Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/310

that here, on the Thracian Chersonese, there lived in a remote prehistoric age a people of the same race, habits, and culture, as the first settlers on the hill of Hissarlik. With the débris of this ancient settlement, and probably long after it had ceased to exist, was erected the tumulus of Protesilaus, to the probable date of which we have a key in the latest pottery contained in the tomb. Now as I find among the pottery a great quantity of a similar type and of a like fabric to the pottery of the second, the burnt city of Troy, and nothing later, we may attribute the tumulus with the very greatest probability to the time of the catastrophe, which gave rise to the legend of the Trojan war. But I must remind the reader, that this is the only tumulus yet found having in it Trojan pottery. The tumulus of Besika Tepeh, explored by me in 1879,^[1] contains a large quantity of prehistoric pottery, which appears to be contemporaneous with that of the second city of Troy, or may even be still more ancient, but its material, fabric, and forms, are totally different from anything found at Troy, and it most decidedly denotes a race of people altogether different. The same may be said of the tumulus of Hanaï Tepeh, which I explored together with Mr. Calvert,^[2] for here too the pottery is totally different from the Trojan pottery. But Hanaï Tepeh has only the form of a vast tumulus; in reality the débris of which it is composed denote a succession of human settlements.

As the latest pottery contained in Kara Agatch Tepeh is identical with that of the second settlement of Troy, there is nothing to contradict the tradition, that this tumulus belongs to the actual time of the Trojan war; and who then shall gainsay the legend, that it marked the tomb of the first Greek who leaped down on the Trojan shore on the arrival of the fleet? We may find it more difficult to