Page:Mycenaean Troy.djvu/28

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MYCENAEAN TROY

tous on the north where it meets the swamp of the latter stream, forming a marked contrast to its gentle incline westward into the broad and level plain of the Scamander.

The name Hissarlik ("little fortification") was given to this locality because of the Hellenistic remains which were here visible. In fact, the inhabitants of the little settlement of Tshiblak, a mile or so distant, designated it the "Place of Ruins" (Asarlik). To-day it is a place of ruins indeed, and, we may add, of isolation and desolation as well. A more lonely spot the traveler rarely visits, and he can find shelter for the night only in the miserable little villages of Yeni Shehr or Yeni Koï. Yet this insignificant hill marks the site of the Homeric Pergamos, or at least that city whose siege and capture formed the historical basis of the poems. On the same plateau was built the Græco-Roman Ilion, with its world-renowned Athena temple. Xerxes (Herodotus, VII, 43) and Alexander (Arian, I, 11) ascended the citadel, believing that they stood in "divine Ilios."

As the eye surveys the Trojan country, it is attracted to those heights near Bunarbashi, almost ten miles distant from the Hellespont, amid which, in the mountain fastnesses, where the Ida range is high and steep, is the fortress of Balidagh. Rising as it does five hundred feet, it forms an excellent spot for an im-


    History of Greece, 1846; Schliemann, Ithaka, 1869; Gladstone, Homer, 1878; Sayce, Contemporary Review, 1878; Eckenbrecher, Die Lage des homerischen Ilion, 1843; Braun, Homer und sein Zeitalter, 1858; Christ, Topographie der troianischen Ebene, 1874; Meyer, Geschichte von Troas, 1877; Lenormant, Les Antiquités de la Troade, 1876.