Heinrich Schliemann
Youth
and early career
Schliemann
was the son of a poor pastor. A picture of Troy in flames in a history book his
father had given him when he was seven years old remained in his memory
throughout his life and sustained his fervent belief in the historical
foundations of the Homeric poems. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed to a
grocer, and it was in the grocer's shop that he heard Homer declaimed in the
original Greek. After several years in the shop, ill health forced him to leave,
and he became a cabin boy on a ship bound from Hamburg to Venezuela. After the
vessel was wrecked off the Dutch coast, he became office boy and then bookkeeper
for a trading firm in Amsterdam. He had a passion and a flair for languages, as
well as a remarkable memory; these factors, combined with great energy and
determination, enabled him to learn to read and write fluently between 8 and 13
languages--accounts vary, but his competence certainly included Russian and both
ancient and modern Greek.
In
1846 his firm sent him to St. Petersburg as an agent. There he founded a
business on his own and embarked, among other things, on the indigo trade. In
1852 he married Ekaterina Lyschin. He made a fortune at the time of the Crimean
War, mainly as a military contractor. In the 1850s he was in the United States
and became a U.S. citizen, retaining this nationality for the rest of his life.
Returning to Russia he retired from business at the age of 36 and began to
devote his energies and money to the study of prehistoric archaeology,
particularly the problem of identifying the site of Homeric Troy. To train
himself, he traveled extensively in Greece, Italy, Scandinavia, Germany, and
Syria and then went around the world, visiting India, China, and Japan (he wrote
a book about the last two countries). He also studied archaeology in Paris.
In
1868 Schliemann took his large fortune to Greece, visiting Homeric sites there
and in Asia Minor, and the following year he published his first book, Ithaka,
der Peloponnes und Troja ("Ithaca, the Peloponnese, and Troy"). In
this work he argued that Hisarlk, in Asia Minor, and not Bunarbashi, a short
distance south of it, was the site of Troy and that the graves of the Greek
commander Agamemnon and his wife, Clytemnestra, at Mycenae, described by the
Greek geographer Pausanias, were not the tholoi (vaulted tombs) outside the
citadel walls but lay inside the citadel. He was able to prove both theories by
excavation in the course of the next few years. He had divorced his Russian
wife, Ekaterina, and married in 1869 a young Greek schoolgirl named Sophia
Engastromenos, whom he had selected through a marriage bureau.
Discovery
of Troy
Although
some isolated discoveries had been made before he began digging, Schliemann has
rightly been called the creator of prehistoric Greek archaeology. The French
geologist Ferdinand Fouqué dug at Santorin in 1862 and found fresco-covered
walls of houses and painted pottery beneath 26 feet (8 metres) of pumice, the
result of the great eruption that divided the original island into Thera (modern
Thira) and Therasis (modern Thirasia). Geologists at that time dated the
Santorin eruption to 2000 BC, which suggested a great antiquity for Fouqué's
finds and the existence of prehistoric cultures hitherto unknown in the Aegean.
The English archaeologist Frederick Calvert had dug at Hisarlk, and in 1871
Schliemann took up his work at this large man-made mound. He believed that the
Homeric Troy must be in the lowest level of the mound, and he dug uncritically
through the upper levels. In 1873 he uncovered fortifications and the remains of
a city of great antiquity, and he discovered a treasure of gold jewelry, which
he smuggled out of Turkey. He believed the city he had found was Homeric Troy
and identified the treasure as that of Priam. His discoveries and theories,
first published in Trojanische Altertümer (1874; "Trojan Antiquity"),
were received skeptically by many scholars, but others, including the prime
minister of England, William Ewart Gladstone, himself a classical scholar, and a
wide public, accepted his identification.
