3 : Walls of Troy

My feelings about a redesign were correct.

I returned to the drawing board and produced a new stonework design.

It should be remembered that Troy was an endless building project. During the Bronze Age, it was always in a state of being built and rebuilt. It may even have been an almost religious endeavour (like the great pyramid building of Egypt) that helped maintain a united society. The South Tower, for example, was an addition that was constructed on top of the existing curtain wall. Its smoothly finished mortar-less stonework is an example of the later building of Troy VI and differs from the curtain wall’s it sits on.

The style of stonework that best identifies the Bronze Age in the Aegean for me is most probably more like the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae. The rounded stones used are so large that folklore had it that the walls had been built by a race of gigantic cyclopes – like the Odyssey’s Polyphemus. 

The new design was one of rounded individual slabs, larger than before. The design, I felt, hinted at the generations of Bronze Age building projects of the Aegean rather than a single style of stonework.

At the same time I increased the height of this, the basic wall module. I was intending the design to be used for the curtain wall of Troy’s citadel. The angled substructures of some of these stand 15 feet high at Hisarlik. Their height and thickness would have been able to support a superstructure as much as a further twenty feet high. Without embarking on a clarification of scale and size and the supposed height of our 28mm fighting men, we can rather assume that when it comes to height a foot here is going to be something in the region of 5-6mm. This means that our walls could be as tall as 175-210mm! But, importantly, the height of our miniature great walls of Troy should look impressive rather than diminutive next to our figures.

The wall module now measures just under 140mm high. The angled substructure is 75mm high – so at 5mm to a foot, it is 15 feet high.