Schliemann's Troja

IN Troja ¹ Dr. Schliemann has published the results of his later excavations at Hissarlik and its neighborhood in 1882, and they prove an important correction and amplification of his previous work, Ilios ; in a new edition of the latter the substance of the present volume must finally be embodied. Without restating the theories that have been superseded, it is enough to say that the Homeric Troy, which was formerly supposed to be the third of the prehistoric settlements whose débris have been cut through and partially uncovered in the great mound, is now identified with the second, and that the description of this last has been modified in essential particulars. Unlike the others, it may be styled a city, without suggesting any misconception of its extent and consequence. It consisted of the small acropolis, or upper city, strongly guarded by massive towered walls, with gates opening into the lower city and of difficult approach, within which were inclosed a few temples and other buildings, apparently palaces. Close under the shelter of this fortification, on the plain to the east, south, and southwest, stretched the broad streets of the town; and that, too, was defended by a wall, which sprang from and returned to the acropolis. In the citadel itself, which alone has been thoroughly explored, the ruins show two stages in the building activity of the inhabitants of this period : in the first, the irregular plateau of the summit was artificially leveled by filling up, and temples, houses, and gateways were erected; in the second, these structures were rebuilt, with a different axis and general arrangement, and the approaches were somewhat changed and greatly strengthened and improved. The material used, except for the foundations, which were of stone, was bricks, fired after the walls were up, according to a custom practiced by primitive peoples from Babylon to Wisconsin. Of especial architectural interest is the fact that the front ends of lateral walls were faced with wooden beams, which, starting from a secure stone foundation, helped to protect and consolidate them, and to support the roof of beams, rushes, and clay. Here is seen, for the first time, the original constructive use of the ornamental antœ of the Greek temple. That all these buildings were destroyed at once by a great fire there is ample and overwhelming evidence, — such, indeed, that this fact cannot be regarded as materially strengthened even by the speaking testimony of the multitude of new objects found with marks of the fierce conflagration they survived. For the most part, these articles, although interesting in detail, do not differ sufficiently from those illustrated in Ilios to affect a general view ; but it should perhaps be observed that no relic was discovered that is incompatible with the generally received conclusion of archæologists that the civilization of this city was prehistoric, and unaffected by either Hellenic or Phœnician influence. The comparatively slight excavation of the lower city disclosed little more than the smooth bed on which the defensive wall ran, and masses of the lustrous black pottery, which, by its peculiar character, proves this settlement on the plain to have been contemporaneous with the existence of the second city on the hill. In this outer wall Dr. Schliemann supposes that there was but one gate, the Scæan, through which the old road descended by the fig-tree and the springs in the rock, now entirely excavated, out toward the sea.

Such, in the barest outline, is the plan of the city of Priam as it is now inferred from a few foundation walls covered with heaps of burnt ruins ; and certainly it is far more credible than the idea of Troy which Dr. Schliemann formerly asked us to accept, when he confined its limits to the narrow platform of the acropolis. Indeed, this second city on Hissarlik corresponds too remarkably with Homer’s description to allow of much doubt that it is the site he had in mind, and few will hesitate longer to believe that its utter and violent destruction by fire was the calamity that tradition so wonderfully preserved and exalted. One has but to remember how small the walled towns in the East usually are in proportion to their importance, to recognize in a city of the size indicated by these remains a seat of power and wealth, whose possessors not only must have dominated the Troad, but were of consequence enough to be named among the associated invaders of Egypt in the reign of Ramses III., and in their turn, a century later, to call to their aid numerous allies to resist their own enemies from Europe. At any ancient time this was the only city in the Troad which could have been the object of a long and doubtful national war. In addition to this fact, the topography of the citadel, its temples, palaces, towers, and walls, as well as the lay of the ground in its neighborhood, answer as closely as could be expected to the traditionary description of Homer. In this rediscovery of the actual ground which a noble legend has consecrated there is a certain satisfaction to the literary mind, not merely because of an increase of emotion due to a sympathetic local attachment to the soil on which great deeds have been done, but because an element of reality is added to the poems themselves. They will seem more truthful to ordinary men; they will make their way better in this age, if Achilles and Patroclus are regarded not as purely ideal, but as the Roland and Oliver of antiquity.

