CHAPTER XXI.
Discovery of a street in the Pergamus—Three curious stone walls of different periods—Successive fortifications of the hill—Remains of ancient houses under the Temple of Athena, that have suffered a great conflagration—Older house-walls below these, and a wall of fortification—Store, with the nine colossal jars—The great Altar—Objects found east of the Tower—Pottery with Egyptian hieroglyphics—Greek and other terra-cottas, &c.—Remarkable owl vase—Handle, with an ox-head—Various very curious objects—A statue of one Metrodorus by Pytheas of Argos, with an inscription—Another Greek inscription, in honour of C. Claudius Nero.
Pergamus of Troy, April 16th, 1873.
SINCE my report of the 5th of this month I have had, on an average, 160 workmen, and have brought many wonderful things to light, among which I may especially mention a street of the Pergamus, which was discovered close to my house, at a depth of 30 feet, in the Great Tower. It is 17¼ feet broad, and is paved with stone flags, from 4¼ to 5 feet long, and from 35 inches to 4½ feet broad. It runs down very abruptly in a due south-western direction towards the Plain. I have as yet only been able to lay bare a length of 10 meters (33-1/3 feet). It leads, without doubt, to the Scæan Gate, the position of which appears to be accurately indicated, on the west side at the foot of the hill, by the direction of the wall and by the formation of the ground; it cannot be more than 492 feet distant from the Tower. To the right and left of the street there is an enclosure 28½ inches broad and 11 feet long. The slope of the street is so great that, while on the north-east side, as far as it is there uncovered, it is only 30 feet below the surface of the hill, yet at a distance of 33 feet it already lies as low as 37 feet.[246]
This beautifully paved street leads me to conjecture that a grand building must at one time have stood at the top of it, at a short distance on the north-east side; and therefore, seven days ago, when the street was discovered, I immediately set 100 men to dig down the north-eastern ground lying in front of it; this cutting I have made 78½ feet long, 78½ feet broad, and 33 feet deep. The removal of these 7600 cubic yards of huge masses of hard débris and stones is rendered much easier by the fact that it joins my last year’s great cutting, which runs quite horizontally from the northern declivity as far as the Tower, and is therefore very well adapted for the use of man-carts. In order to extract from this excavation all the objects of the greatest use to archæology, I am having the walls made perpendicular, as in fact I have had them made in almost all of the other cuttings. As the work of removing this gigantic block of earth is carried on both from above and from below, I confidently hope to have finished it in twenty days’ work.
In this great bank of earth there are three curious walls, built one above another, of small stones joined with earth. They have been built at very different periods, and even the uppermost and latest of the three, as is clear from the material, must be considerably older than the foundation of the Greek colony about the year 700 B.C. This uppermost wall is about 5 feet thick, built up from a depth of 11½ feet to within 1¾ foot of the surface, a circumstance which I do not at all understand; for, as the ruins of the Greek colony reach down to the depth of 6½ feet, the wall must, for many centuries, have stood high above the earth. Still the Greeks may have used it as a foundation for a building, and it may thus have been preserved. Below this wall there is a stratum of earth 11½ inches thick; and then comes the second wall, projecting about 11½ inches, and 6½ feet high; and this again rests upon another and much older wall. The last runs in an oblique line in a south-western direction parallel with the Tower-road, and furnishes a second proof that the surface of the hill, which is now quite horizontal here, did not slope down very abruptly towards the Plain at this part.