Modern scientific archaeology in the Near East began with Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Hissarlik on the Asiatic shore of the Dardanelles, undertaken in the belief that the site of the Hellenistic and Roman town ‘New Ilion’ was also the site of Homer's ‘Troy’. His conviction that the city of Priam which Agamemnon burned was the second from the bottom in the sequence of nine major deposits, because that ‘Second City’ had also perished by fire, was replaced, immediately after his death in 1890, by the probability that the Sixth City, the importance of which he had overlooked, corresponded far more closely in date and character with the conditions of a Trojan War at the traditional date, about 1200 B.C.; and had in fact some intercourse with the peoples of the south Aegean during the late Minoan decline. But, this point gained, the excavation of Hissarlik was left unfinished, and the definitive publication of it, and of the Schliemann Collection in Berlin (both in 1902), showed, all too clearly, how much was still unknown, especially as to the date and character of the Sixth City.