THE TREASURE OF PRIAM, KING OF TROY: A COLLECTION REVEALED BY THE EXCAVATIONS
This remarkable collection of regal treasure comprises the key of the treasure-house (at top of picture in centre); and, under and about the key, a number of golden diadems, fillets, earrings, and smaller jewels. On the shelf below there are a number of silver talents and vessels of silver and gold; while below them is a series of silver vases and a curious plate of copper. A variety of weapons and helmet crests of copper and bronze are displayed beneath, and on the floor are a vessel, a cauldron and a shield, all made of copper.
Yet what chiefly interests us is the historical. The sixth town, too, was suddenly given up, destroyed, and burnt. What follows it are again only poor settlements. Its destruction must have taken place about the end of the Mycenæan epoch of culture. The seventh town, which is built immediately on the ruins of the sixth, shows, already, other and later culture. It had long been suspected that a historical kernel was concealed in the legend of Troy—now we have the monumental confirmation. There really was a Troy, which was strong and great at the same time as the rulers of Mycenæ, rich in gold and treasure, held way in Greece. And that Troy was destroyed—we may now safely affirm, from this agreement between relics and legend—by Greek princes of the Mycenæan epoch, whom the legend calls Agamemnon and his men.
The seventh and eighth towns, built soon after the destruction of the sixth, show an interruption in the intercourse with Greece. There the Mycenæan period was broken by the displacement of peoples known as the Doric migration, and that rich civilised life was replaced by a relapse into the semi-barbaric conditions of the North. In Troy, too, we perceive a period of decline, “a relapse into a stage long since past; black hand-made vessels, which in their form and decoration are strikingly like the home-made pots usual in Italy, especially Etruria and Latium, in the first part of the first millennium before Christ.” Finally, the seventh town also furnishes inferior imported Greek vases with painting, though coming not from Greece itself, but from the coast of Asia Minor, where Greeks had settled in connection with the Doric migration. “The Æolic colonisation of Troas brought Ilium no fresh prosperity. Other places rose, Troy remained a miserable village. In the Hellenistic period the sky clears over Troy. What Alexander intended, Lysimachus carried out; he restores Ilium to the place of a real city with new walls, and erects a magnificent temple to Athene on the top of the acropolis.... Yet artistic creation came to no real perfection. It was only when the great men of Rome, mindful of their Trojan ancestors, began to interest themselves in the place, that new life bloomed on Troy’s ruins.”
Thus the geological-archæological method relates history, merely relying upon the monuments of the soil, without requiring written evidences. Pre-history has here attained its end; it has become history.
JOHANNES RANKE
A VIEW SHOWING THE REMARKABLE CHARACTER OF THE EXCAVATIONS AT TROY
Some idea of the enormous work involved in unearthing ancient Troy will be gathered from the fact, made clear in this view, that the ground-level before excavating was above the height of these buildings. A deep trench was cut, as shown in the illustration, through the whole hill of Hissarlik, the citadel town.