But habitation of the Esquiline and Quirinal Hills in the sixth century is attested by a number of tombs from a total of 164 found there in the 1870’s. The finds from these were never scientifically recorded, and they have never been published, but it is noteworthy that they include weapons, which are absent from the cremation-graves in the Forum. It looks as though the Esquiline folk were invaders, with a more warlike tradition than the Palatine hut-dwellers. The Esquiline folk might earlier have used the Forum necropolis for inhumation. We know that the Sabines buried their dead. Literary tradition (the Rape of the Sabine Women) records that the early Romans got their wives from among the Sabines. Numa Pompilius, the second of the legendary Roman kings, bears a Sabine name. Might not the two types of graves in the Forum necropolis represent the peaceful fusion of cremating Latins and inhuming Sabines who had laid aside their warlike ways? * * * * * On top of the Forum necropolis, when the swamp was drained, huts were built. The archaeological evidence for this phase of early Rome’s history was provided by Boni’s stratigraphic excavation (recently confirmed by the Swede Einar Gjerstad) to the northwest of the site of the equestrian statue of the Emperor Domitian in the middle of the Forum. Gjerstad dug a trench sixteen feet long and eleven feet wide, down to virgin soil, which he found nineteen feet below the present Forum level. On the earth wall of the trench the story of the centuries could be read in the successive levels (Figs. 3.3 and 3.4). Between levels three and nineteen, six pavements could be counted, but level nineteen takes us, to judge by the pots found in it, only back to about 450 B.C. In layers twenty to twenty-two, Gjerstad found three pebble pavements, which he dates about 575 B.C. If he is right in assigning to this date the beginning of monarchic Rome, he has pushed its date down in our direction over 150 years from the traditional 753 B.C. But there is more history below this. Strata twenty-three to twenty-eight are remains of huts, similar to but (pottery again) later than the ones on the Palatine. Gjerstad dates them in two phases: 650–625 and 625–575 B.C. Rather than push the traditional date down so far, it seems plausible to suppose that these huts represent the period assigned by the literary tradition to the early kings, and to argue that the sophisticated period, symbolized by the Forum’s earliest pebble pavement, was inaugurated by Rome’s earliest Etruscan king, Tarquin I. [Illustration: FIG. 3.3 Rome, Forum. Excavation at Equus Domitiani, showing strata. (E. Gjerstad, _Early Rome_ I, p. 37)] [Illustration: FIG. 3.4 Rome, Forum. Excavation at Equus Domitiani, schematic drawing of strata. (E. Gjerstad, _Antiquity_ 26 [1952], p. 61)]