thirteen to twenty feet. Its houses and walls of fortification were
built of stones, large and small, joined with earth, and manifold
remains of these may be seen in the excavations. It was supposed that
these settlers were identical with the Trojans of whom Homer sang,
which is not the case.

All that can be said of the first settlers is that they belonged to
the Aryan race, as is sufficiently proved by the Aryan religious
symbols met with in the strata of their ruins, both upon the pieces of
pottery and upon the small curious terra-cottas with a hole in the
centre, which have the form of the crater of a volcano or of a
_carrousel_, _i.e._, a top.

The excavations made have sufficiently proved that the second nation
which built a town on this hill, upon the _debris_ of the first
settlers (which is from 13 to 20 feet deep), are the Trojans of whom
Homer sings. Their _debris_ lies from 23 to 33 feet below the surface.
This Trojan stratum, which, without exception, bears marks of great
heat, consists mainly of red ashes of wood, which rise from 5 to 10
feet above the Great Tower of Ilium, the double Scaean Gate, and the
great enclosing Wall, the construction of which Homer ascribes to
Poseidon and Apollo, and they show that the town was destroyed by a
fearful conflagration. How great the heat must have been is clear also
from the large slabs of stone upon the road leading from the double
Scaean Gate down to the Plain; for when the road was laid open all the
slabs appeared as uninjured as if they had been put down quite
recently; but after they had been exposed to the air for a few days,
the slabs of the upper part of the road, to the extent of some 10
feet, which had been exposed to the heat, began to crumble away, and
they have now almost disappeared, while those of the lower portion of
the road, which had not been touched by the fire, have remained
uninjured, and seem to be indestructible. A further proof of the
terrible catastrophe is furnished by a stratum of scoriae of melted
lead and copper, from one fifth to one and one fifth of an inch thick,
which extends nearly through the whole hill at a depth of from 28 to
29-1/2 feet. That Troy was destroyed by enemies after a bloody war is
further attested by the many human bones which were found in these
heaps of _debris_, and above all the skeletons with helmets, found in
the depths of the Temple of Athena, for, as we know from Homer, all
corpses were burned and the as