However, the want of ornamentation on the Trojan jewels, the hand-made uncoloured pottery with impressed or engraved ornamentation, and, finally, the want of iron and glass, convinced me that the ruins of Troy belong to such a remote antiquity, as to precede by ages the ruins of Mycenæ, the date of which I thought I could fix by the result of the 34 shafts which I sank in the Acropolis in February 1874. I therefore believed that Homer had only known the siege and destruction of Troy from an ancient tradition commemorated by preceding poets, and that, for favours received, he introduced his contemporaries as actors in his great tragedy. But I never doubted that a king of Mycenæ, by name Agamemnon, his charioteer Eurymedon, a Princess Cassandra, and their followers had been treacherously murdered either by Ægisthus at a banquet, "like an ox at the manger," as Homer[369] says, or in the bath by Clytemnestra, as the later tragic poets represent;[370] and I firmly believed in the statement of Pausanias,[371] that the murdered persons had been interred in the Acropolis, differing in this respect, as I have said before, from Leake, Dodwell, O. Müller, E. Curtius, Prokesch, and other travellers in the Peloponnesus, who had all misunderstood the statement of Pausanias, and thought that he meant the murdered persons to have been buried in the lower town. My firm faith in the traditions made me undertake my late excavations in the Acropolis, and led to the discovery of the five tombs, with their immense treasures. Although I found in these tombs a very high civilisation, from a technical point of view, yet, as in Ilium, I found there only hand-made or most ancient wheel-made pottery, and no iron. Further, writing was known in Troy, for I found there a number of short inscriptions, in very ancient Cypriote characters; and, so far as we can judge, in a language which is essentially the same as Greek;[372] whereas we have the certainty now that the alphabet was unknown in Mycenæ. Had it been known, the Mycenean goldsmiths, who were always endeavouring to invent some new ornamentation, would have joyfully availed themselves of the novelty to introduce the strange characters in their decoration. Besides, in the remote antiquity, to which the Homeric rhapsodies and the tradition of the Mycenean tombs refer, there was as yet no commercial intercourse. Nobody travelled, except on warlike or piratical expeditions. Thus there may have been a very high civilisation at Mycenæ, while at the very same time the arts were only in their first dawn in Troy, and writing with Cypriote characters may have been in use in Troy more than 1000 years before any alphabet was known in Greece.