Troja: Results of the Latest Researches and Discoveries on the Site of Homer's Troy

Front matter

RESEARCHES AND DISCOVERIES ON THE SITE OF HOMER'S TROY,

AND IN THE HEROIC TUMULI AND OTHER SITES, MADE IN THE YEAR 1882;

AND A NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY IN THE TROAD IN 1881.

Preface

Hardly ten years have passed since the veil of an impenetrable night seemed to hang over the beginnings of Greek history. Wolf and his followers had torn in pieces the body of Homer; the school of Niebuhr had criticized the legends of pre-literary Hellas until it had left none of them remaining; and the science of comparative mythology had determined that "the tale of Troy divine," like that of the beleaguerment of Kadmeian Thebes, was but a form of the immemorial story which told how the battlements of the sky were stormed day after day by the bright powers of heaven. The earlier portion of the "History" of Grote marks the close and summing-up of this period of destructive criticism. We have no authorities, the great historian showed, which reach back to that heroic epoch of Greece, between which and the literary epoch lies a deep unchronicled chasm, while the legends turned into history by rationalizing annalists cannot be distinguished from those that related to the gods. Our evidence for the so-called heroic or prehistoric period had been tried and found wanting; the myths told of the ancient heroes might indeed contain some elements of truth, but it was impossible for us now to discover them. All parts of a myth hang closely together, it was pointed out with inexorable logic, and we cannot arbitrarily separate and distinguish them one from another.

The work of destruction necessarily precedes the work of reconstruction. It is not until our existing authorities have been sifted and judged, until all that is false and uncertain has been swept out of the way, that the ground is cleared for building up the edifice of fact with new and better materials. Even while the decisions of Grote were still ruling our conceptions of primaeval Greece, Professor Ernst Curtius had perceived with the eye of genius that they were not, and could not be, final. The ethnology of Greece at the dawn of literary history presupposes the ethnology of the heroic age, and ancient myths could not have been attached to certain events and been localized in certain regions, unless there had been some reason for their being so. Cyrus and Charlemagne are heroes of romance only because they were first of all heroes of reality. But Professor Ernst Curtius perceived more than this. The discoveries of Botta and Layard in Nineveh and of Renan in Phoenicia had revealed to him that the germs of the art, and therewith of the culture, of primitive Greece, must have come from the East. The discredited theories which had connected the East and West together were revived, but in a new and scientific form; no longer based on wild speculations, but on the sure foundations of ascertained facts. Curtius even saw already that Oriental influence must have flowed to Greece through two channels, not through the Phoenicians only, but along the high roads of Asia Minor as well.

But what Curtius had divined he was not in a position to prove. The conclusions of Grote still held almost undisputed sway, and the 6th or 7th century B.C. was fixed upon by classical scholars as the mystical period beyond which neither civilization nor history was possible. Even now we are still under the influence of the spirit of scepticism which has resulted from the destructive criticism of the last half-century. The natural tendency of the student of to-day is to post-date rather than to ante-date, and to bring everything down to the latest period that is possible. The same reluctance which the scientific world felt in admitting the antiquity of man, when first asserted by Boucher de Perthes, has been felt by modern scholars in admitting the antiquity of civilization. First, however, the Egyptologists, then more recently the decipherers of the monuments of Assyria and Babylonia, have been forced to yield to the stubborn evidence of facts. It is now the turn of the students of Greek and Asianic archaeology to do so too. For here, also, the hand of the explorer and excavator has been at work, and the history of the remote past has been literally dug out of the earth in which it has so long lain buried.

