We find scarcely any stones in these strata, and the masses of charred ruins and wood-ashes leave no doubt that all the buildings of this tribe were made of wood. I find in these strata of 6½ feet thick some few stone weights, also a couple of hand-mills of lava, but otherwise no implements of stone except knives of silex in the form of saws, which seem often to have been made with great care. Thus, for instance, at a depth of 6½ feet I found a saw made of silex 4¾ inches in length and 1·3 in breadth, which was so exquisitely made that I at first thought it must be a comb. The upper portion of the saw bore the clearest marks of having been encased in wood.
With the people to whom these strata belonged—from 4 to 2 meters (13 to 6½ feet) below the surface—the pre-Hellenic ages end, for henceforward we see many ruined walls of Greek buildings, of beautifully hewn stones laid together without cement, and in the uppermost layer of all even the ruins of house-walls, in which the stones are joined with lime or cement. Moreover, the painted and unpainted terra-cottas, occasionally found at a depth of 2 meters (6½ feet), leave no doubt that a Greek colony took possession of Ilium when the surface of this hill was still that much lower than it is now. It is impossible to determine exactly when this new colonization took place, but it must certainly have been much earlier than the visit of Xerxes reported by Herodotus (VII. 43), which took place 480 years before Christ. According to Strabo (XIII. 1. 42) the town was built under Lydian dominion, and hence this event may have taken place about 700 B.C., for the commencement of the Lydian dominion is assigned to the year 797 B.C. Fluted jars, which archæologists believe to belong to a period 200 years anterior to Christ, are found immediately below the surface, at a depth of from 1¾ to 3¼ feet. The Greek colony does not appear by any means to have at all extirpated the inhabitants of Ilium, for I still find a great deal of pre-Hellenic pottery at a depth of 6½ and even of 5 feet. At all events those round lamp-shaped terra-cottas with a potter’s stamp and two holes at the edge, found as far down as 6½ feet, seem to me to be of Greek manufacture. The round articles with one hole through the centre, without or with decorations representing the sun and its rays, or the sun with stars, or four double or treble rising suns forming a cross, or even the sun in the centre of a simple or double cross, occur in numbers as far up as a depth of 3¼ feet; but in these uppermost strata the quality of the clay of which these articles are made is very bad, and the symbolical signs are very coarsely and inartistically engraved. My wife, who is enthusiastic about the discovery of Ilium, and who helps me assiduously in the excavations, found, in a cutting which she and her maid had opened close to our house, the same round terra-cottas, with or without decorations, even quite close to the surface. How these exceedingly remarkable objects, which are adorned with the most ancient religious symbols of the Aryan race, can have continued to be used for more than 1000 years by the four tribes which successively held possession of Ilium, and even by the civilized Greek colony, is to me a problem as inexplicable as the purpose for which they were used. If, as I now conjecture, they represent the wheel, which in the Rigvêda is the symbol of the sun’s chariot, they were probably used as Ex votos, or they were worshipped as idols of the sun-god, Phœbus Apollo. But why are there such enormous numbers of them?
The well, which I last year discovered at a depth of 6½ feet, built of hewn stones with cement, belongs of course to the Greek colony; so also do all those enormous water and wine urns (πίθοι), which I met with in the uppermost strata. I find all of these colossal urns, as well as all those met with in the deeper strata, standing upright, which is the best proof, if indeed any were needed, that the mighty masses of débris cannot have been brought here from another place, but that they were formed gradually in the course of thousands of years, and that the conquerors and destroyers of Ilium, or at least the new settlers after its conquest and destruction, never had the same manners and customs as their predecessors. Consequently, for many centuries, houses with walls built of unburnt bricks stood upon the mighty heaps of stone, from 13 to 20 feet thick, belonging to the enormous buildings of the primitive Trojans; again, for centuries, houses built of stones joined with clay were erected upon the ruins of houses of brick; for another long period, upon the ruins of these stone houses, wooden houses were erected; and lastly, upon the charred ruins of the latter were established the buildings of the Greek colony, which at first consisted of large hewn stones joined with clay or cement. It can thus no longer seem astonishing that these masses of ruins, covering the primary soil, have a thickness of from 14 to 16 meters (46 to 52½ feet) at the least.
I take this opportunity of giving a translation of the answer I made to an article published by M. G. Nikolaïdes in No. 181 of the Greek newspaper ‘Ἐφημερὶς Συζητήσεων,’ in which the author endeavours to prove that I am giving myself unnecessary trouble, and that the site of Troy is not to be found here, but on the heights of Bunarbashi.[174]
“M. Nikolaïdes maintains that the site of Troy cannot be discovered by means of excavations or other proofs, but solely from the Iliad. He is right, if he supposes that Ilium is only a picture of Homer’s imagination, as the City of the Birds was but a fancy of Aristophanes. If, however, he believes that a Troy actually existed, then his assertion appears most strange. He thereupon says that Troy was situated on the heights of Bunarbashi, for that at the foot of them are the two springs beside which Hector was killed. This is, however, a great mistake, for the number of springs there is forty, and not two, which is sufficiently clear from the Turkish name of the district of the springs, ‘Kirkgiös’ (40 eyes or springs). My excavations in 1868, on the heights of Bunarbashi, which I everywhere opened down to the primary soil, also suffice to prove that no village, much less a town, has ever stood there. This is further shown by the shape of the rocks, sometimes pointed, sometimes steep, and in all cases very irregular. At the end of the heights, at a distance of 11½ miles from the Hellespont, there are, it is true, the ruins of a small town, but its area is so very insignificant, that it cannot possibly have possessed more than 2000 inhabitants, whereas, according to the indications of the Iliad, the Homeric Ilium must have had over 50,000. In addition to this, the small town is four hours distant, and the 40 springs are 3½ hours distant, from the Hellespont; and such distances entirely contradict the statements of the Iliad, according to which the Greeks forced their way fighting, four times in one day, across the land which lay between the naval camp and the walls of Troy.