Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/176

 Troy. 155 for these dwellings and the products of human industry which they enclose, so hoary an antiquity as would practically make them older than any other monument which may fairly be placed in the prehistoric age of Hellas ; but because Thera supplies data which permit us to state, with reasonable proba- bility, that circa the seventeenth, or at the latest the sixteenth century B.C., its population was sufficiently advanced to carry on a commercial intercourse with its neighbours far and near ; and that above all it perished by Plutonic agency. To have reached this relative degree of culture implies a respectable antiquity, which it is in the last degree improbable it should have been alone to possess. Hence we may expect to find in the i^gean other points where excavations will enable us to reach a period older than that within which we intend to confine ourselves in this history, so as to handle it in as complete a manner as possible. And if there is a spot more than any other where this hope has a chance of being realized, that spot will be found on the hill of Hissarlik. The stretch of ground which the ancients called the '* Trojan plain " occupies the north-west corner of Asia Minor, on the lower course of the Scamander, known at the present day under the name of Mendere-su (Fig. 33).^ It enters the Hellespont close to Cape Sigeum, opposite the extremity of Thracian Cher- sonesus, to the west of the bay fenced in by two promontories of no great elevation, anciently called Cape Sigeum and Rhaeteum, which mighty Ida sends out from its double range of heights. Measured in a straight line, the space intervening between these two points — which is the valley itself — is about 5,500 kilometres. At a short distance from the shore, the coasts on either side suddenly contract and rise almost sheer from the plain, leaving but a narrow gorge for the river to flow through. This plain is bounded by two streams ; but owing to its very slight incline the waters are not drained off, but meander in and out of reed- brakes, where they stagnate and turn the low ground into a vast morass. The land, to a large extent, has been reclaimed by cultivation and drainage. In 1890 I found an enormous improvement in this direction since my first visit there some thirty years before. In order to thoroughly drain and clean it, however, both the Scamander and its two afiiuents, the Dumbrek ^ Su^ a Turkish word meaning " water." — Trans.