The Hero Schliemann

by Laura Amy Schlitz

  Spring turned to summer. The climate of Hissarlik tends to extremes — bitter cold in winter, blistering heat in summer, and a wind that never stops blowing. Since Homer sang of “windy Troy,” Heinrich had once rejoiced that Hissarlik was windy, but his enthusiasm for high winds was waning. Gusts of air blew grit into his eyes. Dust scratched his skin and filled his mouth when he tried to speak.

  As the workmen dug, they unearthed thousands of poisonous snakes. Hissarlik was also home to scorpions and mosquitoes. At night, it was difficult to sleep: there were so many shrieking owls and croaking frogs. Poisonous centipedes invaded the Schliemann bed.

  The workmen grew weary of hauling heavy wheelbarrows full of earth. They began to work more slowly, frequently pausing to smoke. Heinrich badgered them about their smoking. He believed that smoking wasted time and weakened the body.

  Heinrich had become an unpaid doctor. He hated dirt and disease, and could not see either without wanting to meddle. He gave the workers quinine in order to prevent malaria. He preached the virtues of exercise, fresh fruit, and sea bathing.

  Heinrich was particularly proud of curing a girl of seventeen. She was almost too weak to walk, she coughed uncontrollably, and her body was covered with ulcers. Heinrich was shocked by her frailty and the filthy rags she wore. He called for castor oil and administered a dose; he also asked Sophia to give the girl a pretty dress from her own wardrobe. He taught his patient a few simple exercises and told her to take daily sea baths. A month later, she walked three miles to kiss the dusty shoes of “Dr. Schliemann.” Her cough was gone, and the ulcers were healed. She was happy and strong.

  Heinrich was touched by her gratitude, but — as he often complained — he had come to Hissarlik to excavate Troy, not to play doctor. He urged the workers to dig deeper, to go faster.

  The first season ended. Heinrich hired more workmen. He was beginning to understand the way the mound was layered. Little by little, he came to distinguish between the ruins of four different cities — cities that lay on top and outside of another, like nesting dolls or the layers of an onion.

  In an onion, however, the layers are orderly. At Hissarlik, the layers are uneven and the boundaries overlap. The site would have confounded a far more experienced archaeologist than Heinrich Schliemann. “It was an entirely new world for me,” confessed Heinrich. “I had to learn everything by myself.”

  When Heinrich Schliemann dug at Hissarlik, he was hoping to find Homer’s city of Troy. Instead, he found many cities, one on top of the other. Sorting out the different layers, or strata, was a difficult job.

  In order to understand Heinrich’s work, imagine that you’ve tossed everything that you’ve ever owned into a heap in the middle of the floor. On top of the mound would be the clothes you wore yesterday. Lower down, the clothes would be smaller. Legos and puzzle pieces would get bigger. At the bottom of the mound would be baby clothes, board books, and rattles.

  If you looked at the mound like an archaeologist, you’d see all the layers of your past life. You would keep a sharp eye out for anything that might help you to assign dates to the different strata. If, for example, you found your second-grade report card next to a plastic stegosaurus, you might guess that second grade was the year you were crazy about dinosaurs.

  Now suppose your mother wanted to give away the red boots you loved when you were four. Suppose she tore apart your mound like a dog looking for a bone. What had once been an orderly mess would become chaos. The original layering, which made sense, would be lost forever.

  What Heinrich Schliemann did at Hissarlik was quite a bit like that.

  During the second season, Heinrich found a panel of carved marble that showed the sun god in his chariot. Though the panel, which dates from between 355 and 281 BCE, was not old enough to belong to Homer’s Troy, it was the largest and most beautiful object yet found — and it was found on Frank Calvert’s land. Calvert and Schliemann had agreed that whatever was found on Calvert’s section of the mound would be divided between them, but the marble panel could not be cut in half. Heinrich wanted the whole thing. He offered to pay Frank Calvert for his share of the sculpture.

