Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric PeoplesNadaillac, Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, marquis de
History
Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples
Nadaillac, Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, marquis de
Archaeology; Prehistoric peoples
Other ruins are evidently remains of the royal residence. The homes of
the people were clustered on the sides and at the foot of the hill.
After the destruction of the town by the Greeks, the Acropolis formed
one vast mass of ruins, from which bits of walls stood out here and
there as mute witnesses of the catastrophe. The thin layer of black
earth covering the ruins seems to point to the speedy rebuilding of the
town. The houses of the third settlement are very irregularly grouped,
and consisted mostly of one story only, containing a number of very
small rooms. Some of the walls are of bricks with glazed facings,
others of very small stones cemented together with clay. In one house
of rather larger size than the others was found some cement made of
cinders, mixed with fragments of charcoal, broken bones, and the
remains of shells and pottery. On the northwest the new colonists
erected walls in place of those which had fallen down, but they were of
very inferior masonry, coarse bricks baked on the spot, in the way
customary among the Trojans, having formed the material.
The destruction of the third town was more complete than that of Troy.
The walls of the houses can still be made out rising to a certain
height, and it was upon them as foundations that the fourth colony set
up their abodes. These dwellings are smaller still, with flat roofs
formed of beams on which was laid a coating of rushes and clay. Every
generation appears to have been poorer than the last, alike in material
wealth and in fertility of resource.
The fifth colony spread northwards and eastwards. Their homes were
built very much in the same style as those of their predecessors. The
resemblance does not end there, and Dr. Schliemann notes that among the
ruins of the three towns, which successively rose from the site of
Troy, are found similar strange-looking idols, hatchets in jade,
porphyry, diorite, and bronze, goblets with two handles, clumsy stone
hammers, trachyte grindstones, and fusaïoles or perforated whorls
bearing symbolic signs of a similar form. Evidently the men who
succeeded each other after the great siege of Troy on the now
celebrated hill of Hissarlik belonged to the same race, perhaps even to
the same tribe. There are, however, certain notable differences which
must not be passed over. The later pottery is not of such fine clay or
so well moulded as the earlier specimens, nor are the stone hammers,
which appear to have been the chief implements used, of such good
workmanship. The piles of shells left to accumulate about the houses of
the fourth and fifth towns can only be compared to the kitchen-middings
so often referred to, and there is no doubt that those who left such
heaps of rubbish about their dwellings could not have been so civilized
as were the celebrated Trojans.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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