![]() Homer’s account of the Trojan War, a ten-year clash sparked by Priam’s son Paris’ seduction or abduction of Helen, wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, was first written down around the eighth century B.C.E. From 1858 on, the self-professed archaeology enthusiast dedicated his life to the search for Troy, which he later claimed to have first learned of as either a 7-year-old who saw an illustration of the burning city in a book or a 14-year-old grocer’s apprentice who heard the Iliad recited in ancient Greek. With business ventures ranging from indigo trading to reselling gold dust to military contracting during the Crimean War, Schliemann made enough money to retire by age 36. Petersburg, where he used his mastery of several languages, including Russian and Dutch, to establish himself as an entrepreneur. Settling in Amsterdam, he found employment as a bookkeeper at a trading firm that later sent him to St. The son of an impoverished minister, the young Schliemann worked at a grocery store before earning a spot as a cabin boy on a Venezuela-bound vessel that shipwrecked off the Dutch coast. “He traveled across so much of the world, in a way that was possible for the first time in history. “He was a tradesman, a self-made man, and a person who used all possibilities of the 19th century,” Matthias Wemhoff, project manager for the exhibition, tells the Art Newspaper’s Andrew Pulver. Split between the James-Simon-Galerie and the Neues Museum, the two-part show explores the early days of Schliemann’s career, before he started practicing archaeology in his 40s, and spotlights some of his most spectacular finds, including funerary goods from royal Mycenaean tombs and fragments of ancient wall paintings. “ The Worlds of Schliemann,” a new exhibition organized by Berlin’s Museum of Prehistory and Early History, revisits his life and legacy on the bicentenary of his birth. © American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Archives, Heinrich Schliemann Papers © American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Archives, Carl Blegen Papers Heinrich's second wife, Sophia Schliemann, wearing gold jewelry from Priam's Treasure in 1873 As classicist Kenneth Harl jokes in the Great Courses’ Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor series, Schliemann accomplished what the Greeks could not, finally leveling the walls of Troy. Archaeologists soon realized that the loot predated the Trojan War by some 1,250 years, meaning it belonged to an entirely different civilization than the one featured in Homer’s epic poem.Īssuming that Priam’s kingdom lay at the lowest level of the archaeological site, the adventurer rushed excavation of the upper layers, inadvertently destroying almost all traces of the very city he’d set out to find. Schliemann may have correctly identified Troy’s location, but another key aspect of his story-the discovery of Priam’s treasure-failed to hold up under scrutiny. An amateur archaeologist with a penchant for embellishment, Schliemann smuggled the trove out of Anatolia and touted it as proof of his claim that Hisarlik and Troy, the besieged city immortalized in Homer’s Iliad, were one and the same. When German businessman Heinrich Schliemann discovered a cache of ancient artifacts in the place now known as Hisarlik, Turkey, in 1873, he was quick to identify the gold jewelry, silver vases and other precious objects as the treasure of Priam, the legendary king of Troy.
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