The problem, from which the scholars of Europe had turned away in despair, has been solved by the skill, the energy, and the perseverance, of Dr. Schliemann. At Troy, at Mykénae, and at Orkhomenos, he has recovered a past which had already become but a shadowy memory in the age of Peisistratos. We can measure the civilization and knowledge of the peoples who inhabited those old cities, can handle the implements they used and the weapons they carried, can map out the chambers of the houses where they lived, can admire the pious care with which they tended their dead, can even trace the limits of their intercourse with other nations, and the successive stages of culture through which they passed. The heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey have become to us men of flesh and blood; we can watch both them, and older heroes still, in almost every act of their daily life, and even determine their nature and the capacity of their skulls. It is little wonder if so marvellous a recovery of a past in which we had ceased to believe, should have awakened many controversies, and wrought a silent revolution in our conceptions of Greek history. It is little wonder if at first the discoverer who had so rudely shocked the settled prejudices of the historian should have met with a storm of indignant opposition or covert attack. But in this case what was new was also what was true, and, as fact after fact has accumulated and excavation after excavation been systematically carried out, the storm has slowly died away, to be followed by warm acknowledgment and unreserved acquiescence. To- day no trained archaeologist in Greece or Western Europe doubts the main facts which Dr. Schliemann's excavations have established; we can never again return to the ideas of ten years ago.

Excavation probably seems at first sight a very simple matter. This is not the case, however, if it is to be of any real use to science. The excavator must know where and how to dig; above all, he must know the value of what he finds. The broken sherds which ignorance flings away are often in the archaeologist's eyes the most precious relics bequeathed to us by the past. To be a successful excavator, a combination of qualities is necessary which are seldom found together. It is to this combination that we owe the recovery of Troy and Mykénae, and the reconstruction of ancient history that has resulted therefrom. Dr. Schliemann's enthusiasm and devotion to his work has been matched only by his knowledge of ancient Greek literature, by his power of conversing freely in the languages of his workmen, by the strength of body which enabled him to withstand the piercing winds, the blinding dust, the scanty food, and all the other hardships he has had to undergo, and above all by that scientific spirit which has led him in pilgrimage through the museums of Europe, has made him seek the help of archaeologists and architects, and has caused him to relinquish his most cherished theories as soon as the evidence bade him do so. And his reward has come at last. The dreams of his childhood have been realized; he has made it clear as the daylight that, if the Troy of Greek story had any earthly habitation at all, it could only have been on the mound of Hissarlik.

This, as he himself has told us, was the supreme goal of the labour of his life. But in arriving at it he has enriched the world of science with what many would regard as of even greater importance. He has introduced a new era into the study of classical antiquity, has revolutionized our conceptions of the past, has given the impulse to that "research with the spade" which is producing such marvellous results throughout the Orient, and nowhere more than in Greece itself. The light has broken over the peaks of Ida, and the long-forgotten ages of prehistoric Hellas and Asia Minor are lying bathed in it before us. We now begin to know how Greece came to have the strength and will for that mission of culture to which we of this modern world are still indebted. We can penetrate into a past, of which Greek tradition had forgotten the very existence. By the side of one of the jade axes which Dr. Schliemann has uncovered at Hissarlik, the Iliad itself is but a thing of yesterday. We are carried back to a time when the empires of the Assyrians and the Hittites did not as yet exist, when the Aryan forefathers of the Greeks had not as yet, perhaps, reached their new home in the south, but when the rude tribes of the neolithic age had already begun to traffic and barter, and travelling caravans conveyed the precious stone of the Kuen-lún from one extremity of Asia to the other. Prehistoric archaeology in general owes as much to Dr. Schliemann's discoveries, as the study of Greek history and Greek art.

Why is it that Dr. Schliemann's example has not been followed by some of the rich men of whom England is full? Why cannot they spare for science a little of the wealth that is now lavished upon the breeding of racers or the maintenance of a dog-kennel? There are few, it is true, who can be expected to emulate him in his profuse generosity, and freely bestow on their mother country the vast and inestimable store of archaeological treasure which it had cost so much to procure; still fewer who would be ready to expend upon science one-half of their yearly income. But surely England must contain one or two, at least, who would be willing to help in recovering the earlier history of our civilization, and thereby to earn for themselves a place in the grateful annals of science. Dr. Schliemann, indeed, has created for himself a name that can never be forgotten, even when the memory of the plaudits that have greeted him in the Universities of Germany, or in the oldest University of our own land, shall have passed away.

