|
Chapter 2 (part 7)
5. Layers III, IV and V, three prehistoric settlements (p.99).
The
buildings of layer II went down in a great conflagration. We saw
traces of this fire everywhere, on the castle walls, the gates and the
inner buildings. After this catastrophe, the whole castle soon formed
one large heap of rubble, from which only the thick castle walls, which
could not be destroyed so quickly, protruded a little. The inner
buildings had become completely invisible, the collapsed tops of the
walls had filled the space between the remaining lower parts. The new
settlers built their dwellings on this mound of rubble, within the
circle of walls that can still be seen, and thus founded the village of
layer III. We found the conversions in particular on the old main gate
FO in the south-east of the castle. They can be seen on photo 3, on the
large plans, and in fig.22.
First, the width of the gate was
reduced by half by walls of various kinds and was only 1.90 m, then two
small gates (ad and a e in fig.22) were built in front, which left an
entrance of only 2.50 m between them. Finally, a special porch a f was
erected in connection with a staircase a made of small stones. We may
regard the latter as the main entrance to the gate, although its
southwestern boundary has not yet been revealed and its width is
therefore still unknown. The height figures of the steps tell us that
one had to climb 4 m from this side in order to reach the floor of the
III level, which was 1 m higher inside the gate than the floor of the
II level.
A large, room-like extension (h) survives south-west
of the gate, which may perhaps be called a tower because of the
strength of its walls, but it could also have been something completely
different. Its external dimensions are not known because only its
interior is revealed. This consists of a large room 13.51 m long and 71
m wide, which is surrounded by thick walls, most of which are still
under the rubble. The gate a c leads into the room from the east; where
the smaller gateway a b leads, we have not been able to determine.
Since
the interior of the plaster layer, with which the walls consisting of
quarry stone were covered, is particularly well worked, there are
doubts as to whether the complex should not be better assigned to the
last period of the II layer than to the III. This can only be decided
by further excavations in the south of the hill. Also in other places,
such as in front of the southwestern and western castle wall, some
structures have been found whose age and importance cannot be
determined without further (p.100) excavations. However, the surviving
remains of the younger building above it prohibit such a plan from
being carried out. At the gate FM the changes made by the third stratum
settlers are not exactly known; one can even doubt whether it was even
retained as a gate. However, if this was the case, as I assume, then
the curved wall p, which we counted as part of the II castle in fig.21,
may possibly be ascribed to the III layer because of its high position.
We
are better informed about the houses inside the III layer than about
the castle walls. For the huts that were built by the third settlers
are the houses attributed by Schliemann in the book Ilios
to Priam and his time. Apart from a few older walls, only the walls of
the III layer are shown. The larger group of houses lies to the east of
the north-south ditch in this plan and still covers buildings II A, II
B and their neighboring structures of layer II, all of which only came
to light after the huts were demolished in 1882.
Only the west
wall of II A was visible at that time and was strangely mistaken for a
paved road (d). What the house walls looked like can be seen on photos
11 and 12 by small pieces of the wall that have been
preserved in a cone of earth above the fire debris of layer II. They
are the house walls built of small stones, which I have designated with
the letter f. The type of masonry and the size of the stones can be
seen so well in the pictures that a detailed description is probably
superfluous.
The ground plan of these houses cannot be judged
with certainty. According to the plan, we can only claim one thing,
that the narrow corridors visible in fig.4 were the lanes by which the
individual houses were separated from one another. Each house probably
consisted of a small courtyard and several rooms, but the connection
between the rooms can no longer be determined. On the large plans we
left out these eastern houses of the III level in order not to make the
floor plan of the II level even more obscure than it already is by
drawing in the buildings of the 3 different periods.
A smaller
group of III stratum houses lies west of the north-south ditch adjacent
to Thore FM and is still well preserved. The most important of these is
the "House of the Mayor or King", which Schliemann called so because in
and near it several "treasures" were found and because it was the
largest of the buildings uncovered at that time (see Ilios,
p. 366). We have included its floor plan in the large plans and also
shown it in several smaller drawings. In photo 3 its walls are
left white, in fig.5 they are lightly dotted and in figs.15 and 16
(p. 101) they remain white again. The photograph in photo
6, on which our house is marked d, gives a good idea of its present
appearance.
Its north-eastern wall can be seen on a larger
scale in fig.30. Here we clearly recognize their peculiar design. The
0.70 m thick wall consists of small rubble stones in its lower part
(a), which was certainly partly underground as a foundation, and in the
middle part (b) of three layers of unfired bricks and in the upper
one (c) again of rubble. In the other walls of, layer III, clay
bricks are almost non-existent, small quarry stones and clay mortar
predominate by far.
Fig.30: House wall of layer III.
