when empires across the Mediterranean crumbled amid invasion, rebellion, and mass migration.

There’s still no physical evidence of a wooden horse, and scholars caution it may have been poetic symbolism, a metaphor for subterfuge or betrayal.