Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Schliemann was born on January 6 1822 in Neubukow, Germany. His father was an indigent pastor, who gave the seven-year-old Schliemann a book with a print depicting the ancient city of Troy in flames.
According to Schliemann, the image stayed with him throughout his life, fuelling a passion to prove that Homer’s Iliad – with its story of the epic Trojan War and its memorable cast of warriors – was based on real events and not merely Homer’s imagination.
Poverty forced Schliemann to leave school at 14, and he worked as a grocer’s assistant then a cabin boy. He was shipwrecked off Holland, before ending up as a bookkeeping clerk in Amsterdam. In his spare time, he studied, mastering ancient and modern Greek, Dutch, Russian, and numerous other European languages.
His firm sent him to St Petersburg, but before long he moved to the US, where he set up a bank in the California gold rush and acquired US citizenship. On returning to St Petersburg, he married Ekaterina Lyschin, and founded a prosperous indigo dye business, before making a fortune trading ammunition to the tsar’s government during the Crimean War (1853–6). He retired aged 36, a very wealthy man. By now he had three children, but domestic life was strained, and Schliemann and Ekaterina eventually divorced.
In preparation for a life of archaeology, he studied briefly at the Sorbonne, then travelled around Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, Greece, India, China, Japan, and elsewhere.
By 1868 he was ready. His first dig was on Odysseus’s island of Ithaka, but he soon moved to Turkey in search of his real love: Troy.
There are several clues in Homer, Herodotus, and Strabo about where Troy is, Schliemann came to believe it lay at Hisarlık in western Turkey. In this, he was influenced by the self-taught English consular official Frank Calvert, who had come to this conclusion from reading the work of Charles Maclaren. Calvert had, in fact, already begun excavating at Hisarlık before Schliemann arrived, but he quickly recognised that Schliemann had the financial resources to dig the site thoroughly.
Enchanted with Greece, aged 47, Schliemann married Sophia Engastromenos, the 17-year old daughter of a wealthy merchant. She assisted greatly with his work – in his lifetime and afterwards – and they had two children: Andromache and Agamemnon.
In 1873 his efforts at Hisarlık paid off when he unearthed the remains of an ancient city. Along with it, he uncovered a remarkable cache of gold, silver, and bronze. He announced to the world that he had found Homer’s Troy, and what must therefore be the Treasure of King Priam. Buoyed up, he smuggled the valuables away from the dig under his wife’s clothing, and then out of Turkey.
Unfortunately, it turned out that Schliemann had made a mistake. Having perceived that the layers of archaeology at Hisarlık disclosed nine consecutive civilisations built on top of each other, he swiftly dynamited down to the bottom level, which he took to be Homer’s Troy. However, he had miscalculated. The bottom level turned out to be far older, and whichever layer above it was contemporary with Homer’s Troy now lay in his dynamited refuse.
History has not been as quick as Schliemann to conclude that he found Troy. All that can be said with certainty is that Schliemann unearthed an important, ancient settlement, which may or may not be the site of Troy.
In a separate development, since Schliemann’s time, scholars have become increasingly convinced that Homer’s tale of an epic military engagement at Troy was more myth than history. Nevertheless, Schliemann’s discovery was game changing, in that he definitively demonstrated that the Aegean had a rich history far older than the better-known civilisations of classical Greece.
Having accomplished his main goal, Schliemann turned his attention to Mycenae, around 60 miles southwest of Athens. He was again lucky with his dig site, and uncovered five tombs and a cache of treasure. Among the artefacts he found were gold death masks, and as Schliemann stared at the most striking of them, he was convinced he was looking at the face of Agamemnon himself.
What set Schliemann apart from his contemporary archaeologists was the degree to which he informed the public of his achievements. He wrote learned books, but more importantly he kept the public up to date with his adventures in exciting dispatches for The Daily Telegraph and The Times in London, and The New York Times in the USA.
He is sometimes referred to as the Father of Mediterranean Archaeology, but his legacy is a more complex one.
If Hisarlık is the site of Homeric Troy, then the credit for identifying it should really go to Charles Maclaren and Frank Calvert. Schliemann had the funds to undertake the excavations, but he was building on the work of others.
Schliemann’s character has also come in for some reassessment. Numerous diary entries he made – about famous people he met, and important events he witnessed – appear to be untrue. And there are questions about his archaeological finds. For instance, some have raised concerns about his Treasure of Priam.
Quite apart from the manner in which he spirited it out of Turkey, experts have questioned its provenance. The objects seem to cover a wide range of places and dates, leading to a concern that perhaps Schliemann assembled them from various locations, then passed them off as the fabled treasure of Troy.
His Mask of Agamemnon has also been questioned, not least because it looks strikingly modern (with a handlebar moustache), and is noticeably different to the other masks Schliemann found at Mycenae. There even appear to be some records from around this time linking Schliemann with a Parisian goldsmith.
In assessing Schliemann, it is significant that he lived in the age of Darwin and Wagner. Science and myth intrigued a public that was busy coming to grips with both. Schliemann’s work straddled these two fascinations, providing scientific evidence for worlds long shrouded in myth and legend.
In retrospect, his greatest legacy is not what he discovered, or his determination to unearth the past, but the impact of all his self-promotion and publicity, which made archaeology exciting for ordinary people, starting a popular fascination that runs directly from him to Hollywood and the Indiana Jones and Lara Croft film franchises.
Schliemann collapsed on December 25, 1890 while out walking in Naples, and died the following day. He was buried in the First Cemetery of Athens.
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