Notes
The real-life Helen of Troy possibly was a princess of Amurru, from modern Syria. The annals of the Hittites (a 2nd millennium BC state in Anatolia) record a rare dispute after the princess had been wed to the older king of Ugarit, a coastal state near modern Antakya in Turkey. The marriage ended in divorce – apparently because the princess had been found guilty of some serious offence, perhaps adultery. She was sent back to Amurru in disgrace. But after she’d gone, her ex-husband concluded that she had got off too lightly. He promptly wrote to his ex-brother-in-law, the king of Amurru, demanding that the princess be returned to Ugarit for appropriate punishment; if the demand was refused, the ex-husband declared he would go to war with Amurru to enforce it. As the Amurrite king pondered the quandary, Hittite king Tudhaliya IV came up with a compromise that both sides accepted, and the Amurrite king sent his sister back, in exchange for 1,400 shekels of gold from Ugarit. It's no wonder perhaps, that Greek bards would later want to embellish this sordid tale.
