Some scholars propose the Trojan Horse was a rationalized memory of a wooden siege engine or battering ram covered in horse hides.

Classicist Armand D'Angour and other researchers suggest that what Homer's audience heard as a giant wooden horse may have been a folk memory of a siege engine — a war machine from which soldiers would emerge after breaching city walls. The horse hides covering such a device could explain the animal imagery. This theory does not require divine intervention or mythological elements, just the slow distortion of a real military technology through oral storytelling over centuries.