LARGER IMAGE
The Early Culture of Troy
The general character of culture is, according to Furtwängler, still essentially Central European. And yet many an individuality has developed, and the influence of Babylonian culture is everywhere apparent, although it does not go very deep. To this influence our authority chiefly attributes the occurrence of a few pots turned on the wheel, especially flat dishes; for the potter’s wheel was still quite unknown at that time in Europe, and even at a post so far advanced toward the East as Cyprus, while in Egypt and Babylonia it had been in use from the earliest times. In this period also Troy inclines more to Central Europe as its centre of gravity, but remains far behind the peculiar development that bronze work attained there; in the metal tools no advance is made on the forms of the Copper Period. Into any close relation with Cyprus it does not come; only the basis of their culture is common to both. But this basis had a wide range, relics from German districts being often more closely related to the Trojan ones than are those from Cyprus.
TROY: THE GREAT TOWER OF ILIUM
The top of the tower is 26 ft. below the surface of the hill. The foundation is on the rock 46 ft. deep; the height of the tower is 20 ft.
The brilliant period of the second city is followed by a long period of decline for Troy. Ruins are piled upon ruins, walls rise upon walls, but each poorer than the others; no new citadel walls, no gates, no palaces belong to this period, in which three strata—the third, fourth, and fifth towns—are distinguished. The first half of the second millennium before Christ must at least be regarded as the time of this deposit. The inhabitants evidently remained the same, and their culture is that of the second city. But no progress was made; nothing but stagnation; the same forms of vessels continue to be made, the same decorated whorls. Naturally, no active intercourse with abroad could develop in this period. And yet this was the time when an active civilised life began to develop on the islands of the Ægean Sea and on the east coast of Greece, which was to bloom in all its splendour in the following period. To this time the finds at Thera belong, where the pottery, all turned on the wheel, is already painted with a so-called varnish colour which shines like metal, and in which plants, flowers, and animals are treated in quite a new and promising naturalistic style hitherto unheard of in Europe. In Cyprus, too, the decoration of pottery developed exceedingly in wealth and variety in this period of the Bronze Age. Troy, on the other hand, is poor and degenerate.
But a new period of prosperity arrived for Troy, too; this is the sixth town. Rich and powerful princes again ruled in this citadel. They enlarged it far beyond its former compass. They built strong new walls—the old ones had long since sunk in ruins—not of small stones and straw bricks as before, but of large, smooth blocks, and gates and turrets. They did not have the sloping mound of ruins levelled, as the lords of the second city had done; they let the new buildings rise in terraces, on the ruins of the old; stately mansions with wide, deep halls, covered the acropolis. Constant intercourse existed with the princes of Greece, who at that time—the second half of the second millennium before Christ—built their citadels with cyclopean walls. The Trojans employed the same peculiar, constantly-recurring small projections in their walls that we find in a Mycenæan town on Lake Copaïs in Bœotia.
And, above all, the Trojans now provided themselves with those beautiful vessels painted with shining colour that characterise Mycenæan culture in Greece, and whose natural style had so wonderfully developed there on the basis of the attempts that we found at Thera. In Troy these things caused some imitation, but the results remained far behind the originals. The living, imaginative conception of the natural was closed to the Trojan; the home-made pottery kept, on the whole, to its unpainted vessels, although these were now almost entirely made on the wheel.
