The building materials of the Trojans are of various kinds. With but few exceptions, all the house-walls which I have uncovered are composed of unburnt sun-dried bricks, which in the heat of the conflagration have become a kind of really burnt bricks. But the royal palace and two small buildings in the depths of the temple of Athena, as well as the Great Tower of Ilium, the Scæan Gate, and the great enclosing Wall, are generally composed of unhewn stones joined with earth, the less rough face of the stones being turned to the outside, so that the walls have a tolerably smooth appearance.
I thought last year, upon uncovering the Great Tower of Ilium, that it must have been at one time higher than it now is, namely 6 meters or 20 feet; but its flat-built top beside the Scæan Gate, and the benches (not ruins, as I formerly thought) afterwards found upon it, prove that it can never have been higher.[45] I would draw especial attention to the fact, that the masonry of the Scæan Gate, upon being uncovered, looked as wonderfully fresh as if it had been erected quite recently. It is quite certain that it possessed strong wooden fortifications, and probably also a wooden tower above the gateway; for otherwise it is inexplicable to me how the entrance of the Gate can have been covered to the height of 10 feet by those red Trojan wood-ashes, and especially how it was that there, far from the other buildings, the heat should have been so great that even the thick slabs of stone have been destroyed by it.
Homer speaks of Troy as having been destroyed by Hercules previous to the Trojan war,[46] and it will ever remain an enigma to us whether this information, which had been preserved by traditions down to his time, really refers to the Ilium of Priam, or to the very ancient town of the first settlers.
As to the chronology of Troy, we have only the general supposition of antiquity that the Trojan War occurred about B.C. 1200, and Homer’s statement (Iliad, XX. 215-237) that Dardanus, the first Trojan King, founded Dardania, which town I agree with Virgil and Euripides in considering identical with Ilium, and that after him it was governed by his son Erichthonius, and then by his grandson Tros, by his great-grandson Ilus, and then by his son Laomedon, and by his grandson Priam. Even if we allow every one of these six kings a long reign of 33 years, we nevertheless scarcely carry the foundation of the town beyond 1400 B.C., that is 700 years before the Greek colony.
The site of Troy, which at the time of its foundation was 10 meters (about 33 feet) below the present surface, was only 7 meters (23 feet) below it after its destruction, when Ilium was again rebuilt by another people of Aryan origin; for, in the débris of this people, which extends to a depth of from 7 to 4 meters (23 to 13 feet) below the present surface, I find the same objects of terra-cotta with religious symbols.