IL Postcard

Con Man, Smuggler, Archeologist, Thief

Date: 07/22/2007

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Monday, July 23, 2007

Was he one of the greatest explorers of the ancient world--an archaeologist who discovered Homer's Troy and showed that the Iliad and Odyssey are history books as well as poems; the man who first revealed that high civilizations had flourished in the eastern Mediterranean a thousand years before Pericles' Athens? Or was he a fraud--a man who salted his archaeological finds with treasures from elsewhere to make them more impressive; who made up stories about himself as well as his discoveries; and who became an American citizen by deceit?

The answer is…probably a bit of both.

No one can doubt that Heinrich Schliemann was a man of extraordinary achievements. As a boy in the 1830s, he became obsessed with the story of the Trojan War. When most scholars considered it a myth, he determined to show that Homer's account of the epic struggle between Greeks and Trojans for the return of the abducted Helen was rooted in historical fact.

After making his first fortune selling military supplies during the Crimean War, Schliemann moved to California and made another fortune in the Gold Rush years. He divorced his first wife, became an American citizen, and retired from business at the age of 36. The rest of his life was devoted to digging up the past in Turkey and Greece.

Pinarbasi, in western Turkey, was then considered the most likely site of Troy, if indeed that city had ever existed. But Schliemann opted for the less popular site of Hisarlik, closer to the Hellespont--or Dardanelles.

He started digging in 1871 and, believing that King Priam's Troy, the city Agamemnon sacked around 1260 B.C., lay at the bottom, cut quickly through the seven or eight later cities built over it. What he found was a well-fortified site that had apparently been destroyed by fire--seeming to fit Homer's description--and a rich cache of golden jewelry that again fitted Homer's account of King Priam's treasure.

Concealing the gold from his Turkish overseers, Schliemann smuggled "Priam's Treasure," as he named it, out of Turkey into Greece. He published an account of his discoveries and circulated photos of his second wife, Sophie, wearing the golden diadems and necklaces he had found.

When the Turkish government banned him from digging again at Hisarlik for several years, Schliemann turned his attention to finding Agamemnon's palace at Mycenae. He struck lucky again.

In 1876, he excavated graves containing the bodies of 16 notables with another rich treasure of silver and gold including several golden face masks, the most famous of which shows a bearded man with closed eyes. Today it is displayed with the rest of the find in the National Museum in Athens--labeled "Agamemnon's Mask."

Although Schliemann himself never gave the mask this title, he certainly believed the graves he had discovered were those of the victorious Agamemnon and his companions, who had been murdered by his estranged wife and her lover on their return to Mycenae at the end of the Trojan War.

Eventually, Schliemann returned to excavate Hisarlik until his death in 1890. But he made no further finds comparable to Priam's cache and the Mycenae graves.

In his lifetime, Schliemann was a towering figure in the study of the ancient past and was lionized in the intellectual salons of Europe. He proved a skillful publicist, who helped create a new vogue for archaeology with his books and lectures and through the dispatches he sent from his excavation sites to major European newspapers.

In reality, however, Schliemann had not found any of the things he set out to find, although, for most of his life, he believed that he had. What he thought was Homer's Troy was a far older city, dating back to around 2500 B.C. The city sacked at the end of the Trojan War is now identified with a more recent stratum of ruins that, ironically, Schliemann severely damaged in his haste to reach his target. Similarly, the graves he found at Mycenae have now been shown to date from well before the time of Agamemnon and the Trojan War.

Nevertheless, the discovery of a plausible site for Troy was a major achievement, greatly increasing the chances that Homer's account of the war between Greece and Troy was based on historical fact.

Schliemann's greatest feat, however, was to reveal the existence of previously unknown civilizations in Bronze Age Troy and Mycenae, when the Greeks were considered little more than barbarians. This revolutionary new view of pre-Hellenic civilization was strengthened (after Schliemann's death) by Sir Arthur Evans's excavation at King Minos' palace in Crete, revealing a third sophisticated civilization from the same era.

In recent years, however, questions have been raised about Schliemann's truthfulness and the authenticity of some of his finds.

In 1995, David A. Traill, Classics Professor at the University of California published Schliemann of Troy, summarizing the doubts that have arisen about Schliemann's accomplishments.

Traill suggests that Schliemann used faked documents to secure an American divorce from his first wife and to become an American citizen. He also believes Schliemann falsely claimed to have discovered Greek inscriptions in his Athens garden and a bust of Cleopatra at a dig in Alexandria. He argues that Schliemann exaggerated the importance of "Priam's Treasure" by adding artifacts from other sites and on other dates. He also queries the authenticity of Agamemnon's golden mask found at Mycenae, suggesting it may be a modern fake inserted into the excavation by Schliemann himself.

For some, the very richness of Schliemann's finds is grounds for suspicion. Another American archaeologist, William M. Calder, pointed out that "Priam's Treasure" is the richest find ever in Bronze Age Anatolia, while the gold and silver from Schliemann's Mycenaean tombs was only surpassed by the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb.

Schliemann still has his supporters, however. At a 1997 symposium on "Priam's Treasure," organized by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., British archaeologist Donald Easton, defended him, arguing that he needed to keep his records vague to prevent the Turkish authorities from interfering.

Paul Lewis
For International Living

Editor's note: This account of Heinrich Schliemann was recently published in The Owl. If you're fascinated by the legends of yesteryear…have a love of the Classics…and believe you can learn from the extraordinary men of the past…then The Owl is for you. Sign up here, free.