The lowest stratum, lying immediately on the original ground, belongs accordingly to the oldest, or first town, on the citadel-hill of Troy. Furtwängler says:
The First Town of Troy
By moderate computation this settlement must belong to the first half of the third millennium before Christ, but it may very well date back even to the fourth millennium. The inhabitants already used copper implements in addition to stone ones. Their whole culture is most closely connected with that which prevailed in Central Europe during the Copper Period. Clay vessels of the Copper Period from Lake Mond, in Austria, agree completely with those of the first Trojan town. Troy represents only an offshoot of Central European culture, and its inhabitants were in all probability of European origin.
We have already learned that the Copper Period is the end of the Neolithic Period and the beginning of the Metal Age. In the first Trojan town there is still extraordinarily little metal used, the axes, hatchets, knives, and saws still being of stone, of the familiar Central European types, and of the same materials, among which nephrite is particularly frequent. Other materials are serpentine, diorite, porphyry, hematite, flint, etc.
The First Period of Troy’s Glory
The forms of these implements correspond entirely to those of the later Stone Age of Europe. The character of the ceramics also conforms in many respects, according to Virchow, to that of the European Stone Age; and the Stone Age finds at Butmir, in Bosnia, and similar ones in Transylvania seem especially to offer close analogies. It would be a highly important step toward connecting history with the Neolithic Period if the first town could be even more closely investigated, and perhaps more sharply divided from that second stratum which lies between it and the stratum described by Schliemann as the second or burnt city, and which Schliemann afterward separated into two strata, corresponding to two towns. Perhaps the metal comes only from the second or higher stratum under the burnt city. In that case the oldest would belong purely to the Stone Age. The ceramics would seem to contradict this. Furtwängler continues:
High above the first town, a deep layer of débris, is the level surface of the second town, which must at least be dated back to the second half of the third millennium before Christ. It was the first period of Troy’s glory. Mighty walls protected the citadel. Three different building periods may be distinguished. The walls were brought out a long way and strengthened, and magnificent new gates were built. During the third period of this second city a prince, fond of splendour, had the old narrow gateway replaced by magnificent propylæa and a large hall-erection with a vestibule. A great conflagration destroyed his citadel. A treasure was found by Schliemann—he called it Priam’s treasure—in the upper part of the citadel wall, which was made of straw bricks. The tools of the second city are still partly of stone, but also partly of bronze, so that they already belong to the Bronze Age.
THE EXCAVATIONS AT TROY: REVEALING THE WALL OF THE ACROPOLIS
A view of the great substruction wall of the acropolis of the second city of Troy, on the west side, close to the south-west gate: (a) is the paved road, which leads from the S.W. gate down to the plain; (b) is the continuation of the great acropolis-wall of the second city on the west side of the S.W. gate; (c) is the foundation of the paved road and the quadrangular pier to strengthen it; (d) marks the masonry added by the third settlers.