Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/230

say now what part, if any, of these walls belongs to the second city. But the great difference in the level of the surface of the two gates rather induces us to believe that the old lateral walls had been at least in great part destroyed, and that most of the bricks and brick débris which encumbered the upper gateway belong to the lateral walls and upper construction built by the third settlers, and that the latter employed in both gateways the system repeatedly described as used by their predecessors, of baking the brick walls entire. The altar may already have stood in the gate when the walls were fired, for not only the outward appearance of the square plate of slate granite with which it was covered, and the great block of the same stone cut out in the form of a crescent which stood above it, but also the fractures of these slabs, all denote that they have been exposed to a great incandescence.

Professor Sayce observes to me that "brick walls, similarly baked after their construction, have been found elsewhere. For example, the sixth stage of the great temple of 'the Seven Lights of Heaven,' built by Nebuchadnezzar at Borsippa, and now known as the Birs-i-Nimrùd, was composed of bricks vitrified by intense heat into a mass of blue slag after the stage was erected. In Scotland, also, vitrified forts have been discovered, of which the best known is Craig Phadric, near Inverness, where the walls have been fused into a compact mass after they have been built. Here, however, the walls are made of stone and not of brick."

Mr. James D. Butler, President of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, writes me on this interesting subject as follows:—

"Madison, Feb. 14, 1883.

"Henry Schliemann, Esq.

"In the London Times of January 26, I am pleased with your Trojan letter, especially with your discovery of an inversion of our mode of making brick.

"It seems odd to lay them up crude and then bake them. But I