Heinrich Schliemann
—Jason

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The locations, events, and heroes described in the poet Homer’s epics The Iliad and The Odyssey have resonated with listeners and readers throughout the millennia since their creation.  The story of the Trojan War and its aftermath left a long impression on the Greek and Roman cultures that adopted and adapted stories for their own uses.  One of the largest questions that has been on the minds of modern readers is whether the any of events depicted have a basis in reality?

Professional, and amateur, scholars spent significant amounts of time and money to prove that Homer’s tales were based in real-world events.  Some of the key cities discussed in the stories were easy to identify and locate, the most obvious being King Menelaus’s Sparta, but many of the others were not.  The sites, and even veracity, of King Agamemnon’s Mycenae or King Priam’s Troy was lost to time.  One unusual and enterprising amateur named Heinrich Schliemann was determined to find the ruins of Troy.

Schliemann was born on 6 January 1822 in Neubukow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin located within the German Confederation.  He was one of six children of Luise Therese Sophie and Ernst Schliemann.  Ernst Schliemann was a poor Lutheran pastor and, when his wife Luise Therese died in 1831, he was forced to send nine-year-old Heinrich away from home to live with his uncle Friedrich. 

The upheaval of being forced to leave his father’s house did not seem to heavily affect Heinrich as he was enrolled in school and quickly took a liking to history.  By the time he was ready to advance to university, however, he was without funds.  Ernst had been accused of embezzling church funds and was thrown out of the Church because of this.  These events led Heinrich to become an apprentice at Herr Holtz's grocery in the city of Fürstenberg in 1836.  Though not able to complete the academic degree he desired, Schliemann continued his personal education.

After leaving his apprenticeship with Herr Holtz, Schliemann took a position with B. H. Schröder & Co., an import/export firm, who sent him to St. Petersburg as a general agent.  There, he mingled with many different people, and found he had an extraordinary ability to quickly pick up new languages.  By the end of his life, Schliemann was able to converse not only in his native German, but also in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Latin, and Arabic.

His early career as a general agent gave him many contacts throughout the world which helped his amateur archeology later in life.  In 1850, Schliemann learned of the death of his brother, Ludwig, who had become wealthy as a speculator in the California gold fields.  Schliemann travelled to the United States and entered California in early 1851 and shortly thereafter started a bank in Sacramento.  One of his more interesting exploits while in California was his publication of his own eyewitness account of the San Francisco Fire of 1851 (even though he stated the event took place in June rather than when it really happened in May).  On April 7, 1852, he sold his business and returned to Russia.

Having made a very generous profit from his American adventure, Schliemann was well positioned to take advantage of the first major war in Europe since 1815.  He made yet another quick fortune as a military contractor in the Crimean War (1854-1856). He cornered the market in saltpeter, sulfur, and lead, all needed to produce ammunition, which he resold to the Russian government.  By the age of 36, Schliemann was wealthy enough that he no longer needed to focus strictly on business.

With his economic situation settled, Schliemann devoted himself to discovering the veracity of locations in Homer’s Iliad.  By 1869, he received a PhD in absentia after submitting a dissertation on Ancient Greece to the University of Rostock.  His desire to find the Trojan and Achaean cities soon sent him out of the German states south to the Mediterranean Sea. 

In 1870 Schliemann gained permission from the Ottoman government to begin excavations.  After an unsuccessful season of digging at his first location, he shifted the site of his digs to the ruins of Hissarlik.  The ancient city was only four miles from the Aegean Sea and local rumors had labeled it the most likely site of Troy.  For the next three years, Schliemann continued to excavate, eventually uncovering a total of nine buried cities.  However, the methods used to unearth these findings were incredibly destructive: the use of explosives to quickly excavate portions of the mound led to entire layers being destroyed without any consideration for what they may have contained.

On the day before his dig was scheduled to end on 15 June 1873, his persistence and obsession paid off.  Dismissing the local diggers, Schliemann examined a cache of valuable objects: a collection of gold cups and vases, a copper shield, jewelry, an electrum cup, and copper axes and daggers.  Schliemann proclaimed that these items must be from Troy, calling them Priam’s Treasure.  The question was now what to do with the items.

The Ottoman government had been specific about what would happen if any antiquities were discovered: they needed to be reported to the Turks, who would have legal possession of them.  Schliemann got around this very important clause by smuggling the trove from Ottoman territory to Greece.  By not reporting the findings until after they were safely out of Turkish custody, Schliemann was able to send the treasures to the Berlin Museum.  The Turkish government sued Schliemann in a Greek court, and won, forcing him to pay an indemnity to the Constantinople Imperial Museum and return some of the artifacts.

Schliemann immediately gained acclaim for his discovery of Troy and the artifacts he “donated” to Germany after other countries refused to buy them.  Due his illegal procurement of Priam’s Treasure, the Ottoman government banned him for the next two years from conducting further archaeological digs in their territory.  Eventually he would be invited back to dig at the site of Troy in 1878-1879.  Schliemann’s finds were the talk of the world, and he had Sophia, his wife, pose for newspaper reporters and photographers while wearing several of the pieces of jewelry.

To assuage this temporary blow to his ego, Schliemann turned his attention to mainland Greece.  In 1876, he began digging at the ruins of the ancient city of Mycenae. There, he discovered the Shaft Graves, with their skeletons and more regal gold, including the so-called Mask of Agamemnon.  These findings, when added to the discovery of Troy, further built Schliemann’s reputation as the Father of Pre-Hellenistic Archeology.

By the time of his death on 25 December 1890, Schliemann was one of the most well-known and respected European amateur archeologists of his day.  The locations he excavated and items he found gave fellow adventurers the ability to explore the lost ancient world.  Despite his reputation at the time, later research has shown that he had not found Priam’s Troy; his discoveries were either too late or too early for the period he claimed.  Additionally, his destructive methods of excavation may also have irrevocably damaged or outright destroyed that which he hoped to find.