Troja/Preface

by Heinrich Schliemann

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. Today 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,^[1] to be a Thrakian tribe; the Armenians of later history being, as we learn from Hérodotos, an offshoot of them.^[2]

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,^[3] 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.^[4]

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.^[5] 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.^[6]

The presence, in fact, of small stone cylinders points unmistakeably, wherever they occur, to the influence of primaeval Chaldea. When Assyria and Phoenicia took the place of Babylonia in Western Asia as civilizing powers, the cylinder made way for the lentoid or cone-like seal. Hence the discovery of cylinders at Ilion is one more proof of the age to which the prehistoric ruins of Hissarlik reach back, as well as of the foreign culture with which its inhabitants were in contact. The cylinder figured under No. 1522 in Ilios is especially important to the archaeologist. Its ornamentation is that of the class of cylinders which may now be classed as Hittite, and, in its combination of the Egyptian cartouche with the Babylonian form of seal, it displays the same artistic tendency as that which meets us in indubitably Hittite work. A cartouche of precisely the same peculiar shape is engraved on a copper ring which has recently been discovered by Dr. Max Ohnefalsch-Richter in Cyprus. Here the interior of the cartouche is filled with the rude drawing of the Trojan goddess, as she appears in the Hissarlik idols, excepting only that the Cyprian artist has provided her with wings similar to those on the owl-headed vases. In the case of the Hissarlik cylinder, on the other hand, a figure is drawn inside the cartouche, which is curiously like a rudely-designed scarab or beetle on a Hittite seal now in the possession of Mr. R. P. Greg. The flower placed by the side of the cartouche may be compared with one upon the Mykenaean ring to which I have before alluded, as well as with others on Cyprian cylinders of the "Hittite" class. I have already referred to the fact that the so-called swastika (卍) is figured upon the pelvis of the leaden image of the Asiatic goddess found among the ruins of Ilion. This would seem to stamp that mysterious symbol as of Hittite origin, at least as regards its use at Ilion. That it really was so, seems to have been proved by a discovery made last year by Mr. W. M. Ramsay at Ibreez or Ivris in Lykaonia. Here a king, in the act of adoring the god Sandon, is sculptured upon a rock in the characteristic style of Hittite art, and accompanied by Hittite inscriptions. His robe is richly ornamented, and along it runs a long line of Trojan swastikas. The same symbol, as is well known, occurs on the archaic pottery of Cyprus, where it seems to have originally represented a bird in flight, as well as upon the prehistoric antiquities of Athens and Mykênae, but it was entirely unknown to Babylonia, to Assyria, to Phoenicia and to Egypt. It must, therefore, either have originated in Europe and spread eastward through Asia Minor, or have been disseminated westward from the primitive home of the Hittites. The latter alternative is the more probable, but whether it is so or not, the presence of the symbol in the lands of the Aegean indicates a particular epoch, and the influence of a pre-Phoenician culture.

The gold-work of Ilion may be expected to exhibit traces of having been affected to some degree by the foreign art to which the idols and cylinders owed their ultimate origin. And this I believe to be the case. The ornamentation of the gold knob given in this volume under No. 38 exactly resembles that of the solar disk on the Maeonian plaque of serpentine of which I have before spoken. The solar disk is depicted in the same way on a haematite cylinder from Kappadokia now in my possession, and the ornamentation may be traced back through the Hittite monuments to the early cylinders of Chaldea. But, simple as it seems, we look for it almost in vain at Mykênae; the only patterns found there which can be connected with it being the complicated ones reproduced in Dr. Schliemann's Mycenae, fig. 417 and 419. Here the old Asianic design has been made to subserve the Phoenician ornamentation of the sea-shell.

