Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/226

thickness of the walls varies generally between 0.45 m. and 0.65 m. The foundations of these house-walls are only 0.50 m. deep, and have simply been sunk into the débris of the second city, without having any solid foundation. For this reason the houses, with but few exceptions, cannot have been more than one story high; they have no particular characteristic ground plan, but consist of several small chambers irregularly grouped, the walls of which are often not even parallel. The largest and most regular house is the habitation repeatedly mentioned, to the north-west of the south-western gate (see p. 325, No. 188 in Ilios), which I used to consider as the royal house of the burnt city. But as we have now recognized as the Ilios of the Homeric legend the second city, which had a lower town, and which perished in a tremendous catastrophe, this largest house of the third settlement can have nothing whatever to do with that original Troy. I found the substructions of this house, as well as those of the buildings to the north of it, buried about three mètres deep in bricks, which were baked, much like those of the temple A. Hence I conclude that this house, as well as the adjacent buildings, must have had at least one high story of bricks above their substructions of small stones; and that, in the same manner as the walls of the temples and the fortification walls of the second city, these house-walls must have been baked in situ after they had been erected, by large quantities of wood being piled up on both sides of each wall and kindled simultaneously. The condition of the bricks can leave no doubt on this point, for all of them had evidently been exposed to a great fire, and besides they were very fragile; had they been baked separately, they would have been much more solid. Among the houses of the third settlement on the east side of the great northern trench X–Z (Plan VII.), there also occurred walls consisting partly of unbaked and partly of baked bricks, which latter appear to have been extracted from the heaps of ruins of the second city. Remains of such a mode of