The present volume may be considered as the supplement and completion of Ilios. Both Hissarlik and the rest of the Troad have now been systematically and thoroughly excavated, in a way in which no similarly large district has ever been excavated before. All that a very important corner of the world can tell us of the past has been extorted from it. Dr. Schliemann has explored every ancient site in the Troad, and, with the help of two trained architects, has subjected the site of Troy to an exhaustive examination. The results, which to some extent modify and correct the conclusions arrived at in Ilios, are of the highest scientific value. The claims of Bounarbashi on the Bali Dagh to represent the site of a prehistoric city have been disposed of for ever. Besides Hissarlik, Dr. Schliemann has proved that only two other sites of the prehistoric age—the mounds of Hanaï and Besika—exist in the Trojan plain. Nowhere else have remains been found which can reasonably be assigned to an older period than that when Acolic settlers first began to gather on the shores of Asia. But the inhabitants of the first two prehistoric cities of Hissarlik must have differed in race from those who dwelt on the Hanaï Tepeh, or on the edge of Besika Bay. The pottery of Hissarlik is altogether unlike that found elsewhere in any part of the Troad. It is quite otherwise, however, when we cross into Europe and examine the so-called tumulus of Protesilaos. This, as Dr. Schliemann has discovered, has been raised on the site of a remotely ancient city, the pottery and stone relics of which are precisely the same as those of the lowest strata of Hissarlik. The conclusion is obvious; the first inhabitants of Hissarlik, the builders of its first city, must have come across the Hellespont from Europe. The founders of Troy, in fact, must have been of Thrakian descent.

This discovery does but prove the truth of another of those old Greek traditions which modern criticism had discarded. Strabo long ago declared that Phrygians had once crossed into Mysia out of Thraké, and there taken possession of the site of Troy. The Trojans, as Dr. Karl Blind observes, are called Phrygians by the tragedians of Athens, and the name of Hektor himself, the "stay" of Ilion, is said by Hêsykhios to be but the Greek rendering of the Phrygian Dareios. The Phrygians were called the Briges, or "Freemen," by their Lydian neighbours, and were well known, as Strabo assures us, to be a Thrakian tribe; the Armenians of later history being, as we learn from Hérodotos, an offshoot of them.

The researches of the last few years have abundantly shown that all these statements were correct. My decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions of Van has proved that as late as the year 640 B.C. there were as yet no Aryan settlers in Ararat or Armenia, the country being still held by a race which seems to have been the same as that of modern Georgia, and which spoke a language that had no connection with those of the Aryan family. When the Aryan Armenians finally made their way to their new home, they must have marched from the West, and not from the East. Among the hundreds of names belonging to the vast district between Media and the Halys, which occur on the monuments of Assyria, there are none that can be assigned to an Aryan origin, and comparative philology has now proved that modern Armenian, like the scanty relics of the old language of Phrygia, occupies a middle place between the Greek on one side, and the Letto-Slavic on the other. The ancestors of the Armenians and the Phrygians must therefore have once lived in a region which was bounded by Greeks on the south, and by Slavs on the north; in other words, in the very country which was known to classical geography as Thrakê.

Thanks to Dr. Schliemann's discoveries, accordingly, we now know who the Trojans originally were. They were Europeans of Thrakê, speaking a dialect which closely resembled the dialects of Thrakê and Phrygia. And since the dialect was one which belonged to the Aryan family of speech, the probability is that the speakers of it also belonged to the Aryan race. If so, we, as well as the Greeks of the age of Agamemnôn, can hail the subjects of Priam as brethren in blood and speech.

The antiquities, therefore, unearthed by Dr. Schliemann at Troy acquire for us a double interest. They carry us back to the later Stone-age of the Aryan race, an age of which memories have been preserved in the enduring records of language, but of which tradition and history are alike silent. They will serve to settle the question, which is at present perplexing the minds of archaeologists and ethnologists, as to whether the people of the later Stone-age in Western Europe can be regarded as Aryans, or as representatives only of the races which inhabited this part of the globe before any Aryans arrived here. If the objects of stone and bronze, of earthenware and bone, found at Hissarlik, agree with those found in Britain and Gaul, a strong presumption arises that the latter also were made and used by tribes of the Aryan race.