The foregoing considerations establish pretty clearly the latest limit of age to which we can assign the fall of the second prehistoric city of Hissarlik. It cannot be later than the tenth century before the Christian era; it is not likely to be later than the 12th. Already before the 10th century, the Phoenicians had planted flourishing colonies in Thera and Mêlos, and had begun to work the mines of Thasos, and it is therefore by no means probable that the Troad and the important city which stood there could have remained unknown to them. The date (1183 B.C.) fixed for the destruction of Troy by Eratosthenes—though on evidence, it is true, which we cannot accept—would agree wonderfully well with the archaeological indications with which Dr. Schliemann's excavations have furnished us, as well as with the testimony of the Egyptian records.

But it is difficult for me to believe that it could have happened at a period earlier than this. The inscriptions which I have discussed in the third Appendix to Ilios seem to make such a supposition impossible. I have there shown that the so-called Cypriote syllabary is but a branch of a system of writing once used throughout the greater part of Asia Minor before the introduction of the Phoenico-Greek alphabet, which I have accordingly proposed to call the Asianic syllabary. The palaeographic genius of Lenormant and Deecke had already made them perceive that several of the later local alphabets of Asia Minor contained Cypriote characters, added in order to express sounds which were not provided for in the Phoenician alphabet; but Dr. Deecke was prevented by his theory as to the derivation and age of the Cypriote syllabary from discovering the full significance of the fact. It was left for me to point out, firstly, that these characters were more numerous than had been supposed, secondly, that many of them were not modifications but sister-forms of corresponding Cypriote letters, and thirdly, that they were survivals from an earlier mode of writing which had been superseded by the Phoenico-Greek alphabet. I also pointed out-herein following in the steps of Haug and Gomperz—that on three at least of the objects discovered by Dr. Schliemann at Hissarlik, and possibly on others also, written characters were found belonging, not indeed to the Cypriote form of the Asianic syllabary, but to what may be termed the Trojan form of it. Up to this point the facts and inferences were clear.

But I then attempted to go further, and to make it probable that the origin of the Asianic syllabary itself is to be sought in the Hittite hieroglyphics. Since the Appendix was published, this latter hypothesis of mine has received a striking confirmation. A year and a half ago I presented a memoir to the Society of Biblical Archaeology, in which I endeavoured by the help of a bilingual inscription to determine the values of certain of the Hittite characters. Among these there were eight which, if my method of decipherment were correct, denoted either vowels, or single consonants each followed by a single vowel. A few months afterwards, at Dr. Isaac Taylor's suggestion, I compared the forms of these eight characters with the forms of those characters of the Cypriote syllabary which possessed the same values. The result was most unexpectedly confirmatory of my conclusions; the forms in each case being almost identical. Those who wish to test the truth of this assertion can do so by referring to Dr. Taylor's recently-published work on The Alphabet, where the corresponding Hittite and Cypriote characters are given side by side (vol. ii. p. 123).^[7]

If, now, the Hittite hieroglyphics may be definitively regarded as the source of the Asianic syllabary, it is evident that Lydians or Trojans could not have come to employ it till some time, at all events, after the period when the conquerors of Carchemish carved their legends on the cliff of Sipylos and the rocks of Karabel. The cartouche of Ramses II., lately discovered by Dr. Gollob, by the side of the so-called image of Niobê, as well as the fact that the latter is an obvious imitation of the sitting figure of Nofretari, the wife of Ramses II., which is sculptured in the cliff near Abu Simbel, indicates that this period was that of the 14th century B.C. Between this date and that at which the inscriptions of Hissarlik were written, a full century at least must be allowed to have elapsed.

I have little to add or change in the Appendix in Ilios on the Trojan Inscriptions. The reading, however, of the legend on the terra-cotta seal reproduced on p. 693 (Nos. 1519, 1520) of Ilios has now been rendered certain by two deeply-cut and large-sized inscriptions on a terra-cotta weight in the possession of Mr. R. P. Greg, which is alleged to have come from Hissarlik. The characters, at any rate, resemble those of the Hissariik inscriptions, and before the weight passed into Mr. Greg's hands were invisible through dirt. They establish that the inscription upon the seal must be read E-si-re or Re-si-e, the name, probably, of the original owner. The word, moreover, on the patera found in the necropolis of Thymbra, which I had doubtfully made Levon or Revon, is now read ῥέζω by Dr. Deecke, no doubt rightly.

