Amateur Archaeologist, Professional Idiot
He came, he saw, he blew it up and smuggled what survived to England. The life of Heinrich Schliemann is well recorded. If only we could say the same about his archaeological discoveries. The life and times of this controversial figure and the legend he coveted.
This story is an odd one because the dispute of the premise itself seems to originate from the wrong place. Let it play out: “Heinrich Schliemann discovered Troy”. Ok, sure he did. I’m working my way towards discovering Atlantis and I feel it’s going to happen any day now. Whatever.
But he did! The controversy over Schliemann is not that he’s either a blatant fraud or a gullible idiot because he believed he had found an ancient mythical city. The ancient mythical city is real, and in a sense Schliemann did discover it. He is a controversial figure because he was just so, so bad at digging it out.
In a sense this is a two part story. So, let me first address the mythological elephant in the room. You may be familiar with the epic tale of the Trojan War, so let’s set the scene:
It’s a sunny day in the Mediterranean, but a strong easterly wind blows fiercely across the ocean. Riding this gale are several hundred warships, long and lean, sunk low against the water’s surface; these vessels glide through the water with determination towards a compact city that holds one very significant treasure.
Greek heroes of myth have travelled from all corners of Greece, called upon by the Spartan king to seize what is rightfully his and return it home. There is an atmosphere of anticipation, of trepidation. The gods themselves are watching. Spurred on by the promise of glory in battle, the forces are stirred for a fight.
They won’t be home for a long time.
The myth of Troy has consumed debate and inspired art, poetry, plays and stories for as long as it has been passed down through the ages. For ancient Greeks in particular it represented one of the last great battles of the late Bronze Age, a time populated by gods, monsters and heroes, of chivalry, honour and bravery. They were convinced that the Trojan War played a part in the downfall of this golden mythological age, the atrocities committed there angering the gods and leaving the world vulnerable to the corruption and imperfection that the Greeks saw in their own, modern society. If such a war did occur, this mindset only cements it further into the canon of mythology.
The story goes a little something like this:
It is a happy day on Olympus, the sea goddess Thetis is getting married and all the gods have been invited. Well, almost all. Eris, the goddess of discord didn’t make the rsvp list, and in retaliation she does what she does best. She throws a golden apple into the middle of proceedings, inscribed with the phrase ‘to the most beautiful’. I imagine the catfight that followed was astounding. (If this story rings a bell thus far, yes, it is a bit like the beginning of the plot of Sleeping Beauty).
The king of the gods, Zeus, wisely decides he wants no part in the fight for the apple, and does what Gods do best, he passes the responsibility onto a mortal: Paris, a Trojan prince. Paris chooses Aphrodite, the goddess of love, probably a solid choice even if she hadn’t already bribed him with marriage to the most beautiful woman on Earth, Helen of Sparta. One problem. Helen is married already to Menelaus, the king of Sparta, a nation not to be fucked with.
Paris fucks with Sparta. Under the pretence of a state visit, in an act of audacity that has reverberated down the centuries, he left Sparta with his host’s wife. Menelaus is furious. He assembles an army from all over Greece, the greatest soldiers and heroes of the era, including legends like Achilles (with the heel) and Odysseus (with the boat). The army sails to Troy and settles in for the long haul.
The fight lasts ten years. The Greeks do not manage to breach the walls of Troy, though they do take several neighbouring cities for kicks and probably also morale. It is in the tenth year that The Iliad is set. The Greeks have invaded a town, and taken a beautiful woman, Briseis, as a spoil of war. Assume she got no say in this. She is originally promised to the hero Achilles, himself the son of Thetis, but Agamemnon, who was the leader of the Greek army and the brother of Menelaus, demands her as his own. Again, assume she got no say. In protest, Achilles strops off the battlefield with his troops. His mum Thetis asks Zeus to favour the Trojans in the fight for a hot sec to make Agamemnon realise his mistake, but only after his bff and possible bf, Patroclus, is killed by the Trojan Prince Hector does Achilles return.
Achilles' first port of call is killing Hector in revenge. Then he drags the prince's body behind his chariot for a few days, until the god Hermes gets the ick enough to allow the Trojan king Priam save entry to the Greek camp so he could barter for his son’s body back. This is where The Iliad ends.
The fight continues, and ladies man Paris manages to kill Achilles by shooting him in the heel, the only place he is not invulnerable. He dies himself not long after though, also by arrow, so celebrations are short lived. The fight only comes to an end however when Odysseus comes up with a truly original idea. Enter the wooden horse.
