Heinrich Schliemann

German archaeologist

• Born: January 6, 1822
• Birthplace: Neu Bockow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin (now in Germany)
• Died: December 26, 1890
• Place of death: Naples, Italy

A stunningly successful merchant in his early years, Schliemann began a new career in his middle age as an archaeologist. Relying on an unwavering faith in the ancient epics of Homer, he found and excavated Troy and unearthed the riches of Mycenae, and thus singlehandedly brought the splendors of the Greek Bronze Age to the attention of both amateurs and professionals.

Early Life

Heinrich Schliemann was the fifth child in a large family. He was named Julius at birth, but he soon took the name of an older brother who had died ten weeks before he was born. Schliemann reports that by age seven he had already decided to find Troy upon seeing a woodcut of it in a history book that he received as a present from his father for Christmas in 1829. When he was nine years old, his mother died. It was also about this time that his father, Ernest, was disgraced for an affair with a maid and was temporarily suspended from his post as a Protestant clergyman. The scandal was an embarrassment and this, in addition to his mother’s death, caused the family to break up.

Schliemann entered school, but in 1836 he was forced to leave to serve as an apprentice in a grocer’s shop. It was during this period that he met a drunken miller, a former student, who recited Greek for Schliemann and intensified his love of Homer. Manual labor was difficult for Schliemann, who was of slight build and pale complexion. He soon departed to make his fortune in Venezuela, but a shipwreck caused him to land in Amsterdam, where he took a series of menial jobs. During this period, he began his lifelong habit of language study, based on a method of his own devising. He eventually learned some eighteen languages and claimed to learn them in periods ranging from six weeks to six months. In 1844, he joined a mercantile firm, and in 1846, his hard work and newly acquired fluency in Russian persuaded the firm to send him as its representative to Russia. There, Schliemann flourished, trading many items, but especially indigo, from his base in St. Petersburg, where he quickly established his own business.

Schliemann soon became a millionaire. In 1851, he embarked for the United States, ostensibly to help settle the affairs of his dead brother Ludwig but also to make investments in the booming West. He established a bank dealing in gold dust in Sacramento and earned large profits. By 1852, he was back in St. Petersburg, where he married Ekaterina Petrovna Lyschin. He was to have two children, Sergei and Nadezhda, but little happiness from this union. He profited greatly from the Crimean War and the American Civil War, and in 1863, in his early forties and at a stage at which most men look forward to settling down, he liquidated his business and began the second phase of his life.

Life’s Work

In 1866, after a two-year world tour that included the Far East and resulted in the first of his eleven books, Schliemann enrolled in the Sorbonne, finally able to complete his education. He soon traveled again and once more visited the southern United States; yet most important for his future work were visits to several Greek sites that he would later excavate, including Ithaca, Mycenae, Tiryns, and Troy. He even dug, without permission, in the area of Troy in 1868, trying to disprove the theory that Burnarbashi held the remains of Homer’s Troy. Schliemann was convinced that his choice, Hissarlik, was the true site of Troy.

Upon returning to St. Petersburg to find his estranged wife gone, along with their children, Schliemann left that city, never to return. In 1869, he received a doctorate from the University of Rostock for his publications to date and then returned to the United States to divorce under the state of Indiana’s liberal laws. It was during this trip that Schliemann received American citizenship, and not in 1850 as he often related. He was proud of his citizenship and often signed himself “Henry Schliemann.”

Even before Schliemann left the United States, he wrote a former tutor, now a Greek archbishop, asking him to find a wife suitable to help him pursue his dream of finding Troy. The archbishop suggested his cousin, Sophia Engastromenos, whom Schliemann courted cautiously. Impressed by her beauty and love of ancient learning, he married her on September 23, 1869. She, along with Troy, was to be an overriding passion in his life. The couple had two children, Andromache and Agamemnon.

In 1870, Schliemann began to dig at Hissarlik, again illegally, as his permit from the Turks was slow in coming. By 1871, he began legal excavations, but his excavation techniques were unquestionably inferior. He chose speed over care and eliminated higher strata without proper documentation in his zeal to get to the lowest levels. At times, he employed up to 150 men, and his equipment included jackscrews, chains, and windlasses to tear down walls that hindered his progress. In 1873, he found the famed “gold of Troy,” a hoard of gold jewelry, which he smuggled out of the country. One crown alone was said to consist of 16,353 individual pieces. Widely displayed in a photograph of Sophia wearing them, the jewels were lost when Allied forces invaded Berlin at the end of World War II. Schliemann ended excavations in 1873 and published Troja und seine Ruinen (1875; Troy and Its Remains , 1875), whose bold claims of having found Priam’s city brought strong criticism. Denied a permit for Troy by Turkish officials bristling at the loss of the treasure, he turned his sights elsewhere.

In 1874, Schliemann was already at Mycenae, where he dug illegally for five days before being stopped. There, he hoped to find Homer’s “Mycenae rich in gold,” the home of Agamemnon, Greek leader at Troy. As he waited for permission from the Greeks, however, he was well occupied. He first settled a suit by the Turks for the loss of the treasure and then traveled again, as he always did when between projects.

In 1876, Schliemann began at Mycenae and, with naïve faith in the ancient author Pausanias, excavated within the walls of the city, looking for the tombs of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. He soon found five shaft graves that contained vast wealth (the gold alone weighed some thirty-three pounds). He was wrong in his dates, for these graves antedate the supposed dates of Agamemnon by some 250 to 300 years, but the excitement he caused was immense. Schliemann announced his finds in the media, and the public’s imagination was immediately stirred. His subsequent book Mycenæ (1878) did not receive unanimous praise, because his tendency to make hasty judgments on incomplete evidence was antithetical to the staid approach of most classical scholars.

