Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/24

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,^[1] 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