  It was the end of their friendship. Since their first meeting, Frank Calvert had been unstinting with his knowledge and advice. Now Heinrich haggled like the cut-throat businessman he was. He succeeded in beating down the price, but he lost Calvert’s respect. Later, when Calvert published criticisms of Schliemann’s theories in historical journals, Schliemann felt betrayed.

  Heinrich was publishing his discoveries almost as quickly as he made them. He expected the scholars of the world to applaud his labor; instead they accused him of jumping to conclusions. Heinrich raged at the criticism but continued to dig, assisted by his wife. At night the Schliemanns stayed up late, measuring, sketching, and recording their finds. Sophia, who had been so homesick in the grand hotels of Europe, accepted the primitive living conditions without a murmur, though she wore four pairs of gloves during the winter.

  As Heinrich continued to study the mound, he came to believe that the second city from the bottom was the city of Homer’s Iliad. It was a prehistoric city, with a paved ramp, a magnificent tower, and a huge gate, which Heinrich at once assumed was the “Scaean Gate” of The Iliad. The walls had been skillfully constructed, and — even more important — showed signs that the city had once been burned, like Homer’s Troy.

  Heinrich was outwardly delighted, and inwardly puzzled, by this city. He wanted nothing more than to believe that he had found Homer’s Troy, but the city was very small — only about a hundred yards across. He found bronze and copper weapons, but the pottery found at this level was oddly primitive.

  And there was no treasure. By now, Heinrich had been an archaeologist long enough to understand that he was supposed to be seeking knowledge, not treasure, and he was quick to assert that his only desire was to find Troy itself. But the lack of treasure was a nagging disappointment. Homer said that Troy was “rich in gold,” but Heinrich had found little that was precious.

  It was not until 1873 that Heinrich found the riches his heart craved. According to Heinrich, the treasure was found on the last morning of May. He was digging into a wall when he caught a glimpse of shining gold. Some instinct told him that there was a rich treasure hidden within the wall, and he resolved to dig it out for himself. He announced to the workers that it was his birthday (it wasn’t) and told them to take the day off. He summoned Sophia to his side and told her to fetch her red shawl. Together, the husband-and-wife team worked to dig the artifacts out of the wall. There were thousands of precious objects: helmets and swords, vessels of gold and silver, shields, lances, vases, cauldrons, and jewelry. There were more than eight thousand gold rings; there were earrings and bracelets and necklaces and diadems.

  Sophia bundled the treasure in her shawl and carried it back to their living quarters. Once they were alone together, Heinrich decked his beautiful wife in the golden diadem that had once kissed the brow of Helen of Troy.

  This is a good story. It is still found in books, but it is not true. For one thing, Sophia Schliemann was not with her husband on May 31. Her father had recently died, and she had gone to Athens for the funeral. As early as December 1873, Heinrich admitted to a friend at the British Museum that he had made up the story of Sophia and her red shawl. He explained that Sophia was becoming a gifted archaeologist and he wanted to encourage her by including her in the story of his great discovery.

  Sophia’s absence is not the only thing wrong with Heinrich’s account of that day. Scholars who have examined Heinrich’s notes also know that some of the objects in the treasure were found earlier — he had dated and photographed them before May 31. In fact, Heinrich combined several finds in order to make up what he called “Priam’s treasure” after King Priam in The Iliad. His dramatic instinct demanded that the treasure be as lavish as possible, so he added to what he found.

  Heinrich had a theory — or fantasy — about the treasure, and he wante
d the world to share it. According to him, the treasure was hidden on the night Troy was invaded by the Greeks. Led by the crafty Odysseus, the Greek soldiers infiltrated the city, concealed within a wooden horse. Now they attacked with fire and sword. “The treasure was packed together at terrible risk of life, and in the greatest anxiety,” wrote Heinrich. For Heinrich, a well-built city, signs of fire, and a hastily hidden treasure added up to one thing: Homeric Troy. He had solved what he modestly referred to as “the greatest and most important of all historical riddles.”

  Heinrich told the story of how he discovered Priam’s treasure many times, and he never told it the same way twice. His shiftiness about the finding of the treasure was so noticeable that some of his fellow scholars suspected him of paying artists to make the precious objects and burying them himself, only to dig them up later. “Priam’s treasure,” which Heinrich thought would be the greatest triumph of his career, was also the greatest scandal.

