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Modern Description: Further east there is an ancient site called Asarlik. It is on a promontory, apparently called Dut (= mulberry) Burnu on the Admiralty chart, between two small coves just outside Sivrice Bay. Just north of the crest, whose altitude is about 25 m. above the sea, a stretch of walling survives, which was presumably intended to defend the citadel from the landward side. The wall is built in a heavy loose polygonal and cannot have been much less than 4 m. thick. Its appearance is archaic. On the crest we saw a bell-shaped cistern, and boulders which in the spirit of the times Clarke attributed to a sacred grove. We reckoned the maximum dimensions of the site as 180 m. (north-south) and 110 m. (east-west). Clarke noted traces of a town on a lower shelf on the east. Potsherds on the site are relatively abundant, and they include prehistoric. Much of the surface pottery seemed Hellenistic, with occasional later Hellenistic red glaze, but not Roman. Clarke's identification of the site as Polymedion need hardly be questioned. Strabo (xiii. 606) speaks of a of that name on the coast 40 stades from Lekton and, apparently, 80 from Assos; and again (xiii. 616) he speaks of the coast between Polymedion and Assos as being opposite Methymna in Lesbos. It is true that the Asarlik site seems in fact to be something over 60 stades from both our Lekton (Baba) and Assos. But the situation opposite Methymna agrees, and there is no alternative sitelet alone one that fits the literary evidence for a town defunct by Roman times. In Pliny the place is called Palamedium, and it was there, on the Aeolic coast opposite Methymna, that Apollonius of Tyana re-erected the fallen statue of the hero Palamedes and made a shrine round it of a size for ten people to make merry in. (Cook, Troad 1973, p.238)
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymedium
Wikidata ID: Q65072494
Trismegistos Geo: 56272

Info: Cook 1973

J.M. Cook, The Troad : An Archaeological and Topographical Study (OUP 1973)

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