But the discoveries that have resulted from Dr. Schliemann's excavations of 1882 do not end here. He has found that the second prehistoric city, and probably the first also, was not confined, as he formerly believed, to the narrow limits of the hill of Hissarlik. Hissarlik, in fact, was only the Pergamos or citadel, crowned with six public edifices, which to the men of that time must have seemed large and stately. Below it stretched a lower city, the foundations of which have been now laid bare. Like the Pergamos, it was surrounded by a wall, the stones of which, as Dr. Schliemann has acutely noticed, must have been those which, according to Strabo, were carried away by Arkhaianax the Mitylênaean, who built with them the walls of Sigeion. To those who know the size and character of early settlements in the Levant, the city which is now disclosed to our view will appear to be one of great importance and power. There is no longer any difficulty in understanding how treasures of gold came to be discovered in its ruins, or how objects of foreign industry like Egyptian porcelain and Asiatic ivory were imported into it. The prince whose palace stood on the citadel of Hissarlik must have been a powerful potentate, with the rich Trojan plain in his possession, and the entrance to the Hellespont at his command.

Can we venture to call him the king of Ilion? The best answer to this question will be found in the final result of the operations in 1882, which I have left till now unnoticed. More extended excavations, and a closer attention to the architectural details of the site, have proved that the burnt city was not the third, as Dr. Schliemann still believed in Ilios, but the second, and that the vast mass of ruin and débris, which lie on the foundations of the second city, belong to it and not to the third. What is more, two distinct periods can be traced in the life and history of this second city; an older period, when its walls and edifices were first erected, and a later one, when they were enlarged and partially rebuilt. It is clear that the second city must have existed for a long space of time.

Now it is impossible to enumerate these facts without observing how strangely they agree with what tradition and legend have told us of the city of Priam. The city brought to light by Dr. Schliemann lasted for a long while; its walls and edifices underwent at one time a partial restoration; it was large and wealthy, with an acropolis that overlooked the plain, and was crowned with temples and other large buildings; its walls were massive and guarded by towers; its ruler was a powerful prince, who must have had at his disposal the neighbouring gold mines of Astyra, and who carried on an intercourse with distant nations, both by land and sea; above all, it perished by fire. Now let us turn to the outlines of the Greek story of Ilion. Here, too, we hear of a city that was already old in the days of the Trojan war; whose walls and public buildings had already undergone destruction and subsequent restoration; which, like Hissarlik, was large and wealthy, with a lofty citadel, whereon stood the royal palace and the temples of the gods; which was encircled by great walls crowned by towers; whose prince was the rich and wide-ruling Priam, with allies that came from far and near; while its end was to be captured by Greek invaders and burnt to the very ground. When we add to this, that Hissarlik has now been proved to be the only site in the Troad which can correspond with the Homeric Troy, it is difficult to resist the conclusion, that Dr. Schliemann has indeed discovered Ilion.

But, in saying this, it is not necessary to maintain that all the topographical details mentioned in the Iliad can be verified in the immediate neighbourhood of Hissarlik. As Dr. Schliemann has remarked, "Homer gives us the legend of Ilium's tragic fate as it was handed down to him by preceding bards, clothing the traditional facts of the war and destruction of Troy in the garb of his own day." A would-be critic of Dr. Schliemann's has recently discovered that the geography of the Iliad is eclectic, and in all its details suits no single locality in the Trojan plain. But the discovery is not a new one; it was stated by myself in the Academy four years ago, as well as by Dr. Schliemann in Ilios, and is to be found in other writers before us. In determining whether the second prehistoric city of Hissarlik is the Ilion of Homer, it is as little necessary to harmonize all the topographical indications of the Iliad with its site, as it is to harmonize the picture of Trojan civilization drawn in the Homeric Poems with the civilization which the excavations of Dr. Schliemann have actually revealed to us.

