It was here that Dr. Schliemann found the prodigious structure he has named the “Tower of Ilion,” a building no less than 40 feet thick. “This tower,” he adds, “after having been buried for thirty-one centuries, and after, during thousands of years, one nation after another had built its houses and palaces high above its summit, has now again been brought to light, and commands a view, if not of the whole plain, at least of its northern parts, and of the Hellespont.” A little way beyond this tower is a remarkably perfect gateway, fitted for two pairs of gates, one behind the other, the upper fastenings of which still remain in the stone posts. These Dr. Schliemann takes for the “Scæan gates” of Homer. He then came to what he calls the “Palace of Priam,” no doubt, a house of some kind, at a depth of from 22 to 26 feet, resting upon the great tower, and directly under the Temple of Minerva. Its walls were built of small stones cemented with earth, and would seem to belong to different epochs. The walls vary in thickness from 4 feet to 1 foot 10 inches. All about, within as well as without, are abundant signs of fire, which must have burnt with prodigious fury. Dr. Schliemann speaks of many feet in thickness of red and yellow wood ashes. Here, as at Nineveh and at Carthage, the first destruction seems to have been fire, the great extent of it, in each case, having probably arisen from the wooden construction of the upper portions of these houses. At Nineveh, it has been reasonably supposed that only the foundations of the walls were of stone or brick, the upper part, like many Eastern houses at the present day, being wholly of wood, which would readily catch fire, and fill the rooms below with burning embers. In several of the rooms of one of these houses Dr. Schliemann found red jars from 7 to 8 feet high, and, to the east of the house, what he assumes to have been a sacrificial altar, a slab of granite 5 feet 4 inches long by 5 feet 5 inches broad. Such a conflagration, it is likely, would be long remembered; and it has been acutely asked whether, after all, there may not have been an Asiatic Iliad handed down from mouth to mouth, of which Homer may have availed himself, as did the mediæval Minnesingers.
The next and the greatest of Schliemann’s discoveries was also one of his last: we give it in his own words. “In the course of excavations on the Trojan wall, and in the immediate neighbourhood of Priam’s house, I lighted on a great copper object of remarkable form, which attracted my attention all the more, as I thought I saw gold behind. Upon this copper object rested a thick crust of red ashes and calcined ruins, on which again weighed a wall nearly 6 feet thick and 18 feet high, built of great stones and earth, and which must have belonged to the period next after the destruction of Troy. In order to save this treasure from the greed of my workmen, and to secure it for science, it was necessary to use the very greatest haste, and so, though it was not yet breakfast-time, I had “paidos,” or resting-time, called out at once. While my workmen were eating and resting I cut out the treasure with a great knife, not without the greatest effort and the most terrible risk of my life, for the great wall of the fortress which I had to undermine, threatened every moment to fall upon me. But the sight of so many objects, of which each alone is of inestimable worth to science, made me foolhardy, and I thought of no danger. The carrying off, however, of the treasures would have been impossible without the help of my dear wife, who stood by ready to pack up the objects in her shawl as I cut them out, and to take them away.”
We may add that the whole find lay together in a quadrangular mass, retaining the shape of the box in which it had been deposited, and that hard by was a large key, presumably that which once locked it. The treasure had, probably, been hastily packed, an idea fully sustained by its miscellaneous character. Indeed, the same thing seems to have happened in the case of the bronze plates found by Mr. Layard at Nineveh. The mass of precious metal found is simply astonishing, one cup alone weighing 40 oz. of gold, while there were besides, innumerable objects in bronze, silver and gold, spears and axes, and two-edged daggers, together with a large bronze shield, with a central boss, and a rim raised as if to receive the edges of ox-hides or other covering. Fortunately, the gold vessels had resisted the action of the fire; some of them having been cast, others hammered; in some cases, too, soldering had been used. One curious portion of the collection Dr. Schliemann describes as follows:—“That this treasure was packed,” says he, “in the greatest haste, is shown by the contents of the great silver vase, in which I found, quite at the bottom, two splendid golden diadems, a fillet for the head, and four most gorgeous and artistic pendants for ear-rings. On them lay fifty-six golden ear-rings and 4,750 little golden rings, perforated prisms and dice, together with golden buttons and other precious things which belonged to other ornaments. After these, came six golden bracelets, and, quite at the top of all, in the silver vase, were two small golden cups.”
Besides these more precious objects, Dr. Schliemann met with a quantity of what, for want of a better name, may be called idols, consisting of flat pieces of stone, marbles, and terra-cotta, [and, in one instance, of the vertebra of some antediluvian animal,] containing on one side “an attempt to model a face whether human or owlish.” Such objects are not rare. In the British Museum are many flat pieces of burnt clay, with moulding on them, of the rudest kind, not wholly unlike what Dr. Schliemann found. Dr. Schliemann sees in these the original type of the sacred owl of Minerva,—to say the least,—a very bold guess. Indeed, but for the place where they were found, their remote antiquity might be doubted, as they might be, after all, but degraded types of a good period of art. Dr. Schliemann, however, maintains that many of these strange owl-headed objects of clay are representatives of Athene,—in fact, the original type of the γλαυκῶπις θεὰ, the “goddess with the bright or flashing eyes,” and, also, that this epithet ought to be now translated the “owl-faced goddess”! But though Dr. Schliemann may urge in favour of his views that, as the worship of Athene was of Oriental origin, there is no reason why she should not have been represented as owl-faced, just as we find an eagle-headed Nisroch, a hawk-headed Ra, and a ram-headed Ammon, there is, really, no evidence in favour of his theory. Mr. Newton has embraced everything in his remark that “the conception of the human form as an organic whole, a conception we meet with in the very dawn of Greek art, nowhere appears” in Dr. Schliemann’s collections, the probability being that these objects are of an antiquity long antecedent to anything Greek, and the work of a people in no way connected with the Greeks. In Greek art, the usual adjunct to most representations of Athene on coins is the owl, while in Homer (Odyss. iii. 372) Athene leaves Nestor, under the form of an osprey. It is possible, therefore, that these metamorphoses symbolize a still earlier faith.