Never one to rest for long, Schliemann was off again for Troy, where he dug from 1879 to 1880. His book Ilios (1880) is more reasoned and careful than his previous works and shows a greater respect for proper archaeological technique. It also contains the autobiographical essay that is the sole source for information on Schliemann’s early life. In 1881, he excavated at Orchomenus, another city important in Homer’s writings, and visited the ongoing excavations by the Germans at Olympia, where he was impressed by the modern and careful techniques being used.

In 1882, Schliemann was back at Troy, trying to understand its confusing stratigraphy, this time with the help of Wilhelm Dörpfeld, a young architect whom Schliemann had met at the Olympia excavations. The publication that resulted from this dig, Troja (1884), was a great improvement on his earlier works.

At this time Schliemann began to take an interest in the island of Crete, where he was convinced that he would find further prehistoric remains. With his astonishing skill for finding the right places to dig, he located the future site of Knossos, home of the Minoan civilization. The businessperson in him prevailed, however, as he never could agree to pay the asking price for the site. Later, this civilization would be unearthed by Sir Arthur Evans, a man who was much influenced by Schliemann and his finds.

Schliemann next turned to another site indicated by Homer, Tiryns. Just a few miles from Mycenae and the fabled home of Heracles, Tiryns was a strong citadel whose stone walls continue to be impressive. The publication of Tiryns (1885) served further to convince the world of the vibrancy of Bronze Age, or Mycenaean, culture. Schliemann traveled in 1886 and 1887, partly to rest and partly to recover his health that, never sound, had begun to deteriorate. In December of 1889, he returned to Troy in order to silence some of his critics. In 1890, on his way home to spend Christmas with his family in Greece, Schliemann’s chronic earaches became worse. He underwent surgery in Halle in November, but in his haste to return to his family he left bed early, only to collapse on Christmas Day in Naples. Temporarily denied access to a hospital because of a lack of identification, Schliemann was taken instead to a police station. He died the next day, December 26, 1890, apparently as a result of the infection’s spreading to his brain.

Significance

Heinrich Schliemann was an uncompromising businessperson. He was also a passionate romantic who believed in Homer as others would believe in the Bible and who put a copy of Homer’s Iliad to his son Agamemnon’s forehead shortly after the child’s birth. Schliemann was cold and arrogant with his critics but could be tender to his wife and children. His early excavation techniques were undoubtedly appalling, and he destroyed much that was of value. However, it was he who found what others had failed to find, and he strove to improve his technique as he went along, often bringing experts such as Dörpfeld to his later excavations.

In some respects, it is Schliemann’s energy that most impresses. He did not begin his archaeological career until he was in his forties, and he was largely self-taught. He financed his excavations himself, using profits from investments, which he continued to manage while he excavated and wrote ceaselessly.

Although other scholars produced theories from behind their desks, Schliemann went to Asia Minor with Homer in hand and found the site generally accepted today as Troy. Although others read Pausanias on Mycenae, Schliemann used his writings to unearth a civilization that had lain beneath the surface of the Greek soil for three thousand years. In the end, this was Schliemann’s greatest accomplishment, for through his energy and excavations he changed forever the way the Western world viewed Homer and its own heritage.

Bibliography

Brackman, Arnold C. The Dream of Troy. New York: Mason and Lipscomb, 1974. A novelistic biography recounting Schliemann’s discovery of Troy. Vivid but not scholarly. Poorly reproduced illustrations.

Calder, William M., and David A. Traill, eds. Myth, Scandal, and History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986. Consists of five essays demythologizing Schliemann through critical examination of his record. Also includes an edition of his Mycenaean diary.

Cottrell, Leonard. The Bull of Minos. New York: Facts On File, 1953. A general book on Bronze Age Greece, with significant space devoted to Schliemann and his works. A good introduction for the reader who wants to learn something of the actual remains Schliemann unearthed as well as something about the man himself. Somewhat uncritical in its acceptance of Schliemann’s versions of events.

Deuel, Leo. Memoirs of Heinrich Schliemann. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Thorough analysis of Schliemann’s life, with generous selections from his own works, letters, and diaries. Balanced, with careful criticism and analytical sections, full notes, and a bibliography.

Fitton, J. Lesley. The Discovery of the Greek Bronze Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Explores excavations by Schliemann and other archaeologists that led scholars to conclude that classical Greece had roots in the Bronze Age.

Moorehead, Caroline. The Lost Treasures of Troy. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994. A history of the materials that Schliemann uncovered at Troy, describing how his finds were handled from their excavation through the early 1990’s.

Payne, Robert. The Gold of Troy: The Story of Heinrich Schliemann and the Buried Cities of Ancient Greece. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1959. A readable and enjoyable biography, flawed only by its tendency to accept much of what Schliemann wrote at face value.

Poole, Lynn, and Gray Poole. One Passion, Two Loves: The Story of Heinrich and Sophia Schliemann, Discoverers of Troy. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966. A very enjoyable study of the later part of Schliemann’s life, using previously unpublished letters.

Stone, Irving. The Greek Treasure: A Biographical Novel of Henry and Sophia Schliemann. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975. A biographical novel, based on careful study of the available Schliemann material, some of it used here for the first time.