I now perceive that the cutting which I made in April 1870 was exactly at the proper point, and that if I had only continued it, I should in a few weeks have uncovered the most remarkable buildings in Troy, namely, the Palace of King Priam, the Scæan Gate, the Great Surrounding Wall, and the Great Tower of Ilium; whereas, in consequence of abandoning this cutting, I had to make colossal excavations from east to west and from north to south through the entire hill in order to find those most interesting buildings.
In the upper strata of the north-western and western excavations we came upon another great quantity of heads of beautiful terra-cotta figures of the best Hellenic period, and at a depth of 23 feet upon some idols, as well as the upper portion of a vase with the owl’s face and a lid in the form of a helmet. Lids of this kind, upon the edge of which female hair is indicated by incisions, are frequently found in all the strata between 4 and 10 meters (13 and 33 feet) deep, and as they belong to vases with owls’ faces, the number of lids gives us an idea of the number of the vases with the figure of the owl-headed Athena, which existed here in Troy.
But Troy was not large. I have altogether made twenty borings down to the rock, on the west, south-west, south, south-east and east of the Pergamus, directly at its foot or at some distance from it, on the plateau of the Ilium of the Greek colony. As I find in these borings no trace either of fragments of Trojan pottery or of Trojan house-walls, and nothing but fragments of Hellenic pottery and Hellenic house-walls, and as, moreover, the hill of the Pergamus has a very steep slope towards the north, the north-east, and the north-west, facing the Hellespont, and is also very steep towards the Plain, the city could not possibly have extended in any one of these directions. I now most emphatically declare that the city of Priam cannot have extended on any one side beyond the primeval plateau of this fortress, the circumference of which is indicated to the south and south-west by the Great Tower and the Scæan Gate, and to the north-west, north-east and east by the surrounding wall of Troy. The city was so strongly fortified by nature on the north side, that the wall there consisted only of those large blocks of stone, loosely piled one upon another in the form of a wall, which last year gave me such immense trouble to remove. This wall can be recognized at once, immediately to the right in the northern entrance of my large cutting, which runs through the entire hill.
I am extremely disappointed at being obliged to give so small a plan of Troy; nay, I had wished to be able to make it a thousand times larger, but I value truth above everything, and I rejoice that my three years’ excavations have laid open the Homeric Troy, even though on a diminished scale, and that I have proved the Iliad to be based upon real facts.