While written in 1907, there remain numerous lost cities still undiscovered. The article gives some decent ideas as to why people should grow an interest in archaeology and how they should begin their search for lost sites.
Lost Cities Awaiting Discovery
An Opportunity for Wealthy Young Men to Earn Distinction
Notwithstanding all the explorations of the last three centuries, there are still lying under ground in all parts of the ancient world noble cities of the distant past that await but the spade of the investigator to render up their treasures of art and their secrets of history. It is a curious circumstance that while the study of the ancient languages in school and college has lost much of its former importance in the last generation, no age has taken a greater interest than this in the monuments of ancient civilization that are constantly coming to light. Devoted scholars of the New World as well as the Old are betaking themselves to the outermost corners of the earth – to the forests of Yucatan and Ceylon, to the arid sands of Egypt and the bleak deserts of Syria and Turkestan – where, often at the risk of health and always at the sacrifice of personal comfort, they are rebuilding for us the fabric of ancient life, completing and verifying history and tradition, and placing before out eyes by means of photographs the cities and burial places, and, by means of objects gathered in museums, the art and industry of peoples long vanished and often forgotten, but to whom we ourselves owe in great part our civilization, our arts, and our religions.
Books on archaeological travel and exploration are making their appearance in ever increasing numbers, and their ready sale bears witness to the intense popular interest that the American people are taking in the work of these pioneers of history. What better proof could we have than the fact that many foreign writers publish their works in English, as Lanciani on the excavations of Rome, Pais on questions of Roman legend and history, and Mau on Pompeii?
That this popular zeal for archaeological and historical investigation is coincident with a decline in the importance generally given to classical studies in this country, is due to two fundamental causes. First, the essentially practical stage of educational methods through which we are passing; and second, the wretched system of classical instruction which afflicted our colleges and universities during the last fifty years, condemning the students to arid philological disquisitions, and robbing the fascinating life and literature of the Greeks and Romans of all its beauty. There are many and evident signs that the tide is turning – has been turning for ten years – and if the future of classical scholarship in America now looks brighter than ever before, the credit must be given to the explorers and investigators of buried cities and cemeteries, and to those who have popularized the results of their work in attractive books and entertaining lectures.
Where Are the Old Cities
There are three leading questions that everyone who makes a special study of archaeology is called upon to answer almost daily: First, how does it happen that ancient cities in their entirety were covered with earth, forming sometimes veritable hills of their own materials, and preserving their treasures of wealth and art until our days? Second, have not the ravages of of time and the avarice of man, and lately the spade of the excavator already well nigh despoiled ancient sites? And third, where are the renowned cities of the past that still lie unexplored? To answer these questions sufficiently and exhaustively would require a book, but I shall try to do what I can within the limits of a brief paper.
The first question involves a complicated answer, for the causes that determined the decay or fall of ancient cities were different in different times and places. The unique example of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae is familiar to all. Three flourishing towns, with the fertile farms and smiling villas about them, were overwhelmed in one night by the awful river of lava and rain of ashes from the volcano; and since the recent eruption of Vesuvius and that of Mont Pelee we have been able to study these phenomena in all their terrible reality. But such was not the lot of the hundreds and thousands of cities and towns of the ancient world. How then is it that they too were buries, not by a sudden visitation of fate, but by the hand of man or the slow, engulfing lapse of time?
Consider the turbulent conditions of ancient life. War was the spirit of the age – state against state and city against city in implacable rivalry, until Rome by conquering all brought peace within the boundaries of civilization. The laws of early warfare knew little of the sentiment of mercy; once a city was taken and sacked, its people, men, women, and children, were sold into slavery or put to the sword, its buildings and walls razed to the ground, and, as if to preclude its ever rising from its ashes, the very site was plowed over and leveled with the surrounding plain. As Horace says:
Proud cities by anger have come to their fall.
Walls and towers been razed by a fell demolition,
And the plow with its furrows has covered them all.
The Fate of Carthage
Such was the fate of Saguntum in Spain at the hands of Hannibal in 218 B.C., and such in turn was the terrible end of Carthage itself only seventy-two years afterward; and these are the only two familiar examples out of hundreds. On both sites later towns arose, built over the old cities, with no attempt to recover and utilize the earlier building material; and indeed this would not have repaid the trouble, so complete had been the devastation. Of imperial Carthage, the Romans did not leave one stone standing on another; and of Saguntum, Livy tells us that just before Hannibal made the final breach in the walls, the chief citizens, with the fell determination of despair, gathered in a vast pile in the central square gold and silver bullion, coin, vessels, and statues, – everything of value both public and private – reduced the whole by fire to a mass of shapeless wreckage, and threw themselves into the seething flames. Yet, he says, “The town was taken with immense booty. Though almost everything had been purposely destroyed by the citizens, and in the promiscuous massacre old and young alike had perished, and what few captives were taken alive became the booty of the soldiery, nevertheless from the public auction of what was left a large sum of money was secured, and much precious household furniture and clothing was sent to Carthage.”
The later towns disappeared in their time, and Roman Saguntum is represented today by some ruins known as Murviedro [Old Walls]; while of Roman Carthage, the great metropolis of the African Christian writers, only meager remains are being gradually brought to light by the skilled researches of Pere Delattre.
City built over city is the story of ancient barbarity. No less than nine distinct towns and villages have been found superposed on the hill of Hissarlik, the site of ancient Troy. It was far more convenient to throw the dismantled walls and level the place for a new community, – and who would delay such a work to dig into the rubbish underneath in the possibility of finding hidden treasure? Thus town after town on Hissarlik hill arose on the ruins of its predecessor, and Alexander the Great visited there the wretched village of his day in a spirit of reverence for the legend of Priam and Hector; but the finding of the great silver treasure near the Scaean Gate was reserved for Dr. Schliemann and modern scholarship.
