The most remarkable of the objects found this week is a large knob of the purest and finest crystal, belonging to a stick, in the form of a beautifully wrought lion’s head.  It seems probable that in remote antiquity lions existed in this region.  Homer could not so excellently have described them had he not had the opportunities of watching them.

Pergamus of Troy, May 10, 1873. Although the Pergamus, whose depths I have been ransacking, borders directly on the marshes formed by the Simois, in which there are always hundreds of storks, yet none of them ever settle down here.  Though there are sometimes a dozen storks’ nests on one roof in the neighbouring Turkish villages, yet no one will settle on mine, even though I have two comfortable nests made for them.  It is probably too cold and stormy for the little storks on Ilios anemoessa.

My most recent excavations have far surpassed my expectations, for I have unearthed two large gates, standing 20 feet apart, in a splendid street which proceeds from the chief building in the Pergamus.  I venture to assert that this great double gate must be the Homeric Scaean Gate.  It is in an excellent state of preservation.

Here, therefore, by the side of the double gate, at Ilium’s Great Tower, sat Priam, the seven elders of the city, and Helen.  From this spot the company surveyed the whole plain, and saw at the foot of the Pergamus the Trojan and Achaean armies face to face about to settle their agreement to let the war be decided by a single combat between Paris and Menelaus.

I now positively retract my former opinion that Ilium was inhabited up to the ninth century after Christ, and I must distinctly maintain that its site has been desolate and uninhabited since the end of the fourth century.  But Troy was not large.  I am extremely disappointed at being obliged to give so small a plan of the city; nay, I had wished to be able to make it a thousand times larger, but I value truth above everything, and I rejoice that my three years’ excavations have laid open the Homeric Troy, even though on a diminished scale, and that I have proved the Iliad based upon real facts.

Homer is an epic poet, and not an historian; so it is quite natural that he should have exaggerated everything with poetic licence.  Moreover, the events he describes are so marvellous that many scholars have long doubted the very existence of Troy, and have considered the city to be a mere invention of the poet’s fancy.  I venture to hope that the civilised world will not only not be disappointed that the city of Priam has shown itself to be scarcely a twentieth part as large as was to be expected from the statements of the Iliad, but that, on the contrary, it will accept with delight and enthusiasm the certainty that Ilium did really exist, that a large portion of it has now been brought to light, and that Homer, even though he exaggerates, nevertheless sings of events that actually happened.