Having already stated our belief that not only did an Ilium or a Troy really exist, but, also, that there was a real living Homer, we need not notice the objections urged against the opinions of Dr. Schliemann, on the ground that “as the Iliad is a mythical poem, it is absurd to expect in it any historical kernel,” a method of reasoning, to say the least, unsatisfactory, if not fallacious. There is no conceivable reason why the most mythical poem may not comprehend contorted images of real events; the difficulty, in each case, and the only real difficulty, being the unravelling of the confused stories, which prevent our taking up the tangled skein of history. No one supposes the early legends of the Zendavesta to be history, yet some of the stations of the migration from N.E. to S.W. can be reasonably identified: so, too, no one supposes the story of Gyges in Herodotus historical, though the annals of Assur-bani-pal prove the reality of a “Gugu, king of Ludim.” The prehistoric theory may be pressed too far.
Of the character of the art of the objects of Dr. Schliemann, or of the date of his wonderful collections, there is, at present, no evidence on which to base a reasonable judgment. One thing, however, seems certain; that they are not Greek—nor in any way connected with Greek art. If among the vast numbers of objects found, there may be some objects resembling others met with in Greece, the natural inference would be that, as so much of Greek art is traceable ultimately to Asia, so, too, are these. Nor must we, altogether, ignore the possible effects of commerce. Dr. Schliemann has certainly proved the existence of a wealthy population—living on the spot that tradition and history alike have assigned to Troy; and we cannot doubt that the owners of these remains were pre-Hellenic. It is not so long ago that Semiramis was as mythical a name as King Priam; and who can say that a future Rawlinson may not prove the truth of a Trojan Priam as clearly as that “Sammuramit” reigned in Nineveh? The dwellers on the rock of Ilion clearly were “no prehistoric savages,” but denizens of a real city, with its fortress and palace. It is curious that, above Dr. Schliemann’s “Trojans,” at a distance of from 23 to 33 feet, dwelt a population who constructed their houses of small stones and earth, and, occasionally, of sun-dried bricks. The artistic remains of this people are inferior to those below them; yet they made coarse pottery, battle-axes, knives, nails, &c., with a slight use of copper or bronze, but with plenty of stone implements. This place, having been destroyed in its turn, another set of people occupied the mound, a race inferior in civilization to all who had preceded them. These people, it has been suspected, were Cimmerians, perhaps, portions of the Nomad tribes, who, we know from Herodotus and Strabo, constantly made eruptions into Asia Minor.
We must add that, among the various objects found by Dr. Schliemann, were some scratches of the rudest kind, on a honestone, from the first supposed to be letters of some alphabet. The truth of this conjecture has been recently proved by the persevering study of Professor Gomperz, of Vienna, who says that, in the comparisons he has made between the Cypriote alphabet and the Hissarlik inscriptions, “I have not schematized, I have not enlarged or reduced anything. Every dot, every twist is copied with slavish accuracy from the best Cyprian documents. Nor have I allowed myself to be eclectic and to mix letters of different periods and localities.” Professor Max Müller adds, “Accepting these statements of Professor Gomperz, I can only repeat my conviction, that his decipherment of the first inscription Tagoi Dioi seems to me almost beyond reasonable doubt.” The interpretation of the other presumed inscriptions is more open to doubt.
It is a remarkable fact, as clearly shown by Dr. Schliemann’s researches, that the occupiers of all these strata, alike, were tillers of the ground, while the huge jars found standing upright can hardly have been used for any other purpose than the storing of wine, oil, or corn. The quantity of copper found suggests a connection with Cyprus—the island of copper—as do, also, the inscriptions just noticed; subsequent analysis, however, has thrown doubt on Dr. Schliemann’s idea that his vessels were of pure copper.[[13]] The fine red pottery, too, is said to resemble very much the existing pottery of Cyprus. The vases are, however, not painted, nor have any traces of sculpture been as yet detected.
[13]. The Romans called their copper from Cyprus, Cyprium: but the name of the island is, more likely, from the Hebrew Chopher, the cypress tree.
In concluding these notes on Dr. Schliemann’s collection, which, from our limited space, have been more condensed than we could have wished, we need only add that, besides the greater and richer monuments, Dr. Schliemann has found thousands of terra-cotta disks or wheels, each with a hole in the middle, the purport of which has considerably exercised the imaginations of the learned. Thus they have been called spindles, weights for sinking nets or weaving and ex voto tablets by Dr. Schliemann himself, &c. The variety of patterns on them is so great that, if anything but meaningless ornaments, it is impossible to suppose them all for one and the same purpose; and the patterns on some of them are unquestionably very curious. Thus we have scratches much resembling the earliest Chinese sacred characters; others, clearly astronomical; and, above all, that commonest of Buddhist symbols, the Swastika, a cross with arms curved or straight, and bent at right angles.