To the scientific mind, however, Dr. Schliemann’s work means a great deal more. In the first place, he has justified the tradition of the Greek world, and accredited it as the guide of investigation ; in other words, he has dealt a deathblow to the scholarship that would resolve the history of the world before Herodotus into a sun-myth. As Professor Sayce well remarks in his fine preface, science is now adding to our conception of the antiquity of the globe and of man that of the antiquity of civilization. In this field the contents of the mound of Hissarlik have a different and wider interest, entirely independent of the Iliad or the Odyssey. In the city immediately below Troy, and belonging to the late Stone Age, objects were found that go to indicate that its inhabitants were of the same race as the people of the same period in Southern Europe. Of more certain meaning is the discovery, in the tumulus of Protesilaos, on the shore of the Thracian Chersonese, of pottery and other objects contemporaneous with those found at Troy, such as have been unearthed nowhere else. Professor Sayce regards this fact as an important and well-nigh conclusive addition to the evidence that the Trojans were originally from Thrace, and of Aryan blood. On the other hand, their civilization was derived from their Asian neighbors on the east. This is determined, of course, by the character of the art shown on the objects of ivory, gold, bronze, porcelain, or stone found in the ruins. To sum up the matter, nothing of the Greek age, either in coins, inscriptions, or pottery, is to be discerned in the relics. Porcelain and ivory, it is true, might have been brought from Egypt by the Phœnicians, but as there is no trace either of Phœnician or Assyrian workmanship a still earlier source must be sought. There remains only the great nation of the Hittites (our knowledge of which may be said to be a thing of yesterday), and to this people Professor Sayce attributes the tutelage of the Trojans in their early culture mainly on the ground (1) that the idols of the Trojan goddess Atê (identified by the Greeks with Athêna) have the well-known characteristics of the Hittite ’Athi, a modified form of the Babylonish deity; (2) that the stone cylinders indicative of primitive Chaldaic influence occur to the exclusion of the lentoid seal of the Assyrian age ; and (3) that the ornamentation of some of the vases and gold-work points to the same art origin. The Trojans, then, if these inferences be accepted, were an Aryan tribe from Europe, civilized by influences coming from primitive Chaldee by way of the Hittites, whose rule extended from Cappadocia to the Euxine, and from the Euphrates to the Hellespont. This conclusion,— which harmonizes with the little that is known of the art, language, race, time, and locality involved, — would fix the date of Troy in the twelfth century B. c.

No particular interest attaches at present to the four upper layers of prehistoric ruins on Hissarlik, or to the wreck of the Æolic Ilium that lies above these. The ancient Troy was never rebuilt ; for the little settlements on the rock, although they continued the religious and art tradition, can be regarded only as the merest villages. The stones of the wall of the lower city were probably carried off by Arkhaianax to build Sigeion, as Dr. Schliemann observes on the authority of Strabo. No mark of Greek occupancy is met with, except after the period of the peculiar pottery ascribed wholly hypothetically to the Lydians ; and after the Æolic settlers arrived they did not build on the plain until a long time had elapsed. These various facts reconcile the conflicting testimony in classical authors that the site of Troy was a waste, and that it was inhabited by a remnant of men. All this is accepted by scholars of note, except Professor Jebb, of Glasgow, to whose criticism Professor Sayce plainly refers (though not by name) when he ends his protest against the ignorance and presumption of English scholars, who suppose they understand archæology because they can write Greek verses, by saying that “ to look for a Macedonian city in the fifth prehistoric village of Hissarlik is like looking for an Elizabethan cemetery in the tumuli of Salisbury plain.”

Dr. Schliemann also publishes in this volume the results of several excavations in the neighboring tumuli of the Trojan plain, but these were for the most part fruitless. In an appendix he adds a narrative of a journey through the Troad, which is of much interest; but to keep up the distinction hitherto observed, it stirs the literary rather than the scientific spirit. On the summit of Gargarus, from which Zeus looked on the great battle and launched his lightnings to plow the ground before the chariot of Diomed, there is still the ancient throne-like rock, and in its crevices hyacinths and violets still blossom, as when they sprang to strew the couch of Zeus and Hera. Near Sarikis, the other peak of Mt. Ida, at the foot of its northward wall, just below the topmost crag, still lies the marble slab of an altar; and what is more likely than that it is the last fragment of

of which Æschylus sang ? On the slope the crocus and the lotus-leaf flourish, as when Ænone fed her flocks among the pines. To the scientific mind, looking off hence to the famous mound lying like a button in the far distance, there may rise a vision of new knowledge to be conquered from the past; but to the imagination there is a finer possession in the reflection that the most enduring of human works on yonder plain were the poet’s song and heaps of broken shards.