The question of the Trojans’ ethnicity and cultural affiliations is indeed intriguing and has been the subject of much debate, especially as archaeological and linguistic discoveries in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have shed more light on ancient Anatolia.

Troy (Ilion or Ilios) was located in the northwest of modern-day Turkey near the Dardanelles Strait. This location made it part of the broader Anatolian cultural sphere rather than the Greek mainland. While the city’s position gave it significant strategic and commercial importance, especially for controlling the passage between the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea, it also made it distinct from the Greek city-states to its west.

Recent archaeological findings and the decipherment of ancient Anatolian scripts have revealed the presence of a broader “Luwian” civilization in western Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age. The Luwians are known to have used a hieroglyphic script, and their influence extended through much of western Anatolia, possibly including the region around Troy.

While Ancient Greek was an Indo-European language, so too were the languages of the Hittites and Luwians in Anatolia. However, they belonged to different branches of the Indo-European family. The Hittite language is part of the Anatolian branch, while Luwian, closely related to Hittite, has its own dialects and is spoken in various regions of Anatolia. There’s still debate about the exact language spoken in Troy, but it’s generally believed to have been closer to these Anatolian languages than to Greek.

Excavations of Troy, most notably by Heinrich Schliemann in the late 19th century and later by Manfred Korfmann in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, have shown cultural connections with the broader Anatolian region. While there were also connections with the Mycenaean world (which could be expected given its trade and strategic position), the city’s artifacts, architecture, and practices display characteristics distinct from those of the Mycenaean Greeks.

The primary source for the story of the Trojan War is Homer’s epics, the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey”. In these, the Trojans are consistently portrayed as distinct from the Achaeans (Greeks). They have different gods favoring them, different heroes, and different cultural practices. While one shouldn’t read Homer as a straightforward historical account, the consistent distinction drawn between Greeks and Trojans indicates a cultural memory of the Trojans as a different people.

Texts from the Hittite Empire, another major Anatolian power, mention a city named “Wilusa,” which many scholars now identify with Ilion (Troy). The Hittite texts describe diplomatic relations and treaties with Wilusa, indicating its significance in the Anatolian geopolitical landscape.

While the Trojans certainly had interactions with the Mycenaean Greeks, and there were undoubtedly cultural and trade exchanges between them, the prevailing evidence suggests that the Trojans were more closely related to the Anatolian cultural and linguistic milieu, particularly the Luwian sphere, than to the Mycenaean Greeks.