Inside
the houses, Schliemann found the walls still covered with clay plaster
and a thin layer of clay, as described in detail in the book Ilios
(p. 368) by E. Burnouf. In some chambers large pithoi stood, as in the
northern corner chamber of the "royal house" four side by side.
According
to these and other finds and the shape of the floor plans, there can be
no doubt (p.102) that Schliemann rightly considered the buildings of
level III to be residential houses. However, the building preserved in
the west was not a "royal house" because its largest room is only 7m
long and not even 4m wide. I have already noted (p. 50) that the
treasures found here by Schliemann did not belong to the level
III house at all, but rather to the lower-lying rubble of the
older level II. In reality, the house, like the many others of the
IIIrd layer, was certainly the simple dwelling of a farmer who had
settled with his comrades in the ruins of the destroyed Castle II in
order to reach and plow the fertile plains of the Skamander and the
Simoeis.
Whether the level III village was limited to the old
circle of walls or also occupied the slopes of the hill and part of the
adjoining plateau cannot be said with certainty. I do not want to omit
to mention that in front of the western gate and also in the east on
the gentle slope of the hill several walls have appeared, which can
possibly be attributed to level III.
The destruction of the
level III settlement was not nearly as thorough as that of the level II
castle. We do not know how it was brought about. Certainly it was not a
great general fire that destroyed the village. Clear burn marks were
found in some houses, but they were not as general as in the second
layer. Since the walls of the houses were mostly still 1-1.5 m high
during the excavation, despite their low thickness, one would like to
assume that the village was abandoned by its inhabitants for some
reason and then gradually fell into disrepair. The roofs and tops of
the walls collapsed, filling the rooms to a certain height and thus
protecting the remaining bottoms of the walls from total decay.
Some
time later a new village was established in layer IV. At that time
nothing could have been visible from the houses of the older
settlement, because otherwise the destroyed walls would have been
repaired or used as foundations for the new houses. In reality, the
latter never stand on the older walls. The IVth settlement apparently
did not have a castle wall.
It is no longer possible to
determine how much of the village Schliemann found, because during his
first excavations he destroyed most of the huts in the center of the
hill. In the southern and eastern parts of the hill, on the other hand,
a larger number of houses of the IV layer are still preserved, but are
still hidden under the younger layers of rubble. Its walls are easily
recognizable by the slopes of both the earth cones that have remained
standing in the middle and the large outer masses of earth. Also in the
ditches that run through the eastern part of the castle, remains of
house walls of layer IV can be found in several places. From the
photographs (p. 103) on which such walls appear, I can refer to photo 8
(on p. 56), 11 (on p. 80) and 12 (on p. 88). In all three pictures, the
house walls of the fourth layer are visible in the remaining cones of
earth and are marked with g.
They can be seen even better in
relation to the older and younger strata on photo 13, where
they bear the letter c. The walls made of small stones (d) visible
above them belong to the 5th stratum, while the walls of large blocks
of stone, situated at a still higher level, formed the foundations of
Building VI A, one of the great buildings of the VI stratum. On the
other hand, the lower lying walls (b) can mostly be counted to the III
layer. The wall a visible at the bottom left is the outer wall of the
gate FL of the II layer. Finally, in the large section (Plate VIII),
some remains of walls of the IV layer are drawn in the large cone of
earth occupying the middle of the hill.
Only a few people know
what floor plans these different walls had. We have plans of layer IV
buildings from the excavations of 1890 (south-west) and 1893 (south).
From the older excavations we only know the plan of the house uncovered
above the gate FM. This consisted (see fig.3 on p. 7, where the house
is marked with H) of several small rooms and a narrow corridor between
them. That this is a house of the fourth stratum is proved by fig.10
in Ilios (p. 41), where
the great difference in height between its walls and the older gate is
evident. The walls uncovered to the southwest formed similar spaces,
not even rectangular. If we look at all these thin walls, the simple
floors visible next to the walls, the small and often irregular rooms,
we come to the conclusion that the ruins of the IV layer belong to a
poor village built over the destroyed IIIrd layer settlement .
The
impression we get of the next higher level, the V level, after the
ruins have been uncovered is not much different. This new settlement
differs from the older one only in that it again had a castle wall, of
which a few short pieces have been found and uncovered. The buildings
inside the castle, on the other hand, were no more stately than the
houses of the III and IV layers.
The remains of the 5th
castle wall are in two places found directly under the large buildings
of the 6th layer. The largest piece is in squares A 3 to A 5 below
building VI A and bears the designations V b, V c and Vd on plans III
-VII; a smaller piece has been excavated at H 7 under building VI G and
is labeled V e. Both are retaining walls of unworked stone and had an
upper wall of unfired bricks, of which by chance some layers (p.104)
survive under a younger wall at V c.
 Fig.31 is a
section through the base and the remains of the structure from Ziegehi.