But not even the violence of warfare can account for the burial of most ancient cities. A still more active cause may be found, curiously enough, in the growth of the cities themselves, or in circumstances due to a shifting of population, or a change of rulers, or even to the adoption of a new religion. To us of modern times this must seem decidedly strange, but it is a fact none the less. In our cities, where we construct a new building on the site of an old one, we are careful to remove the debris and build on bedrock, or at least on the old level. We seek to cut down hills, and traffic requires a broad, smooth surface for our streets.
But in ancient times such was not the case, or rather it was a rule that operated to a less degree; and even when it did operate, as in Rome, it produced just the result I am describing. In the earlier days, when commerce was secondary to war, the most inaccessible sites were chosen for towns, that they might be defended more easily. That is why Troy arose on the hill of Hissarlik, and Rome on the Palatine; and even where growing commerce and civilization spread the town over the plain, its sacred and public buildings remained perched on the inaccessible hill, its original seat, as in the case of the Acropolis at Athens and the Acrocorinthus.
Who can travel in Italy today without wondering at the small towns of Tuscany and Umbria, set so high on the mountain tops that the peasants must lose an hour or two a day in getting down to their work in the fields and back to bed at night? These are survivals of the age of war. Little Palatine Rome of the eighth century before our era was a settlement of shepherds, who drove their flocks down in the morning to browse in the plains, and barricaded themselves at night in their highland fortress.
Old Buildings as Foundations
But when Rome grew into a city and spread over the seven hills and the intervening valleys, the very isolation of the hills which had been a source of safety and defense became an obstacle to progress. Hence, when buildings were burned to the ground or otherwise destroyed, it was to the public advantage to throw down the walls or use them for a base on which to erect the new, has gradually raising the valleys and lowering the hills. Down to the fourth century before Christ the great wall of Rome, whose origin was assigned to King Servius Tullius, was still kept in repair as a means of defense. Later, when Rome became the Mistress of the World and felt no longer the fear of hostile invasion, and when too the city had spread far beyond the old walls, private and public buildings were constructed against and over them, and they disappeared so completely from view that Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the painstaking antiquarian of the Augustan Age, while describing them from records and tradition, is forced to remark that he is unable to find any trace of them. In modern excavations they have come to light again in great stretches, and we can trace their course for miles, even though only a few small pieces have been allowed to stand.
Everywhere in Rome we find structure raised upon structure, as on the Palatine Hill, where one may descend a stairway from the level of the Great Hall of the Flavian palace and wander through the rooms of an earlier house, still showing their frescoes and stucco decorations. The same is true of the Baths of Caracalla, under which lie superposed two earlier buildings; while the church of Saint Clement, with its lower and earlier churches, rests upon a shrine of the old Mithraic cult; and the Baths of Trajan were erected on a part of the older Domus Aurea where Nero felt himself “at last housed like a man.” Here in the dark underground passages may still be seen the charming fresco designs which inspired Raphael to paint the frescoes of the Vatican Loggia and the Villa Madama.
Eternal Ruins of the Ancient World
To the second and third questions a combined answer is possible. It is quite true that the ravages of time and the avarice of man during fifteen centuries have caused an astounding destruction of ancient remains. Yet such was the wealth of the ancient Mediterranean world, such the density of population, such the solidity of its architecture that a hundred centuries would not suffice to deface and obliterate all traces of ancient life. Even in Italy, where the destruction or change perhaps has been more complete than elsewhere, one may say that the ground has barely been scratched as yet, outside of Rome itself; and even in the Eternal City not a year passes without bringing to view more edifices of the ancient town and more products of its prolific art and industry. Within the last two years, a whole district of tombs and shrines has been laid bare outside of Pincian Gate, two noteworthy sculptures have been found – one, a fine Niobe figure in the Sallustian Gardens, the other a superb replica of Myron’s Discobolus in a suburban villa at Castil Porziano – and it may be said without exaggeration that one cannot dig a ditch or plow a field about Rome without turning up something of interest and historical value, if only an intaglio from a ring, a coin, a lamp with the maker’s name, or a mortuary inscription.
And in the other old Italian cities, with the exception of Pompeii and Ostia, there have never been complete, systematic excavations. The vast necropolis of Cumae still awaits its final exploration; the old renowned Greek city of Crotona, represented now by some few temple remains above ground, has not yet felt the spade. Sybaris, whose luxury gave rise to the very word “Sybarite,” is still an abandoned wilderness. Why multiply examples? Why mention Tarentum, Posidonia, Metapontum, Heraclea, not to pass the limits of Magna Gracia? All these and a hundred more, whose magnificence is attested by the ancients themselves as well as by the long series of coins unequalled for beauty of design and execution that issued for centuries from their mints, will offer up their treasures to our eager eyes, when modern wealth, awaking to its possibilities for real usefulness, will open its coffers and set the willing peasants to the task of digging under competent direction.
Well indeed is the work advancing. Here and there the schools of archaeology, supported by the European Governments or by private generosity, are giving up back old Egypt and Carthage, Thamugadi and Cirta, Delphi and Corinth, Nippur and Perspolis; but there are more, many more; and while we delay, the peasants are tearing down what stands above ground to make of it their modern dwellings, or digging into tombs for loot and thus destroying the possibility of scientific research.
Source: Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.), 20 Oct. 1907.