The alphabet of Kappadokia I am no longer inclined to include among those that preserved some of the characters of the old Asianic syllabary. Mr. Ramsay has copied an inscription at Eyuk, which goes far to show that the one given by Hamilton is badly copied, and that the characters in it which resemble those of the Cypriote syllabary had probably no existence in the original text. In fact, Mr. Ramsay's inscription makes it clear that the Kappadokian alphabet was the same as the Phrygian, both being derived, as he has pointed out, from an early Ionic alphabet of the 8th century B.C., used by the traders of Sinopê.^[8] As I now feel doubtful also about the alphabet of Kilikia, the alphabets of Asia Minor, which indubitably contain characters of the Asianic syllabary, will be reduced to those of Pamphylia, Lykia, Karia, Lydia, and Mysia. These, it will be noticed, form a continuous chain round the western and south-western shores of Asia Minor, the chain being further continued into Cyprus. The Karian alphabet, though still in the main undeciphered, has been determined with greater exactness during the last two or three years in consequence of the discovery of new inscriptions, and I have recently made a discovery in regard to it which may lead to interesting results. A peculiar class of scarabs is met with in Northern Egypt, on which certain curious figures are scratched in the rudest possible way, reminding us of nothing so much as the figures on some of the Hissarlik "whorls." The art, if art it can be called, is quite different from that of the "Hittite" cylinders of Cyprus or of the excessively rude seals that are found on the coast of Syria, and even as far west as the Lydian stratum of Sardes. On one of these scarabs belonging to Mr. Greg's collection I have found a long inscription in well-cut Karian letters, and an examination of another of the same class has brought to light some more letters of frequent occurrence in the Karian texts. Something at last, therefore, is now known of the native art of the south-western corner of Asia Minor; and a comparison of it with the scratchings on the Trojan "whorls" may hereafter help us to distinguish better than we can at present between the European, the Hittite, and the native Asianic elements, in the art and culture of Ilion.

One of the most curious facts, which Dr. Schliemann's excavations have made clear, is that even the destruction of the second city did not bring with it a break in the continuity of religion and art among the successive settlers upon Hissarlik. The idols and owl-headed vases, as well as the "whorls," all continued to be made and used by the inhabitants of the third, the fourth, and the fifth settlements. Even apart from the geological indications, it is evident from this that the site could never have long lain deserted. The old traditions lingered around it, and though new peoples came to dwell there, there must have been among them some relics of the older population. It could only have been the lower city, not the Pergamos itself, which even an orator in the full flow of his eloquence could have described as "uninhabited." It is not until we come to what Dr. Schliemann has called the Lydian stratum that the first break occurs. The second and more important break is naturally that of the Greek city.

The Greek city itself passed through more than one vicissitude of growth and decay. In the lower part of its remains, which do not extend for more than six feet below the present surface of the hill, excepting of course at the sides, we find that archaic Hellenic pottery which always marks the site of an early Greek town. Mixed with it is another species of pottery, which seems of native manufacture, but cannot be of earlier date than the 9th century before our era. At the time when this pottery was in use, the Aeolic Ilion, like the four villages that had preceded it, was still confined to the old Pergamos. Those who have visited the sites of early Greek cities in Asia Minor will readily understand that this was almost necessarily the case. Like the Aeolians of Old Smyrna or Kymê, the Aeolian colonists at Hissarlik were few in number and scanty in resources, while their position among a hostile population, or within reach of sea-faring pirates, made them choose the most isolated and defensible summit in the neighbourhood where they had planted themselves. This summit, however, as always elsewhere, was near the sea. When the army of Xerxes passed through the Troad, the Aeolic city seems to have not yet extended into the plain below. The long-deserted lower town of the prehistoric Ilion was not again covered with buildings until the Macedonian age.

