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II.--Trojan Life and Civilisation

Hissarlik, April 5, 1872. On the first of this month I resumed the excavations which were discontinued at the end of November.

In the ruins of houses I find, amongst other things, a great number of small idols of very fine marble, with or without the symbols of the owl's head and woman's girdle. Many Trojan articles found in the ruins have stamped on them crosses of various descriptions, which are of the highest importance to archæology. Such symbols were already regarded, thousands of years before Christ, as religious tokens of the very greatest importance. The figure of the cross represents two pieces of wood which were laid crosswise upon one another before the sacrificial altars in order to produce holy fire. The fire was produced by the friction of one piece of wood against another.

At all depths we find a number of flat idols of very fine marble; upon many of them is the owl's face, and a female girdle with dots. I am firmly convinced that all of the helmeted owls' heads represent a goddess, and the important question now presents itself, what goddess is it who is here found so repeatedly, and is, moreover, the only one to be found upon the idols, drinking-cups, and vases? The answer is, she must necessarily be the tutelary goddess of Troy; she must be the Ilian Athena, and this indeed perfectly agrees with the statement of Homer, who continually calls her thea glaukopis Athene, "the goddess with the owl's face."

Hissarlik, June 18, 1872. I had scarcely begun to extend a third cutting into the hill when I found a block of triglyphs of Parian marble, containing a sculpture in high relief which represents Phoebus Apollo, who, in a long woman's robe with a girdle, is riding on the four immortal horses which pursue their career through the universe. Nothing is to be seen of a chariot. Above the head of the god is seen about two-thirds of the sun's disc with twenty rays. The face of the god is very expressive, and the folds of his robe are exquisitely sculptured; but my admiration is specially excited by the four horses, which, snorting and looking wildly forward, career through the universe with infinite power. Their anatomy is so masterly that I confess I have never seen so masterly a work.

It is especially remarkable to find the sun-god here, for Homer knows nothing of a temple to the sun in Troy, and later history says not a word about the existence of such a temple. However, the image of Phoebus Apollo does not prove that the sculpture must have belonged to a temple of the sun; in my opinion it may just as well have served as an ornament to any other temple.

I venture to express the opinion that the image of the sun, which I find represented here thousands and thousands of times upon the whorls of terra-cotta, must be regarded as the name or emblem of the town--that is, Ilios. In like manner, this sun-god shone in the form of a woman upon the propylæa of the temple of the Ilian Athena as a symbol of the sun-city.

This head of the sun-god appears to me to have so much of the Alexandrian style that I must adhere to history, and believe that this work of art belongs to the time of Lysimachus, who, according to Strabo, after the time of Alexander the Great, built here the new temple of the Ilian Athena, which Alexander had promised to the town of Ilium after the subjugation of the Persian Empire.

Were it not for the splendid terra-cottas which I find exclusively on the primary soil and as far as 6-1/2 feet above it, I could swear that at a depth of from 26 to 33 feet, I am among the ruins of the Homeric Troy. [The reader should bear in mind that Dr. Schliemann finally came back to this opinion.] For at this depth I have found a thousand wonderful objects; whereas I find little in the lowest stratum, the removal of which gives immense trouble. We daily find some of the whorls of very fine terra-cotta, and it is curious that those which have no decorations at all are always of the ordinary shape, and of the size of small tops, or like the craters of volcanoes, while almost all those possessing decorations are flat, and in the form of a wheel.

Metals, at least gold, silver, and copper, were known to the Trojans, for I found a copper knife highly gilded, a silver hairpin, and a number of copper nails at a depth of forty-six feet. I found many small instruments for use as pins; also a number of ivory needles, and some curious pieces of ivory, one in the form of a paper-knife, the other in the shape of an exceedingly neat dagger. We discovered one-edged or double-edged knives of white silex in the form of saws in quantities, each about two inches long; also many hand millstones of lava, and some beautiful red vases, cups, vessels, jugs, and hand plates. In these depths we likewise find many bones of animals; boars' tusks, small shells, horns of the buffalo, ram, and stag, as well as the vertebræ of the shark.

The houses and palaces in which the splendid terra-cottas were used were large and spacious, for to them belong all the mighty heaps of stone, hewn and unhewn, which cover them to the height of from 13 to 20 feet. These buildings were easily destroyed, for the stones were only joined with earth, and when the walls fell everything in the houses was crushed to pieces by the immense blocks of stone. The primitive Trojan people disappeared simultaneously with the destruction of their town. [Here, as well as in what goes before, Dr. Schliemann writes on the supposition, which he afterwards abandoned, that the remains in the lowest stratum are those of the Trojans of the Iliad.]