Hissarlik, then, or Ilion, as we will henceforth call it, must be the city whose siege and conquest became the subject-matter of Greek epic song. Here were localized the old myths which Aryan bards had recounted in days gone by; and Acolic poets and rhapsodists saw in the struggles which their countrymen had waged against the mighty ruler of Ilion, a repetition in the real world of the war that had once been waged by gods and heroes in the fairyland of legend. The date of the destruction of Troy is not so easy to fix. The second city of Hissarlik belongs to the prehistoric age, to that age, namely, for which contemporaneous written documents do not exist. It is marked by pottery of a peculiar character, by the use of stone and bronze implements, and by the absence of all such objects as coins or inscriptions, or the Hellenic pottery which characterizes the historical epoch. Above the ruins of the second city lie the remains of no less than four other prehistoric settlements, three of which have left traces of building behind them, while the fourth and last is represented only by that surest and most indestructible of memorials—heaps of broken sherds. Above these come the relics of the Ilion of Greek and Roman times, the oldest of which consist of fragments of those painted archaic Greek terra-cottas, which are found at Mykênæ and Orkhomenos, and to which we cannot assign a less antiquity than the seventh century before the Christian era. This agrees well with the date at which, according to Strabo, the Acolic Ilion was founded.

It is true that the four settlements, which succeeded one another on the hill of Hissarlik after the fall of Ilion, were hardly more than villages inhabited by rude tribes. But the very fact that they thus succeeded one another implies a considerable lapse of time. The accumulation of soil and débris, on the top of which the Greek colonists built their new city, must have occupied at least two or three centuries. Even the masses of potsherds with which the ground is filled must have required a long period to collect, while an interval of some length seems to have intervened between the decay of the third city and the rise of the fourth.

But we have more certain evidences of the age to which Ilion reaches back, in the objects which have been discovered in its ruins. As I pointed out five years ago, we find no traces among them of Phoenician trade in the Aegean Sea. Objects of Egyptian porcelain and oriental ivory, indeed, are met with, but they must have been brought by other hands than those of the Phoenicians. Along with them nothing is found which bears upon it what we now know to be the stamp of Phoenician workmanship. In this respect Hissarlik differs strikingly from Mykênae. There we can point to numerous objects, and even to pottery, which testify to Phoenician art and intercourse. Ilion must have been overthrown before the busy traders of Canaan had visited the shores of the Troad, bringing with them articles of luxury and the influence of a particular style of art. This carries us back to the twelfth century before our era, perhaps to a still earlier epoch.

But not only has the Phoenician left no trace of himself at Hissarlik, the influence of Assyrian art which began to spread through Western Asia about 1200 B.C. is equally absent. Among the multitudes of objects which Dr. Schliemann has uncovered there is none in which we can discover the slightest evidence of an Assyrian origin.

Nevertheless, among the antiquities of Ilion there is a good deal which is neither of home production nor of European importation. Apart from the porcelain and the ivory, we find many objects which exhibit the influence of archaic Babylonian art modified in a peculiar way. We now know what this means. Tribes, called Hittite by their neighbours, made their way in early days from the uplands of Kappadokia into northern Syria, and there developed a powerful and wide-reaching empire. From their capital at Carchemish, now Jerablus, on the Euphrates, their armies went forth to contend on equal terms with the soldiers of the Egyptian Sesostris, or to carry the name and dominion of the Hittite to the very shores of the Aegean Sea. The rock-cut figures in the pass of Karabel, near Smyrna, in which Herodotos saw the trophies of Sesostris, were really memorials of Hittite conquest, and the hieroglyphics that accompanied them were those of Carchemish and not of Thebes. The image on the cliff of Sipylos, which the Greeks of the age of Homer had fabled to be that of the weeping Niobê, now turns out to be the likeness of the great goddess of Carchemish, and the cartouches engraved by the side of it, partly in Hittite and partly in Egyptian characters, show that it was carved in the time of Ramses-Sesostris himself. We can now understand how it was that, when the Hittites warred with the Egyptian Pharaoh in the 14th century B.C., they were able to summon to their aid, among their other subject allies, Dardanians and Mysians and Maeonians, while a century later the place of the Dardanians was taken by the Tekkri or Teukrians. The empire, and therewith the art and culture, of the Hittites already extended as far as the Hellespont.

Now Hittite art was a modification of archaic Babylonian art. It was, in fact, that peculiar form of early art which has long been known to have characterized Asia Minor. And along with this art came the worship of the great Babylonian goddess in the special form it assumed at Carchemish, as well as the institution of armed priestesses—the Amazons, as the Greeks called them—who served the goddess with shield and lance. The goddess was represented in a curious and peculiar fashion, which we first find on the cylinders of primaeval Chaldea. She was nude, full-faced, with the arms laid upon the breasts, and the pelvis marked by a triangle, as well as by a round knob below two others which represented the breasts. At times she was furnished with wings on either side, but this seems to have been a comparatively late modification.

A leaden image of this goddess, exactly modelled after her form in archaic Babylonian and Hittite art, and adorned with the swastika (卍), has been found by Dr. Schliemann among the ruins of Ilion, that is to say, the second of the prehistoric cities on the mound of Hissarlik (see Ilios, fig. 226). Precisely the same figure, with ringlets on either side of the head, but with the pelvis ornamented with dots instead of with the swastika ( ), is sculptured on a piece of serpentine, recently found in Maeonia and published by M. Salomon Reinach in the Revue archéologique. Here by the side of the goddess stands the Babylonian Bel, and among the Babylonian symbols that surround them is the representation of one of the very terra-cotta "whorls" of which Dr. Schliemann has found such multitudes at Troy. No better proof could be desired of the truth of his hypothesis, which sees in them votive offerings to the supreme goddess of Ilion. Mr. Ramsay has procured a similar "whorl" from Kaisarieh in Kappadokia, along with clay tablets inscribed in the undeciphered Kappadokian cuneiform. Até, as Dr. Schliemann has pointed out in Ilios, was the native name of the Trojan goddess whom the Greeks identified with their Athéna, and 'Athi was also the name of the great goddess of Carchemish.

The "owl-headed" vases, again, exhibit under a slightly varying form the likeness of the same deity. The owl-like face is common in the representations of the goddess upon the cylinders of primitive Chaldea, as well as the three protuberances below it which are arranged in the shape of an inverted triangle, while the wings which distinguish the vases find their parallel, not only on the engraved stones of Babylonia, but also in the extended arms of the Mykenaean goddess. The rude idols, moreover, of which Dr. Schliemann has found so many at Hissarlik, belong to the same type as the sacred vases; on these, however, the ringlets of the goddess are sometimes represented, while the wings at the sides are absent. These idols re-appear in a somewhat developed form at Mykênac, as well as in Cyprus and on other sites of archaic Greek civilization, where they testify to the humanizing influence that spread across to the Greek world from the shores of Asia Minor. Thanks to the discoveries of Dr. Schliemann, we can now trace the artistic type of the old Chaldean goddess as it passed from Babylonia to Carchemish, and from thence to the Troad and to the Peloponnêsos itself.

As might have been expected, the same type is met with on the peculiar cylinders which are found in Cyprus, on the southern coast of Asia Minor, and in the neighbourhood of Aleppo and Carchemish, and which I have shown elsewhere to be of Hittite origin. Here it is frequently combined with the symbol of an ox-head, like that which occurs so often at Mykênae, where it is found times without number associated with the double-headed axe, the well-known characteristic of Asianic art. A similar axe of green jade has been unearthed on the site of the ancient Hêraion near Mykênae, along with the foot of a small statue in whose hand it must once have been held. The foot is shod with a boot with a turned-up toe, now known to be the sure mark of Hittite and Asianic sculpture. The double-headed axe is also engraved on the famous chaton of the ring discovered by Dr. Schliemann at Mykênae, the figures below it having boots with turned-up ends, and wearing the flounced robes of Babylonian priests. The whole design upon the chaton has manifestly been copied from the Asianic modification. of some early Babylonian cylinder.