The Discovery of Troy

Overview

The ancient Greek poet Homer wrote of the city of Troy, but in medieval times its location was forgotten, and many doubted that it existed at all. An enthusiastic amateur, Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), was determined to find the fabled city. He actually did find the site, and a great treasure trove besides. However, his rather unscientific approach to archaeology led to mistakes and misinterpretations that continue to provoke controversy today.

Background

The poet Homer lived almost 3,000 years ago, and his Iliad is considered to mark the dawn of Greek literature. Several of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were based upon it. The Iliad is an epic woven together from shorter oral poems, and tells the story of a time when Greece was at war with a city on the coast of Turkey, across the Aegean Sea. The name of the city was Troy.

The civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean often fought over trading alliances, wealth, and territories. According to legend, however, the Trojan War, which took place a few hundred years before Homer's time, was a 10-year conflict over a beautiful woman named Helen. Helen was the wife of Menelaus, the king of the Greek city of Sparta. Paris, the son of the Trojan King Priam, carried Helen off to Troy with the assistance of the goddess Aphrodite. Then Agamemnon, the brother of Menelaus and ruler of another Greek kingdom called Mycenae, led an army to Troy to bring Helen back to Sparta.

The Iliad covers a period of 54 days during which a conflict develops between Agamemnon and the Greek hero Achilles, who is under his command. Achilles withdraws from the battle, until his best friend Patroclus is killed by Hector, another of Priam's sons. Determined to have revenge, Achilles kills Hector outside Troy, and his funeral is the last scene in the epic. The fall of the city of Troy is described in Homer's later work, the Odyssey.

Homer himself is shrouded in mystery; as with Shakespeare, scholars debate whether a man by that name actually wrote any or all of the works attributed to him. The location of Troy was unknown after about 400 A.D., and many doubted that it had existed at all outside the realms of fable. But for centuries, upper-class schoolchildren were taught a curriculum that stressed classical literature, including Homer.

Heinrich Schliemann was born in 1822, the son of an impoverished German clergyman. According to his autobiography, he was introduced to stories of Troy by his father, and was captivated by the romance of the world Homer portrayed. Schliemann's formal schooling was cut short in early adolescence by the need to support himself. But he continued to study, and was especially proficient in languages, eventually teaching himself 18 of them. Schliemann was also a very successful businessman, and at the age of 41 was able to retire to pursue his interest in archaeology, and especially his dream of finding the city of Troy.

Impact

In the 1860s, Schliemann turned his life completely around. Not only did he quit