The Sea-Kings of Crete. James Baikie
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this question has come in the most surprising and romantic fashion from the archæological discoveries of the last forty years.
CHAPTER III
SCHLIEMANN AND HIS WORK
The man whose labours were to give a new impetus to the study of Greek origins, and to be the beginning of the revelation of an unknown world of ancient days, was born on January 6, 1822, at Neu Buckow in Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He was the son of a clergyman who himself had a deep love for the great tales of antiquity, for his son has told how his father used often vividly to narrate the stories of the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and of the Trojan War. When Schliemann was barely seven years old he received a present of a child's history of the world, in which the picture of the destruction of Troy and the flight of Æneas made a profound impression upon his young mind, and roused in him a passionate desire to go and see for himself what remained of the ancient splendours of Ilium. He found it impossible to believe that the massive fortifications of Troy had vanished without leaving a trace of their existence. When his father admitted that the walls were once as huge as those depicted in his history book, but asserted that they were now totally destroyed, he retorted: 'Father, if such walls once existed, they cannot possibly have been completely destroyed; vast ruins of them must still remain, but they are hidden beneath the dust of ages.' Already he had made the resolution that some day he would excavate Troy.
The romance of bygone days and of hidden treasure surrounded the boy's early years, and no doubt had its own influence in determining his bent. A pond just behind his father's garden had its legend of a maiden who rose from its waters each midnight, bearing a silver bowl. In the village an ancient barrow had its story of a robber knight who had buried his favourite child there in a golden cradle; and near by was the old castle of Henning von Holstein, who, when besieged by the Duke of Mecklenburg, had buried his treasures close to the keep of his stronghold. On such romantic legends Schliemann's young imagination was nourished. By the time he was ten years old he had produced a Latin essay on the Trojan War. Such things, which in another might have been mere childish precocities, were in him the indications of an enthusiasm for antiquity, which was destined to be the ruling passion of his whole life.
Yet the beginnings of his career in the world were unromantic to the last degree. His father's poverty forced him to give up the hope of a learned life, and at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a small grocer in a country village, in whose employment, surely uncongenial enough for such a spirit, he spent five and a half years, selling butter, herrings, potato-brandy and the like, and occupying his spare moments in tidying out the little shop. Even in such circumstances his passion for the Homeric story found means, sufficiently quaint, for its gratification. There came one evening to the shop a miller's man, who had been well educated, but had fallen into poor circumstances, and had taken to drink, yet even in his degradation had not forgotten his Homer. 'That evening,' says Schliemann, 'he recited to us about a hundred lines of the poet, observing the rhythmic cadence of the verses. Although I did not understand a syllable, the melodious sound of the words made a deep impression upon me, and I wept bitter tears over my unhappy fate. Three times over did I get him to repeat to me those divine verses, rewarding his trouble with three glasses of whisky, which I bought with the few pence that made up my whole wealth. From that moment I never ceased to pray God that by His grace I might yet have the happiness of learning Greek.'
To one whose heart was filled with such a passion for learning, no obstacle could prove insuperable. Yet for many a day the Fates seemed most unpropitious. Ill-health drove him to emigrate to Venezuela, but his ship was wrecked on the Dutch coast, and he became the errand-boy of a business house in Amsterdam. Here in his first year of service he managed, while going on his master's errands, to learn English in the first six months and French in the next, and incidentally to save for intellectual purposes one half of his salary of 800 francs. The mental training of the first year enabled him to learn Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese with much greater rapidity, each language being acquired in six weeks. In 1846 he was sent by another firm as their agent to St. Petersburg, where in the next year he founded a business house of his own, and from that time all went well with him. The Crimean War brought him opportunities which he utilized with such ingenuity as to derive considerable profit from them. By 1858 he considered that the fortune he had made was sufficient to warrant him in devoting himself entirely to archæology, and though exceptional circumstances obliged him to return to business for a little, he finally cut himself loose from it in 1863, and took up the task which was to occupy the remainder of his busy life.
WALLED PASSAGE IN WALL, TIRYNS (p. 49)
BEEHIVE TOMB (TREASURY OF ATREUS), MYCENÆ (p. 46)
His Greek studies had led him to two convictions on which his whole exploring work was based. First, that the site of ancient Troy was on the spot called in classical days New Ilium, the Hill of Hissarlik, near the coast of the Ægean; and second, that the Greek traveller, Pausanias, was right in stating that the murdered Agamemnon and his kin were buried within the walls of the Acropolis at Mycenæ, and not without it. In both these opinions he ran counter to the prevailing views of his time. It was generally believed that, if Troy had ever any real existence at all, its site was to be looked for not at Hissarlik, but far inland near Bunarbashi; while the authority of Pausanias as to the graves of the Atreidæ was held to be quite unreliable.
Schliemann resolved to put his convictions to the test of actual excavation. In April, 1870, he cut the first sod of his excavation at Hissarlik. The work went on with varying, but never brilliant, fortune, until the year 1873, when his faith and constancy began at last to meet with their reward. On the south-west of the site a great city gate was uncovered, lines of wall, already partly disclosed, began to show themselves more plainly, and quite close to the gate there was discovered the famous 'Treasure of Priam,' so called, a considerable mass of vessels and ornaments in gold and silver, with a number of spearheads, axes, daggers, and cups, wrought in copper. As the excavations progressed, it became evident that not one city, but many cities, had stood upon this ancient site. The First City, reached, of course, at the lowest level of the excavation, immediately above the virgin soil, belonged to a very early stage of human development. Its remains yielded such objects as stone axes and flint knives, together with the black, hand-made, polished pottery, known as 'bucchero,' which is characteristic of Neolithic sites in the Ægean, ornamented frequently with incised patterns which are filled in with a white chalky substance. The stratum of débris belonging to the First City averages about 8 feet in depth.
Above this lay a layer of soil about 1 foot 9 inches in depth, and then, on the top of a great layer of débris, by which the site had been levelled and extended, came the walls of the Second City. Here were the remains of a fortified gate with a ramp, paved with stone, leading up to it (Plate II. 1), and a strong wall of sun-dried brick resting upon a scarped stone substructure. This, with its projecting towers, had evidently once formed the enclosure of an Acropolis; and within the wall lay the remains of a large building which appeared to have been a house or palace. The separate finds included the great treasure already mentioned, and numerous other articles of use and adornment, golden hair-pins, bracelets, ear-pendants, a very primitive leaden idol of female form, and abundance of pottery, of which some specimens belong to the class of vases with long spouts, known to archæologists as 'Schnabelkanne,' or 'beak-jugs.' Above the stratum of the Second City lay the remains of no fewer than seven other settlements, more or less clearly marked, ending at the uppermost layer with the ruins of Roman Ilium, and its marble temple of Athena.
The gate and walls of the Second