On the left is the castle wall of the VI Layer drawn in section, the
preserved parts dark, the added parts lighter. Behind it, at right, lies the
castle wall of layer V, which is also sloped, built of smaller stones and not
having as deep a foundation as the former.
Fig.31: The castle walls of layers V and VI in A 6.
Their thickness is not the
same everywhere, at one point I measured 1.30m, at another only 1.00 m;
at a third, the substructure of two separate walls of 1.25 and 1.1m
seemed to have (p.105) to consist of an internal filling of earth, but
the overlying younger walls prevented close examination.
Atop
the stone substructure, our drawing shows a few rows of unfired bricks
under the foundation of a younger wall.The brick masses appear to be
0.40 : 0.53 : to 0.08m, for a reliable measurement, however, the
preserved piece of wall is too small; the joint thickness is 0.01 -
0.02m.While the substructure consists of small stones in most places,
in A 5, where the wall bends in an arc, large stones were used; one
type of construction merges into the other without any recognizable
reason for the change (p.105).The wall section uncovered in the
south-east of the castle in H 7 also has large stones, with a thickness
of 1.50m. Brick masonry does not survive here. Incidentally, there are
doubts about this piece of wall as to whether it was not part of the VI
layer. It would then be a pre-building retaining wall of the inner
terrace.
The
section of the V Wall below Building VI A does not run in a continuous
line, but has two small projections, so that its outline is saw-like.
Similar protrusions are more regular in the castle wall of layer VI and
should be discussed with them at the same time. The two ledges found
under the western side wall of VI A in A 6 and A 7 have a width of
about 0.15 m and a distance of about 13 m. We do not know whether the
entire section of the V ring wall had such ledges.
 Fig.32 offers
a photographic view of a very small part of Wall V. The wall (b) built
of large stones in the middle of the picture (p.106) is the foundation
of the western side wall of level VI A, above which is another layer of the
aus upper wall (c) consisting of smaller and better worked stones.
Below the foundation wall you can see a piece of wall (a) built from
small flat stones on the left, which disappears to the right behind the
earth on which the foundation of VI A rests. This wall is a section of
ring wall V, at the very point in A 6 where it has a small projection
and descends under building VI A. The wall visible in the upper part of
the picture belongs to the 7th layer.
Fig.32: The foundation wall (b) of level VI A, a section (a) of the level V castle wall, and a house wall (d) of level VII.
The
inner buildings of the V tier need not occupy us for long. Few remains
of them are known and these are thin nondescript walls of small rubble
stones and mud mortar. We have already got to know some of them on
photos 11 and 13. As far as we know, they form small, irregular rooms
that can hardly have been anything other than simple dwellings.
Individual
walls made of unfired bricks, only 0.33 m thick, which were found in E
6 and G 7, deserve special mention as remarkably thin earthen walls;
Their quadratic bricks, 0.30-0.33 m long and 0.07 m (p.107) high,
consist of dark earth and are connected with very light-colored,
clearly contrasting mortar. Its foundation is built of small stones
with earth. They, too, may have belonged to dwelling houses or perhaps
to the enclosures of courtyards.
 Finally, a wall (a) of level V, shown in fig.33, is to be
mentioned, which is uncovered immediately behind the circular wall in
square B7. It appears to have been the retaining wall of a terrace,
because it has a somewhat sloping facade, and contains a small stairway
(b), the upper steps of which appear in the picture.
Fig.33: retaining wall (a). and stairs (b) of layer V, and house walls (c, d, e) of layer VII.
The
construction of the wall (flat, fairly square stones) is similar to
that of the outer ring wall (fig.32). The meaning of the small
staircase is completely unknown. Of the other walls shown in fig.33, c
and d belong to the 1st period of layer VII, and contain some
well-worked ashlars from the ruined building VI A. The higher wall e
must be assigned to the 2nd period of layer VII, although it is not
orthostatic (high-edged stone slabs) as they usually appear in the
walls of this period.
Nothing
is known for certain about the demise of Layer V. From the current
condition of the walls it can only be inferred that the castle complex
did not perish due to a large general fire. It does not appear to have
been thoroughly destroyed at all, but gradually replaced by the stately
layer VI Castle.
For the determination of the duration of
their existence and the time of their destruction, just as little
evidence has been found as with the older layers III and IV 500 years
ago, this was done in particular with regard to the significant
elevation of the terrain in the course of its existence. The walls of
these settlements are so solidly built that one would not like to count
more than a century for each layer. The height of the partially
gradually formed masses of rubble alone, which is around 2 m for each
layer, allows us to go beyond this time scale and presumably assume
around 500 years as the duration of the three poor layers between the
richer castles of layers II and VI. I don't think this estimate is too
high.
[Continue to Chapter 2, part 8]
[Return to Table of Contents]
|
|