Troy VIIa burns

Troy VIIa burns inside the same fifty-year window that takes down every palace state in the eastern Mediterranean. The story that survives that fire is one of the only surviving narratives contemporary with our own record's Exodus-to-Judges window.

In plain words

Troy burns in the same fifty-year collapse. The story that survived that fire is one of the few narratives set in the same window as the Bible's Exodus-to-Judges years, and the letter uses it as a control from outside the Bible's own tradition.

The mechanism

REFERENCE — the nearest contemporary control on our record. Two independent corpora come out of the same collapse, which is what makes comparison of their content a measurement rather than an analogy.

How it was checked

• EvidenceT6 PHYSICAL / MANUSCRIPT; Status: COMMITTED
• Letter eraTHE ENCLOSURE AT THE BIRTH OF WRITING c. 3500 to c. 1150 BC
• Plate — Troy archaeological site, Hisarlik, Turkey · CC BY 2.0 · source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Troy_archeological_site_(8709562600).jpg
• SourcesARCHAEOLOGY — the Hisarlik destruction layer, Troy VIIa; SECULAR RECORD — the Homeric corpus