Between the Greek mainland and Crete 220 islands dot the Aegean, forming a circle around Delos, and therefore called the Cyclades. Most of them are rugged and barren, precarious mountain survivals of a land half drowned in the sea; but some were rich enough in marble or metal to be already busy and civilized, as the world goes, long before Greek history comes into our view. In 1896 the British School of Athens dug into the soil of Melos at Phylakopi and found tools, weapons, and pottery remarkably akin, age by age, to the Minoan; and a like research in other islands has built up a prehistoric picture of the Cyclades conforming in time and character, though never comparable in artistic excellence, with the bioscope of Crete. The Cyclades were cramped for land, totaling less than a thousand square miles among them, and proved, like classic Greece, incapable of uniting under one political power. By the seventeenth century B.C. the little isles had passed in government and art, even, here and there, in language and writing, under Cretan domination. Then, in the final period ( i4oo-i zoo), the imports from Crete fell away, and the islands increasingly took their pottery and their styles from Mycenae.

Moving eastward into the Sporades (Scattered) Islands, we find in Rhodes another prehistoric culture of the simpler Aegean type. In Cyprus the rich deposits of copper that gave the island its name brought it a measure of wealth throughout the Bronze Age (3400-1200), but its wares. [Sedulously collected by General di Cesnola, and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is New York.] remained crude and undistinguished before the coming of Cretan influence. Its population, predominantly Asiatic, used a syllabic script akin to the Minoan, and worshiped a goddess apparently descended from the Semitic Ishtar, and destined to become the Aphrodite of the Greeks, After 1600 the metal industry of the island developed rapidly; the mines, owned by the royal government, exported copper to Egypt, Crete, and Greece: the foundry at Enkomi made famous daggers, and the potters sold their globular howls from Egypt to Troy. The forests were cut into timber, and cypress from Cyprus began to compete with the cedars of Lebanon. In the thirteenth century Mycenaean colonists founded the colonies that were to become the Greek cities of Paphos, sacred to Aphrodite, and Citium, birthplace of the Stoic Zeno, and Cyprian Salamis, where Solon paused in his wanderings to replace chaos with law.

From Cyprus Mycenaean trade and influence crossed to Syria and Caria, and thence, as well as by other "rowing-stones," they moved up the coasts and islands of Asia until they reached Troy. There, on a hill separated by three miles from the sea, Schliemann and Dörpfeld found nine cities, superimposed each upon its predecessor, as if Troy had had nine lives.

(1) In the lowest strata were the remains of a neolithic village coming down to 3000 b.c. Here were walls of rough stones, mortared with mud; clay whorls, bits of worked ivory, tools of obsidian, and pieces of handpolished black pottery. (2) Above this lay the ruins of the Second City, which Schliemann believed to have been Homer's Troy. Its enclosing walls, like those of Tiryns and Mycenae, were of cyclopean stones; at intervals there were fortresses, and at the corners great double gates, of which two are well preserved. Some houses survive to a height of four feet, their walls built of brick and wood upon a stone foundation. The red-painted pottery, wheel-turned but crude, indicates a life span for this city from approximately 2400 to 1900. Bronze has replaced stone for tools and weapons, and jewelry abounds; but the statuettes are unprepossessingly primitive. The Second City was apparently destroyed by fire; signs of conflagration are numerous, and persuaded Schliemann that this was the work of Agamemnon's Greeks.

