built Ilium during the dominion of the Lydians. Now, as the commencement of the Lydian dominion dates from the year 797 B.C., and as the Ilians seem to have been completely established there long before the arrival of Xerxes in 480 B.C., we may fairly assume that their first settlement in Troy took place about 700 B.C. The house-walls of Hellenic architecture, consisting of large stones without cement, as well as the remains of Greek household utensils, do not, however, extend in any case to a depth of more than two meters (6½ feet) in the excavations on the flat surface of the hill.
As I find in Ilium no inscriptions later than those belonging to the second century after Christ, and no coins of a later date than Constans II. and Constantine II., but very many belonging to these two emperors, as well as to Constantine the Great, it may be regarded as certain that the town began to decay even before the time of Constantine the Great, who, as is well known, at first intended to build Constantinople on that site; but that it remained an inhabited place till about the end of the reign of Constans II., that is till about A.D. 361. But the accumulation of débris during this long period of 1061 years amounts only to two meters or 6½ feet, whereas we have still to dig to a depth of 12 meters or 40 feet, and in many places even to 14 meters or 46½ feet, below this, before reaching the native ground which consists of shelly limestone (Muschelkalk). This immense layer of débris from 40 to 46½ feet thick, which has been left by the four different nations that successively inhabited the hill before the arrival of the Greek colony, that is before 700 B.C., is an immensely rich cornucopia of the most remarkable terra-cottas, such as have never been seen before, and of other objects which have not the most distant resemblance to the productions of Hellenic art. The question now forces itself upon us:—Whether this enormous mass of ruins may not have been brought from another place to increase the height of the hill: Such an hypothesis, as every