When
he proposed to resume work at Hisarlk in February 1874, he was delayed by a
lawsuit with the Ottoman government about the division of his spoils,
particularly the gold treasure, and it was not until April 1876 that he obtained
permission to resume work. In 1874-76 Schliemann dug instead at the site of the
Treasury of Minyas, at Orchomenus in Boeotia, but found little except the
remains of a beautiful ceiling. During this delay he also published Troja und
seine Ruinen (1875; "Troy and Its Ruins") and began excavation at
Mycenae. In August 1876, he began work in the tholoi, digging by the Lion Gate
and then inside the citadel walls, where he found a double ring of slabs and,
within that ring, five shaft graves (a sixth was found immediately after his
departure). Buried with 16 bodies in this circle of shaft graves was a large
treasure of gold, silver, bronze, and ivory objects. Schliemann had hoped to
find--and believed he had found--the tombs of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and he
published his finds in his Mykenä (1878; "Mycenae"). After an
unsuccessful excavation in Ithaca in 1878, he resumed work at Hisarlk the same
year.
He
conducted a third excavation at Troy in 1882-83 and a fourth from 1888 until his
death. In his first season he had worked alone with his wife, Sophia. In 1879 he
was assisted by Emile Burnouf, a classical archaeologist, and by Rudolf Virchow,
the famous German pathologist, who was also the founder of the German Society
for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory. In his last two seasons Schliemann
had the expert assistance of Wilhelm Dörpfeld, who was a practical architect
and had worked at the German excavations at Olympia. Dörpfeld brought to Troy
the new system and efficiency of the German classical archaeologists working in
Greece, and he was able to expose the stratigraphy at Troy more clearly than
before and to revolutionize Schliemann's techniques. In 1884, Schliemann,
together with Dörpfeld, excavated the great-fortified site of Tiryns near
Mycenae.
Toward
the end of his life, Schliemann suffered greatly with ear trouble and traveled
in Europe, visiting specialists and hoping for a cure. None was forthcoming. In
great pain and alone, on Dec. 25, 1890, while walking across a square in Naples,
he collapsed; he died the next day.
Assessment
Schliemann's
work of discovery in archaeology is easy to assess. He discovered Homeric Troy
as well as a city that existed long before Homer--a prehistoric Bronze Age
civilization in Turkey; this was also what he discovered at Mycenae. Hitherto,
ancient historians had thought of four empires: Greece, Rome, Egypt, and
Babylon-Assyria; Schliemann discovered two new civilizations and enormously
lengthened the perspective of history. He nearly discovered a third, namely that
of prehistoric Crete.
He
had long thought that there must have existed in the Mediterranean a
civilization earlier than Mycenae and Bronze Age Hisarlk, and he guessed that it
might be in Crete. At one time he contemplated excavation in Crete, but he could
not agree to the price asked for the land; thus, the discovery of the pre-Mycenean
civilization of Minoan Crete was left to Sir Arthur Evans 10 years after
Schliemann's death.
Schliemann
was one of the first popularizes of archaeology. With his books and his
dispatches to The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and other papers he kept the world
informed and excited by his archaeological discoveries, as no one previously had
been able to do. It has been said, "Every person of culture and education
lived through the drama of discovering Troy." Schliemann became a symbol
not only of the new archaeological scholarship of the second half of the 19th
century but also of the romance and excitement of archaeology. Scholars and the
public were inspired by him, and when he died Sir John Myres, Camden Professor
of Ancient History at the University of Oxford, said that to many it seemed that
"the spring had gone out of the year."
When
Schliemann began excavating, no corpus of accepted practice existed for
archaeological fieldwork. Like Sir Flinders Petrie and Augustus Pitt-Rivers, he
was a pioneer. Stratigraphy had been observed and understood in the Danish peat
bogs, the Jutland barrows, and the prehistoric Swiss lake dwellings, but Hisarlk
was the first large dry-land man-made mound to be dug. It is not surprising that
Schliemann was at first puzzled by what he found, but, eventually, with the
assistance of Dörpfeld, he was able to untangle the stratigraphy. There is a
wide variation in the assessment of his technique as an excavator. He did
extremely well for someone starting to dig in the 1870s, yet those who are
excavating similar mounds in the Middle East 100 years later often unfairly
criticize him.