Traditional date of the Trojan War

The historical authenticity of the Iliad has been a topic of scholarly debate for centuries and forms one part of the Homeric Question. The Iliad recounts the Trojan War between the city of Troy and a coalition of Mycenaean Greek states, leading to the destruction of Troy. While researchers of the 18th century had largely rejected the story of the Trojan War as fable, the discoveries made by Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik reopened the question. The subsequent excavation of the site and the discovery of the toponym "Wilusa" in cuneiform Hittite correspondence has made it plausible that the Trojan War cycle was at least remotely based on a historical conflict of the 12th century BC, even if the poems of Homer remembered the event only through the distortion of four centuries of oral tradition.