ts. Dardanians were to be encountered in the neighbourhood
of Mount Ida, as well as on the banks of the Axios, from early times,
and the Kebrenes of Macedonia had colonised a district of the Troad near
Ilion, while the great nation of the Mysians had issued, like them,
from the European populations of the Hebrus and the Strymon. The hero
Dardanos, according to legend, had at first founded, under the auspices
of the Idasan Zeus, the town of Dardania; and afterwards a portion
of his progeny followed the course of the Scamander, and entrenched
themselves upon a precipitous hill, from the top of which they could
look far and wide over the plain and sea. The most ancient Ilion, at
first a village, abandoned on more than one occasion in the course of
centuries, was rebuilt and transformed, earlier than the XVth century
before Christ, into an important citadel, the capital of a warlike
and prosperous kingdom. The ruins on the spot prove the existence of
a primitive civilization analogous to that of the islands of the
Archipelago before the arrival of the Phoenician navigators. We find
that among both, at the outset, flint and bone, clay, baked and unbaked,
formed the only materials for their utensils and furniture; metals were
afterwards introduced, and we can trace their progressive employment
to the gradual exclusion of the older implements. These ancient Trojans
used copper, and we encounter only rarely a kind of bronze, in which the
proportion of tin was too slight to give the requisite hardness to the
alloy, and we find still fewer examples of iron and lead. They were
fairly adroit workers in silver, electrum, and especially in gold. The
amulets, cups, necklaces, and jewellery discovered in their tombs or in
the ruins of their houses, are sometimes of a not ungraceful form. Their
pottery was made by hand, and was not painted or varnished, but they
often gave to it a fine lustre by means of a stone-polisher. Other
peoples of uncertain origin, but who had attained a civilization as
advanced as that of the Trojans, were the Maeonians, the Leleges, and
the Carians who had their abode to the south of Troy and of the Mysians.
The Maeonians held sway in the fertile valleys of the Hermos, Cayster,
and Maaander. They were divided into several branches, such as the
Lydians, the Tyrseni, the Torrhebi, and the Shardana, but their most
ancient traditions looked back with pride to a flourishing state to
which, as they alleged, they had a