As we have seen in the preceding pages, the inhabitants of Novum Ilium held, according to an ancient legend, that Troy, the city of Priam, had not been entirely destroyed by the united Greek army under Agamemnon, and that it had never ceased to be inhabited. This legend is certainly confirmed by Homer, who, when Aeneas was on the point of being killed by Achilles in single combat, makes Poseidon say: “It is fated that Aeneas should be saved, in order that the race and the name of Dardanus may not utterly disappear—Dardanus, whom Zeus loved most of all the sons he begat of mortal women; because the race of Priam has now become odious to the son of Kronos: now, therefore, shall the mighty Aeneas reign over the Trojans, and the sons of his sons hereafter to he born.”

This legend has apparently been also confirmed by the criticism of my pickaæe and spade, for—as visitors can easily convince themselves with their own eyes—the south-eastern corner of the Third, the brick city, has not been destroyed by the conflagration. I must further say that this legend is also confirmed by the relies I have discovered, for—as the reader will see in the succeeding pages—we find among the successors of the burnt city the very same singular idols; the very same primitive bronze battle-axes; the very same terra-cotta vases, with or without tripod feet; the very same double-handled goblets (δέπα ἀμϕικύπελλα); the very same battle-axes of jade, porphyry, and diorite; the same rude stone hammers and saddle-querns of trachyte; the same immense mass of whorls or balls of terracotta with symbolical signs.

The traveller who goes by sea from Constantinople to the town of the Dardanelles, sees on both sides of the Sea of Marmora and the Hellespont a number of conical hills, on the origin of which tradition is silent, and which are universally called by the name of “Tepeh,” a Turkish word signifying merely a low and small hill, but which in the imagination of men has obtained, like the word “tumulus” in the West, the additional signification of a sepulchral mound, covering the remains of a deceased person, or of more than one.

The first of these Tepehs which tradition has assigned to a particular person, is the tumulus on the Thracian Chersonesus, obliquely opposite the town of the Dardanelles, attributed to Hecuba, of which Strabo says: “Between the two (Dardanus and Abydus) the Rhodius falls into the Hellespont, and directly opposite its mouth the Cynossema (κυνὸς σῆμα, or Κυνόσσημα, i.e. Dog's monument), said to be the tomb of Hecuba, stands on the Chersonesus.”

Proceeding from the Dardanelles by land to the Plain of Troy, the traveller passes another tumulus to his left, near the site of Dardanus; immediately afterwards, a third to his right, and a fourth again to his left, above the village of Ren Kioi.

Above the stratum of the Fifth pre-historic city, and just below the ruins of Novum Ilium, I found a vast quantity of very curious pottery, partly hand-made, partly wheel-made, which in shape and fabric, in colour and in the clay, is so utterly different from all the pottery of the preceding pre-historic cities, as well as from the pottery of the upper Aeolic Ilium, that I hesitate whether to refer it to pre-historic or to historic times. Such pottery is particularly plentiful on the slopes of the hill; and as, for reasons before explained, the stratum of the Greek city reaches in those places down to much more than the usual depth, it is found there even at 10 and 20 ft. below the surface. But the usual depth at which it is found on the hill is on an average 6 ft.; sometimes, however, it occurs at a depth of only 3 or 4 ft. below the surface. As neither the Greeks, nor the pre-historic peoples who succeeded each other on the hill of Hissarlik, ever made such pottery, and especially as this pottery occurs in such abundance, it evidently points to a settlement of a different people.

At the beginning of last year Dr. Schliemann asked my help in his explorations at Hissarlik and in the Trojan plain. The journey to Troy was a considerable one, but, after a good deal of hesitation, I resolved to make it. In fact, I could not refuse.

A journey to Troy—how many heads would be turned by the thought of it! Men of the most various callings offered me their company, when it was known that I meant to visit so rare a spot. And yet this was no Swiss tour, where the attraction is in the scenery, though an occasional visit may be paid to the Rütli and Küsznacht, Sempach and Laupen, Murten and St. Jacob an der Birs. It is the Iliad which takes us to Troy. The forms conjured up by the poet fill the traveller's fancy from the first. He wants to see the spots where the long struggle for Helen was fought, the graves where the heroes lie who lost their lives in it. Achilles and Hector stand in the foreground of the vivid picture, which is still engraven, as it was thousands of years ago, on the mind of every educated boy. This picture, it is true, cannot have now all the moving power it had in antiquity. Even Xerxes, as he marched against Greece in the fulness of his might, could not withstand the fascination of these memories.

