Heinrich Schliemann

• 1. Introduction

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  Heinrich Schliemann claimed that at the age of seven he had announced he would one day excavate the city of Troy. The boast came from a poor pastor's son in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a child who left grammar school after three months because his family could not pay. Yet within his lifetime, his trenches at a Turkish hillside called Hisarlık would lend weight to the idea that Homer's Iliad reflects real events. Who was this man who learned a dozen languages, made and unmade fortunes, and was later branded an adventurer and a con-man? How did a self-taught amateur come to be called the father of pre-Hellenistic archaeology while other diggers condemned his methods as savage and brutal? And why does a hoard of gold he called Priam's Treasure still sit in a Moscow museum, more than a century after he carried it out of the Ottoman Empire? The answers run from a Sacramento gold bank to a temple-shaped tomb in Athens.

• 2. A Self-Made Polyglot

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  On the 1st of March 1844, a 22-year-old Schliemann took a position with B. H. Schröder & Co., an import and export firm. In 1846 the firm sent him to St. Petersburg as a General Agent, and there his real gift announced itself. He learned Russian and Greek using a system he kept for life, claiming it took him six weeks to master a language. He wrote his diary in the language of whatever country he was in. By the end of his life he could converse in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Latin, and Arabic, besides his native German. This facility with tongues was central to his career in the importing trade. In 1850 he learned of the death of his brother Ludwig, who had grown wealthy as a speculator in the California gold fields. The news pulled Schliemann west, toward a fortune and a set of stories he would later be caught inventing.

• 3. The Inventor Of His Own Past

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  Schliemann went to California in early 1851 and started a bank in Sacramento, buying and reselling over a million dollars' worth of gold dust in just six months. When the local Rothschild agent complained about short-weight consignments, he left, feigning illness. In his 1881 autobiography he wrote that California became the 31st state in September 1850 while he was present, and that he acquired United States citizenship then. He was clearly in St Petersburg that day, and in actual fact obtained his American citizenship only in 1869. The pattern repeats. His memoirs describe dining in Washington, D.C., with President Millard Fillmore and his family, but W. Calder III says Schliemann never attended and simply read about a similar gathering in the papers. He also published what he called an eyewitness account of the San Francisco Fire of 1851, dating it to June although it took place in May. He was in Sacramento at the time and lifted his details from the report in the Sacramento Daily Journal. On the 7th of April 1852 he sold his business and returned to Russia, where he later profited trading in indigo dye. By 1858, aged 36, he was wealthy enough to retire.

• 4. Persuaded By Calvert

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  At the time Schliemann began excavating in Turkey, the site commonly believed to be Troy was Pınarbaşı, a hilltop at the south end of the Trojan Plain. He performed soundings there and was disappointed by his findings. The hill had already been excavated by English amateur archaeologist and local expert Frank Calvert. It was Calvert who identified Hisarlık as Troy and suggested Schliemann dig there, on land owned by Calvert's family. Schliemann was at first sceptical about the identification but was persuaded. In 1868 he had visited sites across the Greek world and published Ithaka, der Peloponnesus und Troja, asserting that Hissarlik was Troy. He submitted that book to the University of Rostock and was awarded a PhD in absentia in 1869. David Traill claims the examiners granted the degree on topographical analyses of Ithaca that were partly translations of another author's work, though other researchers who studied the university archives contradict him. Schliemann was an honorary member of the Society of Antiquaries of London and was elected to the American Antiquarian Society in 1880.

