36 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



Italy, and copied in Etruria. This fact in itself makes all skepticism as to the 

 antiquity of the remains at Hissarlik impossible, except on grounds of ignorance. 

 We have heard in our own day of respectable scholars who are still skeptical 

 about the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the cuneiform writings 

 of Asia. It is quite useless arguing with such people. All one can do is to be- 

 seech them to examine the evidence without prejudice, and to examine the evi- 

 dence they must, of course, learn something of the subject in hand. It is 

 not enough to have read Homer, or Curtius's History of Greece, or to have gone 

 to the Troad as a tourist, and to have seen the place. Archaeology is a special 

 study, infested no doubt by amateurs, but requiring honest and serious attention. 



The demonstration that there existed on the site always recognized in class- 

 days as the site of Troy, a very ancient and important city, with a citadel and 

 such wealth that considerable remnants of gold were lost or forgotten in its ruins 

 — a city, moreover, destroyed by a great catastrophe, and burned with fire in 

 such a way as to preclude all accidental misfortune — makes it almost certain that 

 the poet or poets of the Iliad, whatever historical basis their story may have, cer- 

 tainly attached their stories to this site, and that the memory of this great confla- 

 gration had, in som.e way, survived up to the time when the Iliad was composed. 

 This, again, forces us to place the origin of this epic poetry, at least of the 

 shorter and ruder attempts which preceded the Iliad, at an early date. The 

 brilliant theory of August Fick, that these poems were first composed in the 

 .^olic dialect, and then imperfectly recast in Ionic, falls in with the same argu- 

 ment. But we must not enter into learned discussions in this paper. It is right 

 merely to allude to these literary and historical questions to show how important 

 is the light thrown by Dr. Schliemann's excavations on questions which have 

 hitherto been disputed on purely bookish grounds. Those who wish to have a 

 large and clear view of the general course of enlightenment which our early his- 

 tory ot Greece and Asia Minor has undergone from arqhseological sources, will 

 turn to the brilliant preface with which Professor Sayce has introduced Dr. 

 Schliemann's new volume, Jroja. 



We have often tried to induce Dr. Schliemann to dig on Hellenic sites, but 

 his proper task and the general direction of his studies is to investigate pre-his- 

 toric antiquity. For this purpose he has not only made his magnificent venture 

 at Mycenae, of which the results are recorded in a special work, and exhibited 

 in the splendid collection of gold and silver ornaments now at Athens ; he has 

 also investigated the alleged home of Ulysses in Ithaca, the great tomb-measure- 

 house of the legendary kings at Orchomenus, and some other less important 

 sites. These researches have conspired with sundry discoveries of pre-historic 

 tombs in Attica, and of archaic art about Sparta, in modifying considerably the 

 current notions of early Greek art and its development. This is the most impor- 

 tant outcome of Dr. Schliemann's work, and that to which we desire to call 

 special attention. It used to be a favorite theory among scholars, and is no 

 doubt very common among those who confine themselves to a grammatical study 

 of Greek texts, that the Hellenic race was perfectly original in its art, that the 



