Excavators at Troy have recovered a bone flute about 2,800 years old, the first musical instrument found at the site in more than 160 years of digging. Turkey’s Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy announced the find on Oct. 22, 2026, as part of the results of the 2026 season.
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Professor Rüstem Aslan of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, who directs the excavation, called it “a first in the 160-year history of Troy excavations.” The flute turned up alongside a second object from a far older period, a roughly 4,500-year-old idol head.
A flute from the eighth century BC
According to HeritageDaily’s report on the find, the flute came from an eighth-century BC layer of the Archaic Period at Troy, the UNESCO-listed site near Tevfikiye village in Çanakkale, in northwestern Türkiye. Aslan said it is the first time a bone flute has been encountered in the history of the Troy excavations, and the report describes it as the first musical instrument recovered there.
The details are thin. La Brújula Verde’s account of the ministry’s notes says only the head of the flute, the end that joins the body of the instrument, survives, and that the notes give no length, no count of finger holes and no species for the bone. Hürriyet Daily News reports the same head section still attached to the body and dates the deposits to roughly 750 to 480 B.C., a wider window than the eighth-century label, so the round figure of 2,800 years is best read as approximate.
What 160 years of digging means at Troy
The 160-year figure covers a long and well-documented dig history. La Brújula Verde traces it to 1863, when Frank Calvert began work, followed by Heinrich Schliemann in 1870 and a University of Tübingen team under Manfred Korfmann from 1988. Aslan became co-director after Korfmann’s death in 2005 and has directed the work since 2013. In all that time, according to Türkiye Today and the ministry, no musical instrument had come out of the ground.
Troy has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1998, and its mound holds about ten main levels of occupation spanning roughly 5,600 years of settlement, from the early third millennium BC to the 13th century AD. Teams are working in four areas of the site this season, under Türkiye’s Heritage for the Future project with the permission and support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The principal sponsor of the 2026 campaign is İÇDAŞ.
The claim is narrower than it first sounds. Aslan said older bone examples exist elsewhere in Anatolia, without naming them, so the Troy flute is the first from this site, not the oldest of its kind. Ersoy announced the finds in a post on X and said, as Türkiye Today reports, that the flute offers the first direct archaeological evidence of musical culture at Troy. Because the object has not yet been through scientific study and conservation, questions about how it was made, how it sounded and which animal supplied the bone remain open.
The Homer coincidence, and its limits
The layer sits in the period when many scholars place Homer, and the timing has drawn attention. Homer is traditionally placed in the eighth century BC, the same period as the layer, which is why the match reads as a coincidence rather than a connection. Aslan described what he called a curious coincidence between the eighth-century deposit and the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad, in Book 10, mentions the sound of flutes and pipes from the Trojan camp, in the translation quoted by La Brújula Verde.
Archaeologists are careful about the leap. The flute cannot be directly linked to Homer or to any performance in the poems, which describe a war traditionally set around 1200 BC, centuries before the Archaic deposit. Aslan also noted that the music for the Sirens sequence in a recent film adaptation of the Odyssey was made from a reconstruction of an eighth-century BC flute, and he said there is no direct connection between the film and this artifact.
The 4,500-year-old idol head
The second object is the head of a small human-form idol, found near the entrance of Troy II, the Early Bronze Age settlement phase, in a fire-damaged layer. The ministry dates it to around 2500 BC. Archaeology magazine’s coverage notes that Ersoy said both objects will be evaluated further, and Türkiye Today says both finds will undergo scientific study and conservation.
Aslan considers the idol a cult object and said only three to five similar finds have turned up in the 160-year history of excavation at Troy. Set beside the idol head, the flute gives the 2026 season two small objects from opposite ends of Troy’s long history: one tied to ritual in the Early Bronze Age, and one that points to music in the Archaic Period, roughly 1,700 years later.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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