• 5. Nine Buried Cities

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  In 1870 Schliemann began digging a trench at Hissarlik, and by 1873 he had uncovered nine buried cities. He found pure copper, metal molds, cutlery, shields, and vases deep in the site. The day before digging was to stop, on the 15th of June 1873, he discovered gold he took to be Priam's Treasure. He later wrote that he saw the gold glinting in the dirt, dismissed his workmen, and removed it with his wife Sophia in her shawl. The shawl story was untrue, and Schliemann admitted fabricating it. At the time of the discovery, Sophia was in fact with her family in Athens, following the death of her father. The layer he called the Burnt City and believed to be Troy is now thought to date from 3,000 to 2,000 BCE, too early for the Trojan War as Homer describes it. King Priam's Treasure was found in the Troy II level of the Early Bronze Age, and the finds were unique, with gold artefacts that do not appear to belong to that period. Recent research has confirmed several settlements on the site spanning 3,600 years.

• 6. The Mask And The Shaft Graves

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  In 1876 Schliemann began digging at Mycenae under the supervision of Panagiotis Stamatakis, a Greek archaeologist attached to the dig as a condition of his permit. There he discovered the Shaft Graves, with their skeletons and more regal gold, including the so-called Mask of Agamemnon. He published these findings in Mycenae in 1878. He did not reopen Troy until 1878 to 1879, after a separate excavation in Ithaca aimed at a site named in the Odyssey, where Emile Burnouf and Rudolf Virchow joined him in 1879. In 1880 he began excavating the Treasury of Minyas at Orchomenus in Boeotia. From 1882 to 1883 he made a sixth excavation at Troy. In 1884 he dug at Tiryns with Wilhelm Dörpfeld, and from 1889 to 1890 he conducted a seventh and eighth season at Troy, again with Dörpfeld. He had planned to excavate at Knossos but died before doing so, leaving the site for Sir Arthur Evans, who bought it and began work in 1900.

• 7. Wives, Divorce, And Indianapolis

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  After learning that his childhood sweetheart Minna had married, Schliemann married Ekaterina Petrovna Lyschin on the 12th of October 1852. She was the niece of one of his wealthy friends in St Petersburg, and they had three children: a son, Sergey, and two daughters, Natalya and Nadezhda. His many travels kept him separated from them. He spent a month at the Sorbonne in 1866 while shifting his assets from St. Petersburg to Paris for real estate, and asked Ekaterina to join him, but she refused. In 1869 he bought property and settled in Indianapolis for about three months to take advantage of Indiana's liberal divorce laws, obtaining the divorce by lying about his residency and his intention to stay. A former teacher and Athenian friend, Theokletos Vimpos, the Archbishop of Mantineia and Kynouria, helped him find someone enthusiastic about Homer and about a rebirth of his beloved Greece, with a Greek name and a soul impassioned for learning. The archbishop suggested the 17-year-old Sophia Engastromenos, daughter of his cousin, and married the couple on the 23rd of September 1869. They later had two children, Andromache and Agamemnon.

• 8. The Wreckage He Left

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  On Christmas Day 1890, in Naples, Schliemann collapsed into a coma and died in a hotel room the following day, the cause of death a cholesteatoma. He had ignored his doctors after an ear operation in Halle on the 13th of November and travelled on toward an Athens Christmas he never reached. Friends carried his corpse to the First Cemetery in Athens, where it was interred in a mausoleum shaped like an ancient Greek temple, designed by Ernst Ziller, its frieze showing Schliemann at the Mycenae excavations. His verdict among later archaeologists was harsh. D.F. Easton wrote in 1998 that Schliemann was not very good at separating fact from interpretation. His methods were called savage and brutal, ploughing through layers of soil with no mapping of finds and few descriptions of discoveries. Carl Blegen still excused him, noting that before 1876 there was no science of archaeological investigation and probably no digger better than Schliemann in actual field work. There are stranger legacies too. At Troy he found many swastikas on pottery and consulted Aryan nationalist Émile-Louis Burnouf, who then popularised the symbol as a mark of Aryan nationalism. The gold he called Priam's Treasure ended up in Berlin in 1881, was hidden in the Zoo Tower during the Battle of Berlin, and was flown to Moscow on the 30th of June 1945. Only in 1994 did the Pushkin Museum admit the collection was in its possession.