Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/32

The gold-work of Ilion may be expected to exhibit traces of having been affected to some degree by the foreign art to which the idols and cylinders owed their ultimate origin. And this I believe to be the case. The ornamentation of the gold knob given in this volume under No. 38 exactly resembles that of the solar disk on the Maeonian plaque of serpentine of which I have before spoken. The solar disk is depicted in the same way on a haematite cylinder from Kappadokia now in my possession, and the ornamentation may be traced back through the Hittite monuments to the early cylinders of Chaldea. But, simple as it seems, we look for it almost in vain at Mykênae; the only patterns found there which can be connected with it being the complicated ones reproduced in Dr. Schliemann's Mycenae, fig. 417 and 419. Here the old Asianic design has been made to subserve the Phoenician ornamentation of the sea-shell.

The foregoing considerations establish pretty clearly the latest limit of age to which we can assign the fall of the second prehistoric city of Hissarlik. It cannot be later than the tenth century before the Christian era; it is not likely to be later than the 12th. Already before the 10th century, the Phoenicians had planted flourishing colonies in Thera and Mêlos, and had begun to work the mines of Thasos, and it is therefore by no means probable that the Troad and the important city which stood there could have remained unknown to them. The date (1183 B.C.) fixed for the destruction of Troy by Eratosthenes—though on evidence, it is true, which we cannot accept—would agree wonderfully well with the archaeological indications with which Dr. Schliemann's excavations have furnished us, as well as with the testimony of the Egyptian records.

But it is difficult for me to believe that it could have happened at a period earlier than this. The inscriptions which I have discussed in the third Appendix to Ilios seem to make such a supposition impossible. I have there