ISLAND OF IMBROS. Mount Ida in Samothrace. The Ægean Sea. Kum-Kaleh. Lighthouse. PENINSULA OF GALLIPOLI. Hellespont. Simois. To the right of the Camels is the old bed of the Scamander. Mounds of Achilles and Patroclus. Yeni-Shehr on Sigeum Pr.
VIEW OF THE NORTHERN PART OF THE PLAIN OF TROY, FROM THE HILL OF HISSARLIK.]
THE CHAIN OF MOUNT IDA. Mount Gargarus (Kasdak). Village of Chiplak. Snow-clad Summit. Excavations in the Temple. Altar.
VIEW OF THE SOUTH-EASTERN PART OF THE PLAIN OF TROY, FROM THE HILL OF HISSARLIK.]
Another curiosity of this estate is, that close to the temple of Apollo there exists a round hill, called “Chanaï Tépé,” about 32¾ feet in height, and 216½ feet in diameter at its base. It used to be considered a natural hill, till Mr. Frank Calvert, in the year 1856, made a cutting in it, and found upon a flat rock, 16 feet high, a circular space, enclosed by a wall 6½ feet in height. The whole of the inner space, as far as the edge of the surrounding wall, was filled with calcined bones, which the surgeons of the English fleet pronounced to be human bones. In the centre Mr. Calvert found the skeleton of a human being. The whole was covered with about 10 feet of earth.
The Plain of Troy is traversed from the south-east to the north-west by the Scamander, which is distant from Hissarlik 35 minutes’ walk, and the bed of which I can recognise from here by the uninterrupted row of trees growing upon its banks. Between the Scamander and Hissarlik, at a distance of only 15 minutes from the latter, the Plain is again intersected by the river Kalifatli-Asmak, which rises in the marshes of Batak (Thymbria), and is filled with running water only in late autumn, winter, and spring; but during the hot summer months, till the end of October, it consists of an uninterrupted series of deep pools. This stream, even during the continual heavy winter rains, and in comparison with its splendid and immensely broad channel, has but a very scanty supply of water--in fact, never so much as to cover even the tenth part of the breadth of its bed. I therefore believe that its huge bed must at one time have been the bed of the Scamander; I believe this all the more, as the Simoïs still flows into the Kalifatli-Asmak at a quarter of an hour’s distance north of Ilium, where I am digging.[90] By identifying the channel of this river, which may be traced to the Hellespont near Cape Rhœteum, with the most ancient bed of the Scamander, we may settle the otherwise insurmountable difficulties of the Homeric topography of the Plain of Troy; for, had the Scamander occupied its present bed at the time of the Trojan war, it would have flowed through the Greek camp, and Homer would have had abundant opportunity of speaking of this important circumstance. But as he never mentions a river in the camp, there can, of course, have been none there. Moreover, the Simoïs is now half-an-hour’s distance from the Scamander; whereas Homer frequently mentions the confluence of these two streams before Ilium, and most of the battles took place in the fields between Troy, the Scamander, and the Simoïs. At its confluence with the Kalifatli-Asmak, whose enormous bed must, at one time, have belonged to the Scamander, the Simoïs has an especially large and deep bed, which is doubtless still the same that this stream occupied at the time of the Trojan war.