Two rings of gold beaten very thin, and a little copper saw with no trace of any alloy, are, so far, the only metal objects found in the excavations. The origin of the former, moreover, is very uncertain, and there has been much discussion as to where the rings came from. In spite, however, of all the gaps in the evidence about them, there remains no doubt that the inhabitants of Santorin were farther advanced in civilization than the Lake dwellers of Switzerland, the builders of the terremare of Italy, or the Iberians of the south of Spain, who were very probably their contemporaries; and we cannot refrain from expressing our admiration of the wonderful progress made by the inhabitants of the little group of volcanic islands under notice.
Before the catastrophe which overwhelmed them, Santorin was covered with comfortable and solidly built houses. Men knew how to till the ground, and gathered in crops of cereals, among which barley was the most abundant, then millet, lentils, peas, coriander, and anise; they had learned to domesticate animals, as is proved beyond a doubt by the number of bones of sheep and goats; they kept dogs to guard their flocks, and horses to aid in agricultural work; they knew how to weave stuffs, to grind grain, to extract the oil from olives, and even to make cheese, if we may give that name to the pasty white stuff found at the bottom of a vase by Dr. Nomicos. They were acquainted with the arch, and they used durable and brilliant colors. The copper saw is an example of the first efforts of the natives at metallurgy; the gold and obsidian which were foreign to the island bear witness to commercial relations with people at a distance. They loved art, as proved by the shape of their vases and the ornamentation on many of them, which is really often worthy of the best days of Greece. All around we see signs appearing as it were suddenly of a civilization, the origin and tendencies of which are alike still unknown.
But one human skeleton has so far been found in Santorin, and that is of an inhabitant who had evidently been overtaken in his flight and crushed beneath the burning scoriæ from the volcano. This man was of medium height, and is supposed to have been between forty and forty-eight years old. The bones of the pelvis are firmly consolidated, and the teeth are worn with mastication.
Let us endeavor to guess at the period when the people of Santorin lived. De Longpérier tells us that vases similar to those left by them are represented on the tomb of Rekmara amongst the presents offered to Thothmes III., who lived in the eighth century B.C., but if so the people of Santorin appear to have borrowed nothing in their intercourse with Egypt. The first invasion of Greece by the Phœnicians is supposed to have been in the fifteenth century B.C., but the buildings, the pottery, and the various implements of Therasia and Acrotiri differ essentially from those of the Phœnicians, who, moreover, from the earliest times, used metals. Must we not therefore conclude that the catastrophe which overwhelmed Santorin took place before the fifteenth century B.C.? Conjectures as to the date of the fatal eruption, however plausible, are of no use in anything relating to the origin of the people, or the time of their first occupation of the island. On these points all is still hopeless confusion, and we must wait for further discoveries before we can hope to come to any conclusions in the matter.
We have gone back to the very earliest days of man upon the earth; we have shown that he was the contemporary of the mammoth and the rhinoceros, of the cave-lion and the cave-bear; we have seen him crouching in the deep recesses of his cave and fighting the battle of life with no weapon but a few scarcely sharpened flints, leading an existence infinitely more wretched than the animals about him. Not without emotion have we watched our remote ancestors in their ceaseless struggle for existence; not without emotion have we seen them gradually growing in intelligence and energy, and attaining by slow degrees to a certain amount of civilization. Santorin is a striking and brilliant proof of their progress, and we shall appreciate this progress yet more when we have examined the ruins piled up on the hill of Hissarlik. There we shall close this portion of our work, for from the time when the buildings of which these remains were the relics met their doom, the use of metals, copper, bronze, gold, silver, and iron became general. History began to be written, and it is her task to tell us of the migrations of races, the early efforts of historic, races, the foundation of empires. In a word, the prehistoric age was over; that of self-conscious portraiture was now to begin.
A few years ago I was on the ancient Hellespont and my fellow-travellers, grouped about the deck of our vessel, were trying to make out on the receding coast of Asia the sites of Troy and of the tumuli which were then still supposed to have been the tombs of Achilles, Patrokles, and Hector, but which are now, thanks to the able researches of Dr. Schliemann, known to belong to a comparatively modern epoch. The streams, bearing the ever memorable names of Simoïs and Scamander, were also eagerly pointed out by the watchers, recalling the words of Lamartine:
Le nautonnier voguant sur les flots du Bosphore
Des yeux cherchait encore
Le palais de Priam et les tours d’Ilium.
Great indeed is the privilege of genius, immortalizing all that it touches; for it must be pointed out that Troy was never an important town, and the war in which it disappeared was in reality but one of the incessant struggles between the petty princes of Greece and Asia.
When I visited the East, scholars were not at all agreed as to the site of the town which was so long besieged by the Greeks; and certain sceptical spirits even went so far as to deny that there ever was such a person as Homer at all, or that if there were, he wrote the epic poem which has borne his name so long. Tradition, however, was pretty constant in pointing to the hill of Hissarlik as the site on which Troy was built. Strabo was quite an exception in relegating the town to the lower end of the bay; where the miserable little village of Akshi-koi now stands. In 1788 a new idea was started; Lechevalier in his account of his journey in Troas claims to have recognized the site of Troy at Bunarbashi. At that time erudition was not very profound, and Lechevalier’s site was accepted; indeed it was long maintained, and quite recently it has been defended by Perrot. But the nineteenth century is more exacting; the most plausible hypotheses are not enough without facts to support them, and excavations at Akshi-koi and at Bunarbashi show that there never was a town on either of these sites.
Excavations on the hill of Hissarlik, begun by Dr. Schliemann in 1871, and carried on under his superintendence for more than ten years, have, on the contrary, yielded most definite, satisfactory, and conclusive results. At a depth of fifty-two feet the diggers came to the virgin soil, a very hard conchiferous limestone. The immense masses of débris of which the embankment is made up date front different epochs; we have before us, if we may use such an expression, a perpendicular Pentapolis or series of five ancient cities one above the other. One town was destroyed by assault and by fire; another rapidly rose from its ruins, built with stones taken front the midst of those very remains. The study of the piled-up rubbish enables us to build up again a picture of the remote past with all its vicissitudes, and Virchow may well say that the hill of Hissarlik will for ever be considered one of the best authenticated witnesses of the progress of civilization.[41]