The Trojan Horse - An Earthquake?

In book 5 of my current project, unit 2 describes the 921 Earthquake in Taiwan. In researching other great earthquakes and how they affected society/history/culture, I came across a number of interesting earthquake stories… like how an earthquake in 1692 dropped 33 acres of Port Royal, Jamaica (then dubbed “the wickedest city on earth”) into the harbor! Was it divine retribution? Then just after that, there was the great tsunami that washed over the coasts of Japan - the effect of an earthquake in the seabed. But way before any of these earthquakes, there was… Troy?

We are all familiar with Troy (at least the Troy of Homer’s Iliad), but I wasn’t truly aware that Troy was a REAL, not mythical, city!

The Iliad… emanates from a world that was ‘witty, ironic, mordant, decorative, compassionate, energetic and human.’ It is the "first poem that gives equal dignity" to Trojans and Achaeans ‘and shows the ‘enemy’ in a compassionate and noble light.’ Of the Iliad’s great power and influence, there has never been any argument. Of its historical truth and its origins, there has never been anything but. [John Fleischman, Smithsonian] Link

The story is one that has universal appeal… An archaeologist, who has worked on items recovered from the Troy site, is quoted on The Courier Mail (Australia) site:

"It has themes that just resonate down through the ages, it doesn't matter what age you're living in or what culture you're living in," he says.
"It has these universal elements to it: it's love, it's war, it's greed, it's ambition, it's trickery, it's treachery, it's the agony of defeat. It's all the clichés.
"The hero loses the girl, the hero goes back to get the girl, the hero eventually gets the girl with the help of his best friend who happens to be his brother."

Anyway, what would appear to be true is that there actually was a Troy (in fact there seem to have been more than one), but there was one fitting Homer’s description in the Iliad. In Homer’s story, Helen, in leaving her husband for the brother of the King of Troy, brings the battle which destroys Troy.

She, Helen, brought to Ilium her dowry, destruction. [Aeschylus,
"Agamemnon, 406.] Link

The destruction was brought by means of trickery: the gift of a wooden horse containing the Spartan army. But what we don’t know is if the Trojan Horse really was as described… or something else:

• Theory 1: Poseidon was the god of earthquakes and the animal associated with him was a Horse! Was the Trojan hose an earthquake?
• Theory 2: A horse-like battering ram

I am siding with Stanford University’s geophysicist and going with the earthquake theory... partly because I find it plausable… and partly because it makes my project more interesting!

Below excerpt copied (without permission) from the Stanford Today.

Don’t blame a hollow horse full of sneaky Greeks for the destruction of ancient Troy. Over a period of 50 years around 1200 B.C., a string of killing earthquakes may have toppled dozens of bustling centers of scholarship and industry, the great Bronze Age civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, including Troy, Mycenae and Knossos.

Historians and archaeologists long have cited civil war, invasion and pestilence as possible causes of such widespread destruction. But Stanford geophysicist Amos Nur sees another possibility: The earth moved. Earthquake activity also may be at the root of the biblical prophecy of Armageddon, the site of the final conflict between good and evil. According to Nur, the repeated destruction of the city of Megiddo probably inspired the author of Revelation to script his haunting prediction of the Apocalypse.