Dörpfeld believed that it was not the second city, but rather the sixth—Troy VI—that the Mycenaeans had captured and burned to the ground, and that it was this event that formed the basis of Homer’s epic tales over which the Trojan War had been fought, but that is still a matter of debate. Initially dated to ca. 1250 BC, it was probably actually destroyed a bit earlier, about 1300 BC.29 This was a wealthy city, with imported objects from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Cyprus, as well as from Mycenaean Greece. It was also what one might call a “contested periphery”—that is, it was located both on the
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