I must also add that the good old Trojans may perhaps have brought with them from Bactria the name of Ida, which they gave to the mountain which I see before me to the south-east, covered with snow, upon which Jove and Hera held dalliance,[125] and from which Jove looked down upon Ilium and upon the battles in the Plain of Troy, for, according to Max Müller,[126] Ida was the wife of Dyaus (Zeus), and their son was Eros. The parents whom Sappho ascribes to Eros—Heaven and Earth—are identical with his Vedic parents. Heracles is called Ἰδαῖος, from his being identical with the Sun, and he has this name in common with Apollo and Jove.
To-morrow the Greek Easter festival commences, during which unfortunately there are six days on which no work is done. Thus I shall not be able to continue the excavations until the 1st of May.
CHAPTER VIII.
Hindrances through Greek festivals—Thickness of the layers of débris above the native rock—Date of the foundation of Troy—Impossibility of the Bunarbashi theory—Homeric epithets suitable to Hissarlik—Etymology of Ἴλιος, signifying probably the “fortress of the Sun”—The Aruna of the Egyptian records—Progress of the platform, and corresponding excavation on the south—The bulwark of Lysimachus—Ruins of great buildings—Marks of civilization increasing with the depth—Vases, and fragments of great urns—A remarkable terra-cotta—A whorl with the appearance of an inscription.
On the Hill of Hissarlik, May 11th, 1872.
SINCE my report of the 25th of last month I have only been able to have ten days’ digging, owing to the various Greek festivals, for even the poorest Greek of this district would not work on a church festival even if he could earn 1000 francs in an hour. Turkish workmen were not to be had, for they are at present occupied with field work. The weather has been and still is very favourable for making excavations, as the heat during the day does not yet rise above 20° Réaumur (77° Fahrenheit) in the shade, and then it never rains here from the beginning of May till October, except during thunderstorms, and they rarely last more than half an hour at a time. Moreover, the Plain of Troy is at present still healthy; the notorious Trojan fevers do not actually begin till July, when the many stagnant waters have evaporated, and the pestilential miasma arises from the decomposition of the millions of dead frogs, and from the dried-up marshes, the ground of which cracks with the heat of the sun. My wife and I have therefore still six weeks before us, with the precaution of taking quinine to guard against fever.
I have cleared out the Roman well, which has been repeatedly mentioned, to a depth of 20 meters (65½ feet), and I find that it is walled only as far as 52½ feet below the surface of the hill, and then runs into the limestone rock which forms the native soil. I have caused Georgios Photidas to make a small tunnel in this rock from the well, and have now become quite convinced that the ground—upon which, according to Homer, the Trojan king Dardanus, who had up to that time lived at the foot of many-fountained Ida, built the town of Dardania (Troy) in the Plain[127]—is covered with a layer of débris about 16 meters, or 52½ English feet, thick. I must here remind the reader that the ruins of the Greek colony, which settled on the spot, scarcely extend to a depth of 6½ feet; that consequently if, with Strabo (XIII. 1, 43) we suppose the establishment of this colony to have taken place under the Lydian dominion, that is about 700 B.C., and calculate the duration of the reigns of the six kings (Dardanus, Erichthonios, Tros, Ilus, Laomedon, and Priam) who, according to the Iliad (XX. 215-240), preceded the destruction of Troy, at 200 years, and thus presume the town to have been founded about 1400 years before Christ, the accumulation of débris must in this place have amounted to 14 meters, or 46 feet, during the first 700 years.
I am firmly convinced that, on a glance at my excavations, every one of the remaining advocates of the antiquated theory that Troy is to be looked for at the back of the Plain, upon the heights of Bunarbashi, will at once condemn that theory, for the Acropolis and town which once stood upon those heights, and the small area of which is accurately defined by the ruins of the surrounding walls and by the precipices, is scarcely large enough to have contained a population of 2000 souls; the accumulation of débris moreover is extremely small. In many places, even in the middle of the Acropolis, the naked rock protrudes, and between the area of this small town and Bunarbashi the ground—in some places pointed, in others abrupt, but in all parts irregular—shows that no village, much less a town, can ever have stood upon it. Immediately above Bunarbashi, and in fact wherever there was any earth at all, I and my guide, with five workmen, made (in August 1868) a long series of borings at distances of 100 meters (328 feet) apart, as far as the Scamander, but we found the primary soil in all cases directly, and the rock at quite an insignificant depth; and nowhere was there a trace of fragments of pottery or other indications that the place could ever have been inhabited by human beings. Even in Bunarbashi itself I found the primary soil at a depth of less than 2 feet. Besides this, if Troy had been built at the back of the Plain, upon the heights of Bunarbashi, Homer (Iliad, XX. 216-218) would not have expressly said that previous to its foundation by Dardanus it had not yet been built in the Plain.
The primary soil of Hissarlik is indeed less than 20 meters (65½ feet) above the Plain, immediately at the foot of the hill; but at all events the Plain itself, and especially that part bordering upon the hill, has increased in height considerably in the course of 31 centuries. But even if this had not been the case, still the Troy built upon this hill running out into the Plain would, on account of its high and imposing position, deserve the Homeric epithets of ὀφρυόεσσα, αἰπεινή, and ἠνεμόεσσα, especially the latter; for one of my greatest troubles here is the continual high wind, and it cannot possibly have been otherwise in Homer’s time. It is assuredly time that the Bunarbashi theory, which stands in direct contradiction with all the statements of the Iliad, should now at last come to an end. The theory, in fact, would never have arisen had its advocates, instead of spending one hour, remained a whole day on the heights, and made investigations even with the aid of a single workman.