112 Oiitlijies of European History Food prod- ucts and climate of the Medi- terranean equally so in ancient times. In the Homeric poems bread and wine are the chief food of all, even of the children; and Eu- ripides praises bread and wine as the earliest gifts of the gods to men. In spite of the dry summer heat, the grapevine and the olive tree grow and ripen their fruit without irrigation. This is a condition in the Mediterranean countries, then, very different Fig. 58. The Mound of Axcient Troy (Ilium) When Schliemann first visited this mound (see map, p. 146) in 1868, it was about one hundred and twenty-five feet high, and the Turks were cultivating grain on its summit. He excavated a pit like a crater in the top of the hill, passing downward through nine successive cities built each on the ruins of its predecessors. At the bottom of his pit (about fifty feet deep) Schliemann found the original once bare hilltop about seventy-five feet high, on which the men of the Late Stone Age (p. 14) had established a small settlement of sun-baked brick houses about 3000 B.C. (First City). Above the scanty ruins of this Late Stone Age settle- ment rose, in layer after layer, the ruins of the later cities, with the Roman buildings at the top. The entire depth of fifty feet of ruins rep- resented a period of about thirty-five hundred years from the First City (Late Stone Age) to the Ninth City (Roman) at the top. The Second City (p. 117) contained the earliest copper found in the series; the Sixth City was that of the Trojan War and the Homeric songs (p. 142). Its masonry walls may be seen in Fig. 71 from what we have found in Eg}^pt and Babylonia. The shores of the northern Mediterranean are on the whole so cut up by steep and rugged mountains that they are well suited to flocks and herds, but agriculture and gardening also flourish where river valleys and shore plains, as in Italy, offer a wider stretch of moist and culti- vable soil. A mild climate with a dry summer and a rainy season during winter makes the conditions of life easy and favorable.