Odysseus is famed for being a clever guy, but surely this idea must have been a stretch for his commanding officers. Ten years is a long time to be fighting however, and you can imagine everyone was looking forward to going home and having a lovely plate of moussaka then bed. The wooden horse is built, loaded with soldiers and left outside Troy as a surrender gift while the rest of the army backed off. The Trojans happily accepted the gift, and that night the soldiers inside snuck out and killed all the men and captured all the women. Troy had fallen. Helen went back to Sparta.
So ends the war. The gods were so appalled by the morally dubious actions committed by the Greeks throughout the battle however that they took revenge by giving everyone a crap commute home., plaguing the hapless survivors’ sea journeys with peril and risk. Odysseus in particular got shafted, he was bounced round the Aegean by the vengeful sea god, Poseidon, his trip home consequently taking another ten years. Anyone who has taken a train from London Euston to anywhere in recent months will know how he felt. Our time at Troy has come to an end.
So what is real and what isn’t? I have a few educated guesses myself, but let’s not judge. The greatest myths are often based partially in historical truth. In fact is that one of the largest reasons that the Trojan War is thought of as fictitious is that this ten year siege is largely because it is most notably remembered from the epic poem The Iliad, penned by the poet Homer in the 8th century. This gargantuan tale is over 15,000 lines long, and would take roughly 15 hours to read out loud. But read it people did, even today it is one of the world’s most famous poems.
You would be forgiven therefore for thinking that Troy and the siege that defines it were the invention of Homer, but evidence suggests that the legend had been passed down orally for many years before the poet put pen to paper. Certainly the Greeks considered the event to be a genuine historical occurrence. The Iliad, despite its length, only covers about four days in the tenth year of the war, but other contemporary works, like the Epic Cycle poems cover different periods. Equally, further tales from Troy can be found in slightly younger texts, which could signify other events in a known historical narrative were being told elsewhere. In addition visual art, such as vase paintings, also illustrate scenes from the war and may be yet another way the legend was passed down. The Iliad therefore cannot be taken as a definitive account.
The problem is that The Iliad, and to some extent, The Odyssey, Homer’s other chart topper epic, have inserted themselves so completely into the canon of antiquity that it is hard for modern audiences to ascertain where history and fiction overlap. This is not a modern phenomenon. Plays inspired by the Trojan War written in ancient Greece seem to have instead been drawn from events in The Iliad rather than historical fact, and even the Roman poet Virgil used the Trojan War as the basis for his own epic poem: The Aeneid, where the founders of Rome were survivors who escaped Troy after the siege. There is a theory in creative writing that two layers of explanation are all that is needed to create the illusion of infinite depth for worldbuilding. In some ways The Aenid has created this illusion by building from The Iliad. The battle at Troy exists in a limbo between fact and fiction as a direct consequence of the poem’s popularity.
Today Troy is believed to be situated in Troad, in the northwest corner of modern-day Turkey, an area that was first settled in the early Bronze Age. This spot had been earmarked as a possible location for the famous city since antiquity, but a Scottish journalist, Charles Maclaren, and English archaeologist, Frank Calvert, were the first to identify the specifics in 1822. They linked a hill containing the ancient remains of a city to pilgrimages to the area made by travellers for centuries, and we’ll get to what happened next in a minute.
Today, excavations at the site are still ongoing. Troy’s history can be traced through its layers of occupation, preserved one on top of the other, like sedimentary rocks, or rings in a tree trunk. There is certainly evidence of some sort of battle at Troy, dating from roughly the right period. Archaeologists have found evidence of fire, and a small number of arrowheads at the site, hinting at a conflict, though the scale is as yet unknown. It seems unlikely that the combat was on the level of a ten year siege, but excavators certainly have no reason to speak against Troy’s mythical pedigree, as this helps greatly with attracting funding, something cultural endeavours never seem to have enough of. In addition, previous, less sophisticated archaeological digs have damaged layers, muddying attempts at revealing further artefacts that may point to something definitive. Troy has yet to reveal its secrets.
So that’s a lot of names, and certainly a LOT of poetry. But now we can safely say that on some level, the story of Troy is based on historical fact, and searching for the remains of a real ancient city is a perfectly reasonable task for an archaeologist to undertake. Even if it does feel a bit made up.
So now we’ve settled the Troy problem, what exactly is the deal with Heinrich Schliemann?
Where to start. The classicist Kenneth Harl infamously joked that Schliemann achieved what the Greeks could not, and finally levelled the walls of Troy. Not subject to modern best practice, what he did find was discovered through acts of destruction, rather than excavation. Troy was being destroyed as fast as Schliemann could uncover more of it to smash up.
