Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/256

Troy. 233 the Bali Dagh. Again, Priam, after having obtained the body of Hector, begs Achylles to grant an armistice of eleven days, that he may prepare and celebrate his son*s funeral, adding — " We are, as thou knowest, shut up in the city by the siege, and wood for the pyre has to be fetched afar from the mountains ; and the Trojans are terribly scared [by this war]."^ Would the old king have thus spoken if Troy had been at Bunarbashi, whose heights are connected with a wooded mountain range (Ida), whence the Trojans could quietly have fetched as much wood as they required, without asking anybody's leave, or being troubled by the Greeks on the shore ? The poem by itself is not sufficient evidence in a contention of this nature ; literary documents seldom are ; for though helpful in throwing out useful hints, they are necessarily fragmentary, often immature and doubtful, so that it would be unsafe to trust to them alone ; reference to the results of the excavations should, if possible, be made in every instance before coming to a final conclusion. These results, needless to say, are deadly against the hypothesis under notice.^ Lechevalier makes much of the fact that on the Bali Dagh are several tumuli, which he would identify with the tu/jl^oi or funereal mounds of the Iliady in which the Trojan heroes were buried. Of these the largest, which Lechevalier christened the Tomb of Hector, because of its size, was opened by Sir John Lubbock in 1872 ; but neither bones nor even ashes were found in the vault ; whilst the broken pottery collected around it was painted, and seemingly not older than the third century B.C. The excavations of Von Hahn in 1864 and Schliemann in 1868, on and around the Bali Dagh, were without results. Despite their zealous search, no old pottery, or brick, or even freestone, which might point to an important settlement on this spot in remote antiquity, was discovered. Towards the summit, however, they brought to light the ruins of a small acropolis, in length about 200 metres by 100 metres. The mode of building exhibited in these walls is pot uniform throughout ; thus some of the blocks are of considerable size and roughly squared, 1 Iliad— OlffOa yap, wc Kara Avrv UXfuOa, ri/XoOi 8' vXrj diifity e^ opeoc' fidXa de Tpweg Miatriy, 2 Schliemann, //tos.