Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/84

melted pine-resin, to which may have been added a little oil, and, when this had become cold, exposing them to the action of the fire, so that the layer of resin became carbonized."

No. 4 is a very small lustrous black cup, with a handle and a convex foot. No. 5 is a lustrous black jug: the body is globular, the foot flat, the neck straight and cylindrical; the handle long and slender. The clay of this jug is only three millimètres thick, of which hardly one millimètre is baked; it is one of the lightest vases I ever found in any of the prehistoric settlements at Hissarlik,

and is of capital interest to science, because it is wheel-made and, except the vase, p. 214, No. 23 in Ilios, which is manufactured in like manner, it is the only entire wheel-made vase of the first city that I can boast of: fragments of wheel-made pottery sometimes occur in the first city, but they are rare.

Although the ruins of this first and most ancient Trojan settlement may be more than a thousand years older than Homer, I cannot refrain from mentioning in this place, that the art of making pottery by means of the wheel existed already as a handicraft and a profession at the time of the poet; as we see it in the admirable simile, in which,