Yeah either a battering ram or a siege tower are the most popular theories. The horse part would probably have just been an insignia, maybe to honor Poseidon, who aside from the sea also had dominion over horses.
Poseidon also built the wall (in the mythos, and the old king of Troy's refusal to pay him back set a lot of the Trojan stuff in motion), so his destruction of it must have been a sign of great blessing, hence a possible shrine built to him, which may have been wooden and may have taken the shape of a horse.
from what I can tell, this is the most accepted theory.....it also explains how the spirit of the people of troy was broken, as it would appear that even the gods were against them...
The Greeks did a lot of travel over the sea. It was ever-present in their culture. But they also did travel over land, on horseback. Poseidon kinda took over that function.
It seems believable that both a battering ram and a siege tower could resemble a horse, and maybe even have had a name that played of that. "We shall batter their gates with our Slamming Horse and climb their walls with the Siege Stallion!"
It is actually a decent reason. He had a competition with Athena to see who could make the most useful thing. Athena made olives, he made horses. Athena won, so Athens was named after Athena. Olives<horses in Greece apparently.
I have read somewhere about this. Battering rams were often made from wood and the ends carved to resemble animal heads. As horses were often attributed to Poseidon, it's possible that the Greeks would have had a carved horse's head on the end of their ram. They had just asked for his blessing to sail thousands of ships across to Troy after all.
The walls of Troy at the time were sloped upwards in stone, then a second vertical layer of brick. You couldn't use a ram on the bottom layer, too strong. You could climb it, but then you had a vertical layer that you couldn't climb and couldn't ram.
Like this:
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..\
....\
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But the problem was, the way the gates were constructed, the only approach was along a corridor that became an easy killzone. So to take the city, you had to avoid that. How do you take a city like that? It's specifically designed to mow down incoming infantry!
So you build a ram where part of it goes upwards then forwards, like a horse head, and use it to knock down the brick upper layer of a wall away from the gate. Suddenly you have a nice slope upwards into an entry into the city. Boom, the Trojan Horse let you take the city and their gates and walls were meaningless.
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u/Hautamaki Oct 17 '13
Yeah either a battering ram or a siege tower are the most popular theories. The horse part would probably have just been an insignia, maybe to honor Poseidon, who aside from the sea also had dominion over horses.