ZAP’S FACTS!
ANCIENT

The Trojan Horse may have actually been an early type of siege weapon.

Greeks called wooden siege engines "horses" - so the legend might be a wild retelling of a real military machine.

2 min read
The Trojan Horse may have actually been an early type of siege weapon.
THE FULL STORY

For centuries people thought the city of Troy was just a made-up place from Greek poetry. Then in the 1870s, a German treasure hunter named Heinrich Schliemann started digging in northwestern Turkey - using Homer’s ancient poem the Iliad like a treasure map. He found the real ruins of Troy.

The legend says Greek warriors hid inside a giant wooden horse, were rolled into the city as a “gift,” then leapt out at night to open the gates. Historians think this might be a wild retelling of a real siege engine. Ancient Greeks sometimes called large wooden battering rams or siege towers “horses.” Over centuries, a real wooden machine could have grown into a magical wooden animal in the retelling.

Or it might just be a fantastic story made up by Homer. Troy was definitely real, and it was definitely destroyed by fire around 1180 BCE. Whether soldiers really climbed out of a wooden horse - we’ll probably never know for sure.

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