Above the stratum of ruins of the Fourth City there is a layer of débris about 6 ft. thick, evidently consisting of the remains of houses built of wood and clay. That the people of the fourth City, of which we see innumerable house-walls, should suddenly have abandoned the architecture they were accustomed to, and have built their houses of wood or mud, or of both conjoined, seems incredible. Besides, the rude stone hammers, which are found in such enormous quantities in the fourth city, are no longer found in this stratum; nor do the stone axes, which are so very abundant there, occur again here. Instead of the hundreds of axes I gathered in the fourth city, I collected in all only two here; but one of these—the axe of white jade represented under No. 1288—is, in the opinion of Mr. Story-Maskelyne, the most precious of all my thirteen Trojan jade axes, on account of its extreme rarity. I attribute it to this Fifth City, as it was found at a depth of only 6 ft. The saddle-querns of trachyte, which occurred in the fourth city by hundreds, were very rarely met with here. The forms of the terra-cotta whorls, too, are in innumerable instances different here.

Not the least interesting and important of the results obtained from Dr. Schliemann's excavations at Hissarlik is the discovery that writing was known in the north-western corner of Asia Minor long before the introduction of the Phoenician or Greek alphabet. Inscribed objects are not indeed plentiful, but sufficient exist to show that the ancient inhabitants of the place were not wholly illiterate, but possessed a system of writing which they shared with the neighbouring nations of the mainland and the adjacent islands. Throughout Asia Minor a syllabary was once in use, which conservative Cyprus alone retained into historical times.

Numerous inscriptions in this syllabary have been found in the latter island. The characters, which amount to at least fifty-seven in number, long resisted all attempts at decipherment, but at last the problem was successfully solved by the genius of the Assyrian scholar, the late Mr. George Smith, with the help of a mutilated bilingual inscription, written in Phoenician and Cypriote. The language concealed under so strange a garb turned out to be the Greek dialect spoken in Cyprus, a dialect full of interesting peculiarities, and especially noteworthy as preserving up to the fourth century b.c. the two sounds of v and y (or digamma and yod), which had disappeared elsewhere. To the student of Homer the dialect is of considerable importance, since several of the grammatical forms found in the Iliad and Odyssey can be shown to have had a Cyprian origin.

THE EXTENT OF THE TROJAN LAND. THE TROAD (ἡ Τρῳάς, sc. γὴ).

In interpreting the Homeric geography of the Troad, Strabo rightly says: “The coast of the Propontis extends from the district of Cyzicus, and the neighbourhood of the Aesepus and the Granicus, to Abydus and Sestus; the land around Ilium, and Tenedos, and Alexandria-Troas from Abydus to Lectum: but above all these lies the mountain-range of Ida, which extends to Lectum. But from Lectum to the river Caïcus and (the promontory of) Canae there follows the country around Assos, and Adramyttium, and Atarneus, and Pitane, and the Elaitic Gulf; opposite all of which stretches the island of the Lesbians: then follows immediately the district of Cyme, as far as the Hermus and Phocaea, which forms the beginning of Ionia and the end of Aeolis. Such being the localities, the poet gives us to understand that, from the district of the Aesepus and the present province of Cyzicene to the river Caïcus, the Trojan rule extended, divided into eight or even nine parts, according to the dominions; but the mass of auxiliary troops is counted among the confederates.”

The full and explicit argument of Strabo, in the 13th book of his Geography, has persuaded the philological world pretty generally, from his day to our own, that the Greek Ilium of his time was not the town about which the heroes of the Iliad were supposed to have fought their immortal conflicts. I now propose, according to the flattering invitation of Dr. Schliemann, to enquire critically into this argument, and see what foundation it has in real history.

Let me first observe that Strabo is not our original authority for this theory, but that he professedly borrows his arguments from a certain Demetrius of Skepsis (in the Troad), who had written largely on the subject, and who had, in fact, started what I may call the illegitimacy of the Ilium of his day.