(3-5) Above the "Burnt City" are the relics of three successive hamlets, small and poor, and negligible in archeological content. (6) About 1600 another city rose on the historic hill. Through the passionate haste of his work, Schliemann mixed the objects of this stratum with those of the second, and dismissed the Sixth City as an unimportant "Lydian settlemerit." But Dörpfeld, continuing the excavations after Schliemann's death, and for a time with Schliemann's money," revealed a town considerably larger than the Second, ornate with substantial buildings in dressed stone, and enclosed by a thirty-foot wall of whose four gates three remain. In the ruins were monochrome vases of finer workmanship than before, vessels like the "Minyan" ware of Orchomenos, and potsherds so like those found at Mycenae that Dörpfeid considered them to be importations from that city, and therefore contemporary with the Shaft Grave Dynasty (1400-1200). On these and other shifting grounds current opinion iden. tifies the Sixth City with Homer's Troy, [Dr. Carl Blegen, field director of the Uuiversity of Cincinnati excavations at Troy (1931f), believes that these have shown that Troy VI was destroyed about 1300, probably by earthquake, and that upon its ruins rose the Seventh City, which he calls Priam's Troy. Dörpfeld prefers to this Troy VIb. Cf. Journal of Hellenic Studies, LVI, 156.] and assigns to it the "Treasury of Priam" that Schliemann thought he had found in the Second City-six bracelets, two goblets, two diadems, a fillet, sixty earrings, and 8700 other pieces, all in gold. The Sixth City too, we are assured, perished by fire, shortly after 1200. Greek historians traditionally assigned the siege of Troy to 1194-1184 b.c. [Troy VII was a small unfortified settlement, which occupied the site till (8) Alexsnder the Great, in 334, built upon it Troy VIII in homage to Homer. (9) About the beginning of the Christian en the Romans built Novum Ilium, or New Troy, which survived nil the fifth century a.d.]

Who were the Trojans? An Egyptian papyrus mentions certain "Dardenui" as among the allies of the Hittites at the battle of Kadesh (1287); it is likely that these were the ancestors of the "Dardenoi" who in Homer's terminology are one with the Trojans." Probably these Dardani were of Balkan origin, crossed the Hellespont in the sixteenth century with the kindred Phrygians, and settled in the lower valley of the Scamander. Herodotus, however, identified the Trojans with the Teucrians, and the Teucrians, according to Strabo, were Cretans who settled in the Troad, [The name Troy was traced by Greek tradition to the eponymous hero Tros, father of llus, father of Iaomedon, father of Priam. Hence the variant names of the city – Troas, Ilior, Ilio; Ilium. An eponymous hero, or eponym, is a probably legendary person to whom a social or political group attributes its on and name. The Dardani, for example, believed or pretended that they were descended from Dardanus, son of Zeus; so the Dorians traced themselves to Dorus, the lonians to Ion, etc.] perhaps after the fall of Cnossus. Both Crete and.the Troad had a sacred Mt. Ida, the "many-fountained Ida" of Homer and Tennyson. Presumably the region was subject at various times to political and ethnic influences from the Hittite hinterland. All in ail, the excavations indicate a civilization partljr Minoan, partly Mycenaean, partly Asiatic, partly Danubian. Homer represents the Trojans as speaking the same language and worshiping the same gods as the Greeks; but later Hellenic imagination preferred to think of Troy as an Asiatic city, and of the famous siege as the first known episode in an endless contest between Semite and Aryan, East and West."

More significant than the racial complexion of its people was the strategic position of Troy near the entrance to the Hellespont and the rich lands about the Black Sea. Throughout history that narrow passage has been the battleground of empires; the siege of Troy was the Gallipoli adventure of 1194 b.c. The plain was moderately fertile, and precious metals lay in the soil to the east; but this alone would hardly account for the wealth of Troy, and the tenacious attack of the Greeks. The city was admirably placed to levy tolls upon vessels wishing to pass through the Hellespont, while it was too far inland to be conveniently assailed from the sea: perhaps it was this, and not Helen's face, that launched a thousand ships upon Ilium. On a likelier theory the southward current and winds in the strait persuaded merchants to unload their cargoes at Troy and ship them overland into the interior; from the charges exacted for this service Troy may have derived its wealth and power." In any case the city's trade grew rapidly, as may be judged from the varied provenance of its remains. From the lower Aegean came copper, olive oil, wine, and pottery; from the Danube and Thrace came pottery, amber, horses, and swords; from distant China came so great a rarity as jade:' In return Troy brought from the interior, and exported, timber, silver, gold, and wild asses. Seated proudly behind their walls, the "horse-taming Trojans" dominated the Troad, and taxed its trade on land and sea.