Born in Germany in 1822 to a poor family, Schliemann was fascinated by ancient civilisations, driven largely by the work of Homer. He was particularly obsessed with Troy, and it’s fair to say this was a bit of a toxic relationship. For example, if you fancy reading a bit of fiction, I might recommend Schliemann’s memoirs. He alternatively claimed that he first heard about Troy from his father when he was 7, and saw an illustration in a book, or when he was 14, when he first heard The Iliad read out loud by a drunken man who walked into the greengrocers where he worked, reciting the Homeric poem. As you do. However, there was no mention of Troy in his diaries until 1850 however, throwing both narratives into further question.
Schliemann left his job at said greengrocers in 1814 after bursting a blood vessel, and enlisted as a cabin boy on a ship bound for Colombia. The ship was wrecked off the coast of the Netherlands not long into the journey however, and it was from here that Schliemann’s life changed course.
Arriving in Amsterdam fresh from the ocean, Schliemann changed course, and sought and found employment in a merchants, working his way up the food chain while teaching himself to read and write. Finally, when he was 22, Schliemann was hired at an exportation firm, travelling all across Europe and learning languages as he went, becoming fluent in, to varying accounts, eight or thirteen languages during his lifetime. Heinrich traded primarily through the indigo and gold trades, becoming very wealthy in the process. He lived briefly in California, founding his own bank that sold gold dust to the Rothchilds, and when this relationship broke down, he returned to and old haunt of his, St Petersburg, where he married for the first time to the daughter of a business associate, Ekaterina Petrovna Lyschin. The couple had three children, but it was not a happy union. This seemed not to affect Schliemann’s business dealings though, and it was at this point that he made a real fortune trading indigo, saltpetre, brimstone, and metals during the Crimean War.
Heinrich retired at 36 in 1858, keen to dedicate the rest of his life to research in antiquity and the pursuit of Troy. To this end he travelled through Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Egypt, Jerusalem, Petra, Syria, Smyrna, the Cyclades, and Athens, passing the coast of Troad in 1859. His diary notes that here he saw a vision of Troy in its mythic glory, as imagined so long ago by Homer.
Schliemann had picked a good time to start his new life. All things considered, the 19th century was prime time to be an adventurous businessman, the world was beginning to open up, and if exciting exploits to far off lands was what you wanted, there was little that did not yield to you. Schliemann was just one of many men who took advantage of the possibilities this time presented.
Western museum collections are built on the benefice of such figures. Look no further than the British Museum: the world’s largest repository for some of the greatest artefacts of fellow nations, most of which was transported across the continent in centuries past through acts of dubious morality, often with permission from a hegemonic government, as is the case for the Parthenon Marbles, extracted from Greece by Lord Elgin with the permission from the Turkish government in the 1810’s.
This was partly due to the cultural climate of the time, ancient works were of considerably lower regard to the average person in the 19th century, before protection efforts really began to take off. Additionally, turbulent political climates made intervention by a stable Western government seem in ways legitimate. In such contexts, Western removals could be seen as an act of grace instead of an act of theft, lending a benevolence to the whole affair. Many modern museums still consider themselves ‘caretakers’ of artefacts belonging to those less fortunate societally, a kind of cultural colonisation.
In many cases, other countries' law enforcement did not have the organisation, funds or wherewithal to prevent wealthy Westerners from simply picking off their heritage at will. So many objects could be taken from Egypt to France during this period for example, because of the French hegemony there following the Napoleonic crusades, in which they gained an almost total monopoly on the acquisition of antiquities. Furthermore, until well into the 9th century it was an Albanian dynasty who ruled over Egypt, removing local interests almost completely from the equation.
Even those who mean well could also cause harm. Ignorance of proper architectural practice was one of the biggest reasons for loss of cultural heritage. There was no regulation, and procedures were clumsy at best, dependent entirely on the individual than agreed on practice. Artefacts were often destroyed as they were prized from walls or plinths. Amateur archaeology was almost completely the reserve of the male, rich and white, in short those with the freedom, capital and political clout to enter these environments. Driven by curiosity and in some cases fanatical love for a distant past, but subject to the hubris of men unused to adversity and with Western interests and biases at heart.
Case in point. In 1866, Schliemann enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris, attending lectures in archaeology and classics, and travelled further through Italy and Greece to attend archaeological digs. He divorced his wife in 1869, and two months later at the big age of 47 he married the 17 year old Sophia Engastromenos, who he had met in Greece. A dubious pairing to say the least. Heinrich had apparently asked around for someone “enthusiastic about Homer and about a rebirth of my beloved Greece...with a Greek name and a soul impassioned for learning”. They settled in Athens and had two children, who they named Andromache and Agamemnon. Finally, in 1869, Heinrich Schliemann arrived in Turkey with nothing but a poem, a dream, and his bucket and spade. It had all been leading up to this.
