Treasure hunt begins in England

Chapter 983 City Analysis

Due to the excavation of an ancient city wall, everyone's morale was boosted, and at the same time more manpower was also invested in this excavation work.

In addition to mobilizing personnel from within the Golden Dawn, they have also found a series of reliable professionals who are good at excavation through a series of connections.

For example, Liang En recruited more than 20 professional archaeologists from the two teams through connections from Huaxia, and Nelson also found more than a dozen professional archaeologists from the UK.

Even Chairman Charles, who was not in good health and no longer engaged in field excavation work, made a special trip to Turkey and rushed to the site and visited the site.

At this time, everyone's excavation work has been going on for a month, so the ruins of the entire city have been cleaned up little by little with the help of more and more people.

The biggest discovery in this kind of cleaning came from the deep caves dug. After sampling and analysis, they can confirm that this ruin is not a single ruin, but a large number of ruins superimposed.

Through exploration, it can be determined that the entire ruins are as deep as 30 meters, and there are ancient city ruins belonging to 9 periods, from 3000 BC to 400 AD.

The most obvious ones are naturally the Temple of Athena and the ruins of the meeting hall, market and theater during the Roman Empire in 400 AD, because this is a ground-level building, and everyone can see it when they come.

But this does not mean that no important relics have been found in other formations, especially with the help of a series of modern technologies such as ground penetrating radar, they have discovered many things that have never been discovered before.

Although these discoveries were very fragmentary, they still allowed archaeologists like Liang En to obtain a lot of information, the most important of which was a preliminary and general understanding of the entire ruins.

According to the inspection results, the lowest layer of the ruins, which is the first layer you label, is a small stone castle with a diameter of only more than 1 meters from 3300 BC to 2500 BC, and it is also the beginning of the entire city.

Although the diameter of 90m sounds very small, it was considered a big city in that era. After all, thousands of years ago, neither the East nor the West basically had the kind of city wall that could enclose the entire city.

In that era, people would often choose a highland to build a large castle with armory, barracks, palace, granary and other core departments as the core of the city, surrounded by ordinary residential areas with little defense.

That is to say, the fortified part of the city in that era was closer to Miyagi in the future, so it is indeed a large-scale city with a diameter of 90m.

The second layer is about 2 BC to 2500 BC. The city began to prosper, with strong castles, dwellings and paved roads in the city.

A large amount of ashes were excavated at multiple survey points on this layer, but the cause of the destruction is unknown. For example, Nelson thinks that the castle was probably destroyed in the flames of war.

However, Liang En did not agree with this point of view, because considering that the city was on a volcanic earthquake zone, it might also be traces left by volcanic fires.

But anyway, a prosperous city just disappeared into history.Then, the third, fourth, and fifth floors were around 3 BC to 4 BC. The city was relatively large, but its development scale and level were not high.

At least from the results of Liang En's detection, although the distribution of buildings here is not worse than before, the quality of the buildings is significantly different from before.

For example, this can be seen from the foundation stones. The stone processing in this period is obviously much rougher than before, which clearly reflects the decline of the city.

However, ups and downs are always a cycle. On the sixth floor, the city built from 1800 BC to 1275 BC is the most prosperous and largest city site in this area.

For example, the huge city wall structure they excavated proves this point, because the buildings of this period are the largest and most exquisite, so there are more remains left behind.

And these ruins cost Liang En and the others a lot of time and energy, and in exchange for this, their understanding of the city at this stage can be said to be the deepest level of understanding among so many layers of ruins.

This problem arises because the ruins of this period are so prosperous that everyone thought it was Troy described by Homer at first.As a result, when everyone was digging about the same, they found out that they had dug wrongly through the excavated cultural relics.

However, at that time, everyone had already invested too much time and energy, and this relic did have a high excavation value, so after a brief discussion, everyone decided to check the relics on this floor first.

Through excavation, they found that the castle is located in a dangerous position on the west side of the highland, and gradually rises along three concentric terraces. The highest point is about 40m above sea level, and the lowest point is about 30m.

The entire castle covers an area of ​​100m x 180m, and a deep water well located in the east fortress can ensure the water supply in the city.

The exquisite city walls have been rebuilt twice, and the final appearance with towers is the product of continuous construction by three or four generations of rulers after 1400 BC.

The defenses of the entire castle are strongest inland, with the highest walls, the strongest gates and towers, because the inland areas and the western countries of Anatolia can choose to lead to the city-state.

Visitors from the Bronze Age etc. who wanted to enter the city had to walk through the passage built between the houses outside the castle to the South City Gate, and then up the paved streets up the stairs to the king's palace.

As for the edge of the city gate, some traces of burning were found. At first, people thought it was left by war or fire, but a large number of charred animal bones and exquisite carvings proved that this was an altar.

At that time, the gods were likely to be the core of a civilization.The natives had to offer sacrifices to their gods before going out on a journey or fighting; likewise, strangers had to make sacrifices to the gods before entering the city-state.

The discovery of the altar greatly increases the probability that this is Homer's Troy, because it is repeatedly mentioned in the epic that the Greeks called Troy "Holy Ilios", and these religious occasions just prove it.

In addition to the south gate, the city has two other gates, east and west, and each gate has a similar altar outside, and for military considerations, there are side gates beside each gate.

As for the south gate where they focused on excavation, they found more interesting things: a large fort facing east, that is, facing the land.

It can be seen that the enemies of the city at that time mainly came from the land direction to the east, rather than the sea direction to the west, which coincided with the known history:
At that time, the Mycenaeans in Greece had not yet risen. Their sea power could harass the shipping lanes, but they could not conduct large-scale cross-return expeditions.

On the contrary, the Hittite Empire located in the inland area is in its heyday, and as a classical militaristic country, its neighbors will inevitably be wary of it.

This is why the defense focus of the ruins of this city is placed in the east. After all, their main threat comes from the east, so the defense will naturally face the east.

(End of this chapter)