Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/94

52 General History of Europe 74. Cretan Civilization on the European Mainland (about 1500-1200 B.C.). Up to this time the mainland, both in Europe and in Asia Minor, had continued to lag behind the civilization of the islands. Nevertheless, the fleets of Egypt and of Crete traded with the mainland of Greece. In the plain of Argos, ^Egean chieftains were sufficiently civilized after 1500 B.C. to build the massive strongholds of Tiryns and Mycense. They imported THE MOUND CONTAINING THE NINE CITIES OF ANCIENT TROY (ILIUM) When the celebrated archaeologist Schliemann first visited this mound (see map, p. 50) in 1868, it was about one hundred and twenty-five feet high, and the Turks were cultivating grain on its summit. In 1870 he excavated a pit like a crater in the top of the hill, passing downward in the course of four years 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 had established a small settlement of sun- baked-brick houses about 3000 B.C. Above the scanty ruins of this Late Stone Age settlement 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 represented a period of about thirty-five hundred years from the First City (Late Stone Age) to the Ninth City (Roman) at the top. The Sixth City was that of the Trojan War and the Homeric songs works of Cretan and Egyptian pottery and metal work, which are today the earliest tokens of a life of higher refinement on the continent of Europe (see Ancient Times, 364). 75. Troy (about 3000-1200 B. c.). Along the Asiatic side of the JEgean Sea we find much earlier progress than on the European side. In the days when metal was first introduced into Crete (after 3000 B.C.) there arose at the northwest corner of Asia Minor a shabby little Late Stone Age trading station known as Troy. Though several times destroyed, as modern excavations show, it was rebuilt and finally came to control a kingdom of