This website invites you to a journey into the past, when the so-called Sea Peoples raided the coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean and Greek heroes set off to conquer legendary Troy. The majority of civilizations around the Eastern Mediterranean disappeared within a few years shortly after 1200 BCE. Here you will find for the first time a coherent reconstruction of what might have happened. Instead of natural disasters and unknown invaders, the thus far little-known Luwian people will now assume the pivotal role in triggering this demise. Once their significance is acknowledged, answers to a number of hitherto puzzling questions in Mediterranean Archaeology are likely to fall into place.

During the second millennium BCE people speaking a Luwian language lived throughout Asia Minor. They were contemporaries, trading partners, and at times opponents of the well-known Minoan, Mycenaean, and Hittite cultures of Greece and Asia Minor.

However, the Luwians in Asia Minor possessed the knowledge of writing at least five centuries before it became customary at Mycenaean courts. And when the art of writing was lost in Greece at the end of the Bronze Age, it still persisted amongst Luwians for as long as half a millennium. In the 19th century European scholars discovered these Luwian inscriptions long before the first Mycenaean, Minoan, and Hittite documents.

The territory inhabited by Luwian-speaking populations was about three times as large as the core area of the Mycenaean civilization and five times as large as that of the Hittite. We know already today as many Luwian settlement sites as Mycenaean, Minoan, and Hittite combined. The world’s first large-scale excavation of a prehistoric archaeological site was Troy, a citadel in Luwian territory. And still today this is the most important stratified archaeological site in the world.