Dr. Schliemann has been vaguely accused of obscuring his facts by his theories, and the public has been warned that a strict distinction should be made between the theories he has put forward and the facts he has discovered. In reality, however, it is his critics themselves, rather than Dr. Schliemann, who have been guilty of propounding theories which have no facts to support them. As compared with most explorers, he has been singularly free from the fault of hasty generalization, or the far worse fault of bending the facts to suit pre-conceived views. Admiration of the Homeric Poems, and the growing conviction that if the Troy of Homer ever had any existence at all it could only have been at Hissarlik, can hardly be called theories. His works are for the most part a record of facts, brought into relation with one another by means of those inductive. inferences, which the scientific method of modern archacology obliges us to draw from them. And, with the true scientific spirit, he has never hesitated to modify these inferences whenever the discovery of new facts seems to require it, while the facts themselves have invariably been presented by him fully and fairly, so that his readers have always been able to test for themselves the validity of the inferences he has based on them. To forbid him to make any suggestion which is supported only by probable or possible evidence, is to deprive him of a privilege enjoyed both by the critics themselves and by every scientific enquirer. But such suggestions will be found to be rare, and the fact that so much has been said about them makes me suspect that the critics do not possess that archaeological knowledge, which would enable them to distinguish between a merely possible or probable theory and an inference which is necessitated by the facts. The very peculiar pottery found immediately below the Greek stratum proves to the archaeologist, more convincingly than any architectural remains could do, that a separate and independent settlement once existed between the fifth and the Greek cities, just as the objects found on the plain below prove that the Greek city must once have extended thus far, even though the walls by which it was surrounded have now wholly disappeared. On the other hand, the theory that this settlement was of Lydian foundation is a theory only, about which Dr. Schliemann expresses himself with the needful hesitation.

One of the most disheartening signs of the little knowledge of prehistoric and Levantine archaeology there is in this country, is to be found in the criticisms passed upon Ilios in respectable English publications. Nowhere but in England would it have been possible for writers who enjoy a certain reputation to pass off-hand judgments and propound new theories of their own on archaeological questions, without having first taken the trouble to learn the elementary principles of the subject about which they treat. What can be said of a critic who does not know the difference between prehistoric and Hellenic pottery on the one hand, or archaic and classical Greek pottery on the other, and covers his ignorance by misquoting the words of an eminent French archaeologist who has made the early pottery of the Levant his special study? The English public is apt to think that a man who is reputed to be a great scholar is qualified to pronounce an opinion upon every subject under the sun. As a matter of fact, he knows as little as the public itself about those subjects in which he has not undergone the necessary preliminary training, and his writing about them is but a new form of charlatanry. The power of translating from Greek and Latin, or of composing Greek and Latin verses, will not enable a scholar to determine archaeological problems, any more. than it will enable him to translate the hymns of the Rig-Veda, or to decipher a cuneiform inscription. Theories in regard to Dr. Schliemann's discoveries at Hissarlik have been gravely put forward of late, which have derived an importance only from the influential character of the organs in which they have appeared. It has been maintained in sober earnest, that the fifth stratum of ruins represents the Macedonian Ilion, which was embellished by Lysimakhos about 300 B.C., and sacked by Fimbria in 85 B.C., while the fourth city was that visited by Xerxes, and the third city the old Aeolic settlement. It is only necessary for the reader who does not pretend to a knowledge of archaeology to examine the woodcuts so lavishly distributed throughout the pages of Ilios, in order that he may judge of the value of such a hypothesis, or of the archaeological attainments that lie behind it. The pottery, the terra-cotta "whorls," the idols, the implements and weapons of stone and bone, found in the prehistoric strata of Hissarlik, are all such as have never been found—nor are likely to be found—on any Greek site even of the prehistoric age. We shall look for them in vain at Mykênae, at Orkhomenos, at Tiryns, or in the early tombs of Spata and Menidi, of Rhodes and Cyprus. On the other hand, the distinctive features of Greek daily life are equally absent; there are neither coins nor lamps, nor alphabetic inscriptions, nor patterns of the classical epoch; there is no Hellenic pottery, whether archaic or recent. We now know pretty exactly what were the objects left behind them by the Greeks and their neighbours in the Levant during the six centuries that preceded the Christian era; and, thanks more especially to Dr. Schliemann's labours, we can even trace the art and culture of that period back to the art and culture of the still older period, which was first revealed to us by his exploration of Mykênae. It is too late now, when archaeology has become a science and its fundamental facts have been firmly established, to revert to the dilettante antiquarianism of fifty years ago. Then, indeed, it was possible to put forward theories that were the product of the literary, and not of the scientific, imagination, and to build houses of straw upon a foundation of shifting sand. But the time for such pleasant recreation is now gone; the study of the far distant past has been transferred from the domain of literature to that of science, and he who would pursue it must imbue himself with the scientific method and spirit, must submit to the hard drudgery of preliminary training, and must know how to combine the labours of men like Evans and Lubbock, or Virchow and Rolleston, with the results that are being poured in upon us year by year from the Oriental world. 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: the archaeologist can only pass by the paradox with a smile.

