Heinrich Schliemann

Heinrich Schliemann was born on January 6, 1822, in the small town of Neubukow in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, one of several children of a poor Protestant pastor ^[1]. The family soon moved to the village of Ankershagen, where the boy grew up surrounded by local legends of buried treasure and haunted ruins. In his later autobiographical writing he claimed that a childhood gift of Georg Ludwig Jerrer's illustrated world history, with its picture of Troy in flames, fixed his life's ambition at the age of seven. Scholars who have examined his diaries treat this story with caution, since Schliemann was fond of reshaping his past to fit the legend he built around himself ^[2].

His father's financial and personal troubles ended any hope of a full education. Heinrich left school at fourteen and was apprenticed to a grocer in the town of Fürstenberg, where he spent five years weighing herring and candles ^[1]. A chest injury forced him out of the shop, and in 1841 he set off for Hamburg, then signed on as a cabin boy on a ship bound for Venezuela. The vessel wrecked in a storm off the Dutch coast, and Schliemann came ashore with almost nothing. He found work as a messenger and office attendant in Amsterdam, and it was there that his real education began.

In Amsterdam, Schliemann taught himself languages with a method of his own devising: reading aloud, writing constant exercises, and reciting memorized passages to paid listeners. He claimed he could master a new language in a matter of weeks, and while the boast invites skepticism, his results were undeniable. Over his lifetime he gained working command of well over a dozen languages, including English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and both ancient and modern Greek ^[1][3].

His Russian opened the decisive door. The trading firm B. H. Schröder & Co. sent him to St. Petersburg as its agent in 1846, and within a year he had founded his own trading house there. He dealt in commodities such as indigo and became a wealthy man while still in his twenties ^[3]. During the California gold rush he traveled to Sacramento, where his brother had died, and ran a bank buying gold dust from miners. Back in Russia, he profited heavily during the Crimean War as a contractor supplying war materials, and by the mid 1860s he was rich enough to retire from business altogether ^[1].

Retirement did not mean rest. Schliemann traveled around the world, visiting China, Japan, India, and the Americas, and published a book about his Asian journey. In 1866 he settled in Paris to study archaeology and ancient languages, a middle-aged merchant remaking himself as a scholar. He later obtained a doctorate from the University of Rostock on the strength of a dissertation about Ithaca, written partly in ancient Greek ^[2].

The central question of any Heinrich Schliemann biography is how a retired businessman came to find Troy. In the 1860s most academics considered Homer's Iliad a poetic invention with no real geography behind it. Schliemann believed otherwise, and he was not alone. The British expatriate Frank Calvert, whose family owned part of the mound of Hisarlik near the Dardanelles, had already concluded that the site concealed the ancient city and had begun small trial excavations. When Schliemann arrived in the Troad in 1868, Calvert persuaded him that Hisarlik, not the rival candidate Bunarbashi, was the place to dig. Schliemann adopted the theory, and later gave Calvert far less credit than he deserved ^[4].

Excavation began in earnest in 1871. Schliemann attacked the mound with large crews of workmen, driving an enormous trench straight through its center. The mound turned out to contain many superimposed settlements, and in his haste to reach what he assumed were Homeric levels near the bottom, he destroyed substantial remains of later cities, including, ironically, much of the layer most archaeologists now associate with the Troy of the Late Bronze Age ^[1][5].

In May 1873 he announced his most famous find: a cache of gold and silver vessels, weapons, and jewelry that he named Priam's Treasure, after the Trojan king of the Iliad. He smuggled the hoard out of the Ottoman Empire in violation of his permit, provoking a lawsuit from the Ottoman government, which he eventually settled with a payment ^[5]. A celebrated photograph shows his young Greek wife Sophia wearing the gold diadems, which he called the Jewels of Helen. Later research dated the treasure to roughly a thousand years before any plausible Trojan War, and discrepancies in Schliemann's own accounts of the discovery have led some scholars to suspect that he assembled the hoard from finds made over several days or weeks ^[2][5].

Among the most consequential Heinrich Schliemann achievements was his campaign at Mycenae in southern Greece in 1876. Working under the supervision of the Greek Archaeological Society, he excavated inside the citadel's Lion Gate and uncovered a circle of deep shaft graves containing an astonishing quantity of gold: funeral masks, cups, inlaid daggers, and ornaments buried with the dead of a warrior aristocracy ^[1][6]. Lifting one hammered gold mask, he believed he was looking at the face of Homer's king, and a telegram attributed to him famously reported that he had gazed on the face of Agamemnon. The burials are now dated to the sixteenth century BC, centuries earlier than any historical setting for the Trojan War, but the discovery revealed a previously unknown Greek Bronze Age civilization that scholars named Mycenaean ^[6].

