Treasure Seekers: Glories of the Ancient Aegean Page #2

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a thousand ships,

had been taken away to Troy.

How the Greeks had battled for

ten long years to get her back,

led by the great king Agamemnon.

How the war was finally won with

a wooden horse full of soldiers.

In Homer's tale,

the Greeks destroyed the great city

of Troy; burning it to the ground.

Schliemann was just captured

by the Iliad,

the descriptions of what goes on,

everything about the human condition

is found in the Iliad

in a very poetic

and magnificent manner.

And the idea of finding the site

where all of these great tensions

between love and strife,

between divine and human interaction

were worked out

was something that just

swallowed him up.

With his copy of Homer as a guide,

Schliemann examined the mound thought

to be the likeliest location of Troy.

In the Iliad, two springs marked

the foot of the great city's hill.

To his dismay, Schliemann found

many more here.

And trial excavations turned up

nothing but dirt.

But just as he was about to leave

the area, the German got lucky-

He met an Englishman named

Frank Calvert who owned another mound,

the site of many prior civilizations.

Calvert believed his mound held

the real Troy far beneath the surface.

Frank Calvert explained to Schliemann

that he had done some excavations there

which took him below the Greek

and Roman levels,

into deep deposits where were earlier.

So he said there was a very good chance

that in these deep burial deposits

you will find the Troy

of the Trojan War.

And that convinced Schliemann;

it gave him something to do.

But Schliemann didn't have a clue

how to begin.

Dear Mr. Calvert, have I to take a tent

and iron baluster and pillar with me?

What sort of hat is best

against the scorching sun?

Please give me an exact statement of

all of the implements of whatever kind

and of all the necessaries

you would advise me to take with me.

With Calvert's encouragement Schliemann

began digging in earnest in October 1871.

On the first day, he hired 8 men.

By day three there were 80.

Caution was not his style.

Assuming Homer's Troy lay

at the bottom of the mound,

Schliemann had his men dig a great

gash right through the center of it.

One must plunge immediately

into the depths.

Only then will one find things.

On their way down the men uncovered

not one city, but many of them.

But Schliemann didn't let these other

Troys get in his way.

You can see when he began that

his methods were very, very crude.

He was going in with winches

and crowbars and battering rams.

The horrifying tales are spelled out

in some of his writings.

Nowadays, one just blenches

at the thought of it.

Numbers of immense blocks of stone

which we continually come upon

cause great trouble and have to be

got out and removed.

All of my workmen hurry to see

the enormous weight roll down

and settle itself at some distance

in the plain.

Schliemann was discarding

priceless relics

from thousands of years

of civilization on the site.

Thankfully, rains closed

the season early.

But the next year he was back,

this time attacking the mound

with 150 men under the command

of a railroad engineer.

Often by Schliemann's side

was his new Greek wife, Sophia,

who won his heart

by reciting from the Iliad.

Forging ahead,

Schliemann continued to aim straight

for the bottom of the mound,

haphazardly uncovering

ancient stone walls

and collecting pottery and other

artifacts along the way.

What Schliemann did was to go down

deep into this complex, complex site.

And he did try to understand

how the layers had built up

one on top of the other.

He wasn't bad at either;

he was quite observant.

Of course now we would do it

in much finer detail than he did,

but he was the one to reveal

that this sort of thing could be done

in a site of this sort.

In the third season of digging

the hard work finally paid off.

Near the bottom of the mound

workman uncovered the charred ruins

of a citadel.

It didn't look like much,

but Schliemann declared it must be

the place of King Priam

burned in the Trojan War.

As he himself told the story,

he dismissed his workman and began

to attack the palace walls himself.

I cut out the treasure

with a large knife,

which was impossible to do without

the most fearful risk of my life.

But I never thought of any danger.

It would, however, been impossible for

me to have removed the treasure

without the help of my dear wife who

stood by me ready to pack the things

that I cut out in her shawl

and carry them away.

It was a fabulous find.

Ancient silver and copper vessels.

Bronze weapons.

And most extraordinary of all,

elaborate gold jewelry.

With Schliemann's usual panache,

he announced that he had

uncovered the treasure of Priam

and the jewels of Helen of Troy.

A photograph of Sophia Schliemann

modeling Helen's jewels

became one of the most celebrated

images of the 19th century.

Yet, Schliemann's account

of the discovery

was controversial from the start.

The story is certainly fiction in

at least one major element,

and that is that Sophie was not there.

Sophie had left about three weeks

earlier, gone back to Athens.

So she was certainly not there

packing the stuff

in her shawl and carrying them off.

The question is how much else is true?

I think that although Sophie

wasn't there-

and we know that Schliemann

was telling a lie about that-

that doesn't necessarily mean that

the treasure itself is a hoax.

I think, in fact, there are very good

signs that it was genuine.

There are discrepancies with regard

to where the treasure was found,

the day on which it was found,

and exactly what was found.

He makes wrong connections.

For example, he misremembers exactly

where things were found.

He associates them with

the wrong features and so forth.

But I think you also have to consider

what he has left us with

at the end of the day,

and what he has left us with is

an enormous volume of material

because he was so energetic,

and spent so much money

and spent so much time at Troy.

A master of 19th century media,

Schliemann informed

the world of his success.

But first he carefully smuggled

his treasures out of Turkey,

ignoring his permit stipulation that

all finds belonged to the Turks.

The crafty German was triumphant.

Convinced that he'd

uncovered Homer's Troy,

buried in myth for more than

Being Schliemann, however,

even fame and recognition

couldn't occupy him for long.

Homer pointed him in a new direction,

to a city rich in gold.

He turned his sights to Mycenae, home

of Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks.

According to Homer, the conqueror of

the Trojans had met a violent fate.

Agamemnon returned home to Mycenae,

only to find that his wife

had taken up with another man.

Late one night,

the two murdered the great hero.

It was another compelling tale-

sufficient motivation for Schliemann.

And with Mycenae, the fledgling

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