  A word about the treasure: It did not belong to King Priam, and it was not worn by Helen of Troy. Though the treasure is ancient and genuine, it predates the Trojan War by a thousand years. Modern archaeologists have since divided the site at Hissarlik into at least nine different Troys, dating from nine different periods of occupation. Heinrich’s prehistoric city, second from the bottom, is generally known as Troy 2. Heinrich’s dating, for both the treasure and the city, was a thousand years off: Troy 2 was not Homeric Troy.

  It’s easy to laugh now. To be “off” by a thousand years is to be pretty far “off.” It’s important to remember, though, that ancient artifacts do not come out of the ground with dates on them. Modern dating methods, such as radiocarbon dating, did not exist in Heinrich’s time. In Heinrich’s day, archaeologists had to figure out how old objects were by keeping track of how deep they were buried and by comparing them to other objects. Because the artifacts Heinrich was finding were so ancient, he didn’t have objects with which to compare them. Later on, archaeologists came to date materials by creating a sequence of styles in pottery. Though Heinrich loved gold and precious stones, he was one of the first archaeologists to realize the importance of pottery. In this, he was ahead of his time.

  In falsifying details of the treasure, however, he was doing his fellow archaeologists the kind of injury they find hard to forgive. All archaeologists, past and present, work together. Each object is a clue to the past, and archaeologists count on one another to pass on only the right clues. In hedging about exactly where and when the objects were found, Heinrich cheated his colleagues of the opportunity to learn the real history of his treasure.

  Though finding “Priam’s treasure” was the thrill of a lifetime, it created a dilemma for Heinrich. According to the rules of the firman, half of the excavated goods belonged to the Turks. Heinrich had two choices: he could surrender half the treasure, or he could keep it a secret. He could not publish his great discovery without losing half of what he had found.

  Either option was more than body and soul could bear. Heinrich could not wait to dazzle the public. He believed that the Trojan gold would bring him undying glory. The temptation to publish his finds was irresistible.

  On the other hand, he could not stand to part with any of the treasure. Heinrich had a childish “finders-keepers” feeling about the Trojan gold. It was his connection to Homer, something he could hold in his hands. He had borne heat and dust and ridicule for it. He could not let it go.

  The solution to this problem was a crooked one. Heinrich was neither the first nor the last archaeologist to resort to it. He smuggled the treasure out of the country. No one knows exactly how he did it: he may have been helped by the Calvert brothers or by members of Sophia’s family, but the finding of the treasure was kept a secret. Once the gold left Turkey, Heinrich closed down the excavation and returned to Athens. There he photographed the treasure and wrote articles about its finding.

  When the articles were published, Heinrich was in trouble, as he fully deserved to be. Though Greece and Turkey had been at odds for hundreds of years, the Greek government agreed that Schliemann ought to return the treasure to the Turks. When the authorities came to claim it, the treasure had vanished again. It seems likely that Heinrich divided it among the members of the Engastromenos family, who hid it in caves and barns.

  Heinrich knew that he might go to jail, but didn’t care. “I kept everything valuable that I found for myself and thus saved it for science,” he wrote self-righteously. Guards surrounded the house. Policemen searched his belongings. The Schliemann bank accounts were frozen. Heinrich was questioned about the whereabouts of the treasure, but he kept his mouth shut. Only once did he come close to admitting his guilt. The Turks had arrested Effendi Amin, the watchman who had been hired to keep an eye on the Schliemann excavation. Heinrich felt no shame about stealing the treasure or smuggling it out of the country, but it distressed him that Effendi Amin should be put in jail for what he had done. He wrote to the Turkish government, pointing out that the loss of the treasure was not Amin’s fault — he had done his best. He begged them, “in the name of humanity” to set Amin free.

