Emil Forrer first identified the Achaeans (Homer’s usual identifier for the Greeks) in the Hittite archive. That was back circa 1930. The stench of Arthur Evans and his non-Greek Minoan thallosocracy still hung over everything, and in some places still does. There remains a sort of manic response to Schliemann — less than ten years ago there were a couple of (alleged) researchers who claimed that the so-called Mask of Agamemnon had been faked by Schliemann. That’s a form of mental illness, whatever his failings may have been.
Anyway, Forrer’s identification was rejected. It first started to revive for real thanks to the efforts of Michael Wood. In the DVD set, Wood said something interesting. He thought that Schliemann’s rubbish tips at Hissarlik would be a great place to sift through to see if any tablets were tossed. If there had been an archive of some sort (even a small one), it probably would have been in the citadel, which is something Schliemann mostly destroyed in his first excavation of the site.
There’s still debate obviously about whether the Trojan War was historical, but all the evidence points to its historicity. This doesn’t mean that Washington threw a coin across the Delaware, or chopped down the cherry tree, only that the documentary evidence that a war was fought by the Mycenaean Greeks in Troy.
Perhaps Washington threw the coin across an upper branch of the Potomac, or maybe the nearby Rappahannock. Perhaps likely he skipped it across. The story is supposedly based on a story told by one of Washington’s step-grandsons. In any case it was not the Delaware!
Nor is the coin throw story part of Parson Weems’ childhood legends made up about young Washington which include the ‘will not tell a lie’ tale as to who chopped down the cherry tree.