It was at this point that Heinrich met Frank Calvert, who you will remember had theorised on the exact location of Troy. Calvert had bought the mound containing the ruins, in the area slightly away from the traditionally agreed location of Troy, in which he intended to discover the mythical city. Heinrich was convinced by his argument, and agreed to bankroll an excavation, which despite the two having secured no permit, began in 1871. This was the first dig to actively look for the site of Troy.
The first excavation yielded no fruit. Schliemann in his wisdom, perhaps thinking that archaeological excavation of a half-mythic city was a ‘know it when you see it’ type job, decided the best move from here was to dig a massive 45 foot deep trench through the site, using, among other tools, dynamite to achieve this goal. The method was described as brutal even by his peers. Troy did not yield, though it is possible that the core of the earth might have. It was careless to say the least, and the damage caused by this first dig is still being undone to this day.
What artefacts survived the onslaught were attributed without delay by Schliemann as the treasure hoard of the Trojan king Priam. His notes however are sketchy, incomplete and in some cases completely incorrect. The trove of necklaces, diadems, brooches and weapons unearthed have since been reidentified as belonging to an earlier layer of Troy, Troy II, while the Troy of myth sits several layers above at Troy VI, five ancient cities above. It is even theorised now that the collections is actually assembled from artefacts from a plethora of different locations, due to differences in materials and styles. Nonetheless, Schliemann wasted no time declaring the hoard as ‘Priam’s treasure’ , a claim based not on fact but desire. Do not underestimate just how much Schliemann really, really wanted to discover Troy.
The excavation was sharply caught short however when local authorities became wise to the fact that Schliemann had smuggled his new treasure out of Turkey, and he was banned from the dig site, lawsuit pending. A welcome breather for Troy I’m sure. Not to be deterred however, Heinrich turned his attention to another mythical ruler, Agamemnon, leader of the Greek army. He began a new dig in Mycenae, Greece in 1876, searching for evidence of Troy’s foe.
It was here that the German discovered a gold funeral mask he attributed to the long dead king. The Mask of Agamemnon has been called the ‘Mona Lisa of Prehistory’, and it certainly has a similar pensive beauty. Unfortunately, it is also 300 years younger than Troy, and maybe even a fake. Judge for yourself however, it is currently on display in the Greek National Museum of Archaeology.
Heinrich was permitted to return to Troy in 1890 after he gave back some of the more menial treasures from his hoard, and brought with him William Dörpfeld, a fellow German archaeologist. Significantly better qualified, Dörpfeld had just about managed to convince Schliemann to investigate the upper layers of Troy, where it actually was, when our hero dropped dead. Dörpfeld’s logic, expertise and professionalism possibly proving too much to bear. Heinrich Schliemann had developed an infection after surgery and collapsed on the street in Naples. He died the next day.
So what of his legacy? Ironically, one of Schliemann’s biggest faults was his own obsession with the myth of Troy, his single-minded quest to discover the city of The Iliad at all costs, a result of a decades-long obsession. His devotion to the narrative of The Iliad, a book which undoubtedly contains creative liberties but was nonetheless something of a bible to the fanatic German, made his efforts clumsy and hasty. He was all too willing to see a Homeric sparkle in even the dullest jewels. For Schliemann, discovery for a foregone conclusion in his narrative of success. When you are willing to bend reality to your own version of events you are unlikely to end up disappointed.
It is also possible the haste in which Heinrich Schliemann excavated was in some ways caused by a desire for renown and credibility in his chosen field. His first wife was a lady of nobility, and it has been suggested she did not favour this match as her husband was not a social equal. It is possible that Schliemann’s many scholarly endeavours stemmed from his desire to be seen as a bona fide ‘gentlemen’. To be seen as a ‘real’ adventurer and archaeologist. It is possible that this new money self-consciousness drove his need for a successful outcome. This is similarly reflected in his choice of second wife, a Greek who had to share his passion for Homeric poetry, there must be no distraction.
We also know from the many stretched truth’s in his auto-biography that Schliemann was a showboat. Among his many claims about his deep connection to The Iliad, he had also purported to have dinner with a US president and been in California when it was declared a state, the former is unlikely, the latter simply a lie. Henry Calvert, who as you remember told Schliemann where to even dig for Troy, was never given credit for his contributions in accounts written by the German. Troy would be his achievement, and his alone.
Whatever his reasoning, Schliemann’s archaeological technique was notably lacking, and his legacy is rightly controversial. It is certainly possible that because of his destructive methods and single-minded pursuit, Troy may have been destroyed enough to forever be out of reach. Rest in pieces.