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.