The site of Ilium is on a plateau 80 feet above the plain.  Its north-western corner is formed by a hill about 26 feet higher still, which is about 705 feet in breadth and about 984 feet in length, and from its imposing situation and natural fortifications, this hill of Hissarlik seems specially suited to the acropolis of the town.  Ever since my first visit I never doubted that I should find the Pergamus of Priam in the depths of this hill.

On October 10, 1871, I started with my wife from the Dardanelles for the Plain of Troy, a journey of eight hours, and next day commenced my excavations where I had, a year previously, made some preliminary explorations, and had found, among other things, at a depth of 16 feet, walls about 6-1/2 feet thick, which belong to a bastion of the time of Lysimachus.

Hissarlik, the Turkish name of this imposing hill at the north-western end of the site of Ilium, means “fortress,” or “acropolis,” and seems to prove that this is the Pergamus of Priam; that here Xerxes in 480 B.C. offered up 1,000 oxen to the Ilian Athena; that here Alexander the Great hung up his armour in the temple of the goddess, and took away in its stead some of the weapons therein dedicated, belonging to the time of the Trojan war.

I conjectured that this temple, the pride of the Ilians, must have stood on the highest point of the hill, and I therefore decided to excavate this locality down to the native soil, and I made an immense cutting on the face of the steep northern slope, about 66 feet from my last year’s work.  Notwithstanding the difficulties due to coming on immense blocks of stone, the work advances rapidly.  My dear wife, an Athenian lady, who is an enthusiastic admirer of Homer, and knows almost the whole of the Iliad by heart, is present at the excavations from morning to night.  All of my workmen are Greeks from the neighbouring village of Renkoi; only on Sunday, a day on which the Greeks do not work, I employ Turks.

Hissarlik, October 26, 1871.  Since my report of the 18th I have continued the excavations with the utmost energy, with, on the average, 80 workmen, and I have to-day reached an average depth of 13 feet.  I found an immense number of round articles of terra-cotta, red, yellow, grey, and black, with two holes, without inscriptions, but frequently with a kind of potter’s stamp upon them.  I cannot find any trace of their having been used for domestic purposes, and therefore I presume they have served as ex votos for hanging up in the temples.

I found at a depth of about five feet three marble slabs with inscriptions.  One of these must, I think, from the character of the writing, be assigned to the third century, the two others to the first century B.C.  A king spoken of in the third century writing must have been one of the kings of Pergamus.

The view from the hill of Hissarlik is magnificent.  Before me lies the glorious Plain of Troy, traversed from the south-east to the north-west by the Scamander, which has changed its bed since ancient times.