Schliemann kept digging for the rest of his life. He excavated at Orchomenos in Boeotia, and in 1884 and 1885 he cleared the great fortified palace at Tiryns with his collaborator Wilhelm Dörpfeld, exposing massive walls and a megaron hall that shaped all later understanding of Mycenaean architecture ^[1]. He also returned repeatedly to Hisarlik. Dörpfeld, a trained architect, brought discipline to the Troy excavations, distinguishing the site's many building phases with a rigor Schliemann had never managed. Their later seasons together, and Dörpfeld's work after Schliemann's death, established the stratigraphic sequence of nine principal cities at Troy that remains the framework for research today ^[5].

Not every project succeeded. Schliemann hoped to excavate Knossos on Crete, correctly suspecting that the island held another great prehistoric center, but he could not agree on a price for the land. The site was later dug by Arthur Evans, who uncovered the Minoan palace there ^[2].

Schliemann married twice. In 1852 in St. Petersburg he wed Ekaterina Lyschin, a Russian merchant's niece, and the couple had three children. The marriage was unhappy, and after Ekaterina refused to leave Russia, Schliemann obtained a divorce in Indianapolis in 1869, taking advantage of Indiana's lenient divorce laws while briefly establishing American residency ^[2].

That same year he asked the Archbishop of Athens, an old acquaintance, to help him find a Greek bride who loved Homer. The search produced Sophia Engastromenos, a seventeen-year-old schoolmaster's daughter roughly thirty years his junior. They married in Athens in 1869, and despite the transactional beginning the partnership endured. Sophia worked beside him at Troy and Mycenae, and their two children received the names Andromache and Agamemnon, chosen from the epics that governed their father's imagination ^[1][3].

The couple's Athens residence matched Schliemann's self-image. He built a grand neoclassical mansion called the Iliou Melathron, the Palace of Ilium, decorated with frescoes of his excavations and mosaic floors quoting Homeric scenes. The building now houses the Numismatic Museum of Athens ^[6].

Through the 1880s Schliemann remained restlessly active, publishing excavation reports, defending his interpretations against skeptics, and planning new campaigns. His books, including Troy and Its Remains, Mycenae, and Ilios, reached wide audiences in several languages and made prehistoric archaeology a matter of public fascination across Europe and America ^[1]. He fought bitterly with critics, among them the German scholar Ernst Boetticher, who accused him of misrepresenting the Troy excavations, and he organized an international conference at Hisarlik in 1890 to rebut the charges ^[5].

His health failed before his ambitions did. Schliemann had long suffered from painful chronic ear infections, and in late 1890 he underwent ear surgery in Halle, Germany. Ignoring medical advice, he traveled on, and after visiting Pompeii he collapsed in Naples. He died there on December 26, 1890, at the age of sixty-eight ^[1][3]. His body was taken to Athens, where he was buried in the First Cemetery in a mausoleum built in the form of a Greek temple, its frieze depicting the excavator and his workmen among scenes from the Trojan War ^[6].

Judged by results, Schliemann transformed knowledge of the ancient world. Before his trenches at Hisarlik and Mycenae, the Greek Bronze Age barely existed as a subject; after them, two great civilizations, Trojan and Mycenaean, demanded explanation. Later giants of the field, from Wilhelm Dörpfeld to Carl Blegen, built directly on his sites, and the question of whether some historical conflict lies behind Homer's poem remains a live scholarly debate that his work began ^[5][6].

Judged by methods and character, the verdict is harsher. Schliemann's brutal excavation techniques destroyed evidence that modern archaeology can never recover, and biographers, most insistently the American classicist David Traill, have documented a lifelong habit of embellishment and outright fabrication in his diaries, autobiographies, and reports ^[2]. His treatment of Frank Calvert, the collaborator whose insight guided him to Hisarlik, is now widely regarded as a serious injustice ^[4].

Even his most famous find kept generating drama long after his death. Priam's Treasure, donated to Germany and displayed in Berlin, vanished at the end of the Second World War. In the 1990s Russia confirmed that Soviet forces had removed the hoard in 1945, and the objects went on display at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, where they remain the subject of an unresolved dispute over ownership ^[7]. Among Heinrich Schliemann facts, this afterlife of his gold may be the most fitting: a treasure taken in war, hidden for decades, and still contested, much like the reputation of the man who dug it up.