A. H. Sayce.

Oxford,

October, 1883.

1. VII. p. 295, X. p. 471.
2. Herod. VII. 73; see also Eustath. ad Dienys. Perieg, v. 694.
3. Contemporary Review, December, 1878.
4. See my Paper on "The Monuments of the Hittites" in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, VII. 2, p. 259.
5. Academy, November 27, 1881 (p. 384); see also Major di Cesnola's Salaminia, pp. 118 sq., and Fr. Lenormant in the Journal des Savans, June, 1883, and the Gazette archéologique, VIII. 5–6, (1883). The art of the engraved stones of the Hittite class, which is based on an archaic Babylonian model, must be carefully distinguished from that of the rude gems occasionally met with at Tyre, Sidon, and other places on the Syrian coast, as well as from that of the so-called lentoid gems so plentifully found on prehistoric sites in Krêtê, the Peloponnêsos, and the islands of the Aegean. The origin of the latter is cleared up by a seal of rockcrystal found near Beyrût, and now in Mr. R. P. Greg's collection, which has the same design engraved upon it as that on the lentoid gem from Mykênae figured under No. 175 in Schliemann's Mycenae. This fact disposes of the theory so elaborately worked out in Milchhoefer's Anfänge der Kunst in Griechenland. The art of the lentoid gems must be of Phoenician importation. Whether, however, it may not have owed its original inspiration to the Hittites at the time when they bordered upon Phoenicia, must be left to future research to decide. Some of the designs upon these gems seem clearly to refer to subjects of Accadian or archaic Babylonian mythology, but this may be due to direct Babylonian influence, since Sargon I. of Accad (whose date has been fixed by a recent discovery as early as 3750 B.C.) not only set up a monument of victory on the shores of the Mediterranean, but even crossed over into Cyprus. The rudely-cut stones from Syria, to which I have alluded above, may have been the work of the same aboriginal population as that which carved the curious sculptures in the Wadis of el-'Akkab and Kânah, near Tyre.
6. Schliemann's Mycenae, fig. 530. See Academy, Aug. 25, 1883, p. 135.
7. It is particularly gratifying to me to find that Dr. Deecke in his latest work on the Cypriote inscriptions (in Collitz's Sammlung der gricchischen Dialekt Inschriften, I. p. 12) has renounced his theory of the cunciform origin of the Cypriote syllabary in favour of my Hittite one.
8. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, XV. 1 (1883).