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In 1890, the year of his death, Schliemann was on the way to the solution of the problem, and in 1892, his coadjutor, Professor Dörpfeld, finally proved that the Sixth City, lying four strata above Schliemann's Troy, was the true Ilion of the great epic.
What my fellow-archæologists had accomplished in Syria, in Egypt, in Greece, was nothing to what I could thus accomplish in Mexico. At the best, Smith, Rawlinson, Schliemann, had done no more than stir the dust above the surface of dead antiquity; but I was about to bring the past freshly and brightly into the very midst of the present, and to make antiquity once more alive!
"In the half light that veils all truth, let us prepare to worship and adore," chanted Schliemann, who had preceded him to the end of the room. "In the mists that protect our faces before the Black Throne, let us make ready the willing victim," echoed Kalkmann in his great bass.
There was much disappointment on the hilltop. Then one day a spade grated on gravel. Once before that had happened, and they had found gold below. They called out to Dr. Schliemann. He and his wife came quickly. Fire leaped into Schliemann's eyes. "Stop!" he said. "Now I will dig. Spades are too clumsy." So he and his wife dropped upon their knees in the mud. They dug with their knives.
Schliemann at Hissarlik, were two fragments of reindeer antler pierced with holes presenting a singular resemblance to those we have been describing.
Schliemann has told us that in his researches upon the site of Troy he found that in pre-Christian if not indeed pre-historic times the cross was, in that classic locality as elsewhere, a phallic emblem and the symbol of life; as well as a solar emblem and the symbol of the holy fire with which life was more or less identified.
Schliemann notes that among the ruins of the three towns, which successively rose from the site of Troy, are found similar strange-looking idols, hatchets in jade, porphyry, diorite, and bronze, goblets with two handles, clumsy stone hammers, trachyte grindstones, and fusaioles or perforated whorls bearing symbolic signs of a similar form.
The gate and walls of the Second City the fact that it had been undoubtedly destroyed by fire, and the evidence of wealth and artistic faculty offered by the golden treasure seemed to Dr. Schliemann decisive evidence of the fact that this had been the Ilion of the Homeric poems.
The Schliemann museum possesses numerous battle-axes of bronze, some double-bladed daggers with crooked ends, lances similar to those discovered at Koban, and thousands of spits, some with spherically shaped heads, others of spiral form. Some of these spits are made of copper, as are some large nails weighing thirty ounces, so that this metal was evidently still often used in a pure state.
Schliemann resolved to put his convictions to the test of actual excavation. In April, 1870, he cut the first sod of his excavation at Hissarlik. The work went on with varying, but never brilliant, fortune, until the year 1873, when his faith and constancy began at last to meet with their reward.
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