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The Achaeans (also Akhaians, Greek Αχαιοι) is the collective name given to the Greek forces in Homer's Iliad. An alternative name, used interchangeably, is Danaans. More specifically, Achaea in Homer is the province of Agamemnon, chief commander of the Greek forces, the northern part of the Peloponnese peninsula, roughly corresponding to the modern prefectures of Achaea and Corinth. The Homeric Achaeans would have been a part of the Mycenaean civilization that dominated Greece from ca. 1600 BC, with a history as a tribe that may have gone back to the prehistoric Hellenic immigration in the late 3rd millennium BC.
Some Hittite texts mention a nation in western Anatolia called Ahhiyawa; in particular the Hittite king Mursili IIMursili II was a king of the Hittite empire (New kingdom) 1322 BC 1285 BC. Hittite kings. in ca. 1320 BC wrote a letter to the king of the Ahhiyawa, treating him as an equal and suggesting that MiletusIn Greek mythology, Miletus was the founder of the city described below. He had two children: Caunus and Byblis. Miletus was an ancient Ionian Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia, in the Aydin Province of Turkey, near the mouth of the Maeander Riv (Millawanda) was under his control, and also referring to an earlier "Wilusa episode" involving hostility on the part of the Ahhiyawa. This people has been identified with the Achaeans of the Trojan WarThe Trojan War was a war waged, according to legend, against the city of Troy in Asia Minor by the armies of Greece, following the kidnapping (or elopement) of Helen of Sparta by Paris of Troy. The war figures centrally in Greek mythology and was narrated and the city of Wilusa with the legendary city of TroyThis article is about the city of Troy / Ilion as described in the works of Homer, and the location of an ancient city associated with it. For other uses see Troy (disambiguation) and Ilion (disambiguation). Troy ( Greek Τροα Troia (. However the exact relationship of the term Ahhiyawa to the Achaeans beyond a similarity in pronunciation is hotly debated by scholars.