  There was a long court case. Eventually the Turks gave up and agreed that Heinrich should pay them for the treasure, a fine of fifty thousand francs. He joyfully sent five times that amount and a number of artifacts he did not greatly admire. Once again, his luck had held. Perhaps Hermes, the Greek god of thieves, protected him. Against all odds, he was able to keep the Trojan gold.

  He was not, however, as celebrated as he had hoped to be. Many scholars felt that more evidence was needed before Hissarlik could be renamed Troy. Others found Heinrich’s theories ridiculous, his stories preposterous. Cartoons and caricatures of the Schliemanns filled the newspapers.

  All his life, Heinrich Schliemann was to irritate his colleagues. Though many scholars befriended him, he also made enemies — and his enemies simply could not stand him. They were disgusted by his romanticism, his boasting, his hysterical excitement over every new idea. It rankled that a grocer turned millionaire should unearth such staggering finds. Schliemann was a shrill and vulgar little man. What right had he to come up with theories?

  Three years of frustration followed. Though he had gained fame, Heinrich had failed to dazzle the scholarly world, and he could not get permission to mount another excavation — this time at Mycenae. Because Mycenae was known to be a Bronze Age site, Heinrich hoped to find weapons and pottery similar to those he had found at Hissarlik. He also hoped to find the tomb of Agamemnon, the warrior king of The Iliad. Unfortunately, neither the Greek nor the Turkish government had any intention of letting him dig up anything. Who can blame them?

  Heinrich argued and coaxed. It did no good. At last he resorted to bribery. He spent a huge sum of money to knock down an ugly tower that blocked a view of the Parthenon. The people of Athens had hated this eyesore for centuries, but no one had ever been willing to pay to get rid of it. Heinrich was willing to foot the bill. Shortly afterward, he received permission to dig at Mycenae. The rules of this firman were strict. Everything he found would belong to Greece — and he was limited to digging inside the city walls.

  As it happened, Heinrich wanted to dig within the city walls. He believed that the royal tombs would be found inside Mycenae. He owed this belief to a Greek writer named Pausanias, who visited Mycenae in the second century of the Common Era.

  Of course other scholars had read Pausanias, too, but they brought more knowledge to their reading. They knew that the city of Mycenae had once possessed two sets of walls, one inside the other. They reasoned that the space inside the inner wall was too small to hold the tomb of a great king. If royal tombs existed, they were certain they must lie somewhere between the inner and outer walls. It is probable the Greek government gave Schliemann permission to dig within the inner city walls because there was little chance of his finding anything there.

  But Heinrich’s hunch turned out to be an auspicious one — he found the tombs. Quite early on, he came upon
a circle of stone markers. Inside the circle were tombstones that marked the entrance to narrow tunnels, leading straight down. At the bottom of the tunnels were underground chambers — shaft graves. Pausanias had mentioned five royal tombs, and Heinrich discovered exactly five shaft graves. (There were in fact six, but Heinrich trusted Pausanias completely; after he found the fifth grave, he stopped looking.)

  As Heinrich had hoped, the graves were royal tombs, and they were magnificently rich. Fifteen royal corpses were heaped with gold. The men wore gold death masks and breastplates decorated with sunbursts and rosettes. The women were adorned with gold jewelry. All around the bodies were bronze swords and daggers inlaid with gold and silver, drinking cups made of precious stones, boxes of gold and silver and ivory. Once again, Heinrich was half-mad with enthusiasm. “I have found an unparalleled treasure,” he wrote. “All the museums in the world put together do not possess one fifth of it. Unfortunately nothing but the glory is mine.”

  The tombs of Mycenae were even more spectacular than “Priam’s treasure.” The artifacts were exquisite, but that was not all — many of the artifacts matched exactly the descriptions found in Homer’s Iliad. Wine cups, swords, jewels, bracelets, helmets — everything was in keeping with Homer’s Bronze Age world. To crown it all, one of the gold-masked warriors had died in the prime of manhood. This, Heinrich felt certain, was the hero from The Iliad, the murdered Agamemnon. He knelt down and kissed the gold mask. Afterward, according to a famous story, Heinrich telegraphed the king of Greece with the words, “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.”