Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/116

mined on the east side by the slope, on the west side by the swamp and the ancient bed of the Scamander. But we find a still more weighty reason for the identity of these springs with the Homeric sources, in the fact that they flowed directly and at a distance of a few hundred yards into the Scamander, and the springs might, for this reason, be called by the poet the sources of this river,^[1] whilst the three springs which still exist on the north side of Ilium flow into the Simois, and may perhaps for that reason have been called by the Trojans "Springs of the Simois," to distinguish them from the springs of the Scamander. Being for all these reasons perfectly convinced that Homer could not possibly have had in mind any other springs than these, we endeavoured to find here the lukewarm spring he refers to,^[2] and with this object we carefully excavated the soil around, but all our researches were in vain. The water of the three springs had a uniform temperature of 15°.6 C. (60°.8 F.) But the absence of the warm spring must not astonish us, for it no longer existed in the time of Demetrius of Scepsis^[3] (210–180 B.C.), and it may have been already destroyed by an earthquake at a remote antiquity, or changed by the same cause into a cold-water spring.

To the many proofs I have given in Ilios, pp. 83–96, of the identity of the ancient bed of the Scamander with the immense bed of the small rivulet Kalifatli Asmak, which flows at the foot of the hill of Hissarlik, and immediately on the west side of the lower city of Ilium, I may