ages. Its ruins remained solitary; the brick-walls crumbled away; the stones of their substructions and the housefoundations were employed for the new constructions on the Acropolis; and I now see no reason which clashes with the tradition preserved by Strabo,[1] according to which Archaeanax, the Mitylenaean, built the walls of Sigeum with the stones of Troy; for by this could of course only be meant the stones of the lower city of the second settlement, and probably those of the city walls. It is, therefore, but natural that, in spite of the numerous and extensive excavations I made on the site of the lower city of Ilium—except the city-wall represented under No. 2 B in Ilios—I found no fragments of the wall belonging to the lower city of the second settlement; but I found in several places the platform of rock on which it must have stood, and which had been purposely levelled for it.
We cannot determine now with certainty how far the lower city extended. In indicating its walls, which we have marked in Plan VIII. with dotted lines, we were guided by their two junctions with the Acropolis-wall. On the northeast side it is the above-mentioned wall of large calcareous blocks in the trench W;[2] on the west side it is at the point where also in the Macedonian and Roman time the wall of the lower city joined the Acropolis-wall. For the rest we were guided by the formation of the ground, and by the pottery belonging to the second city.
I have given in Ilios (p. 625, No. 1480) an engraving of a mysterious cavern situated just outside the lower city, about 300 yards to the west of the hill of Hissarlik, at a place where the site of Ilium slopes from the city wall gently down to the plain (see Plan VIII.); it is beneath a protruding rock crowned with three fig-trees, which have grown up from the same root. Having excavated it in 1879, I found a vaulted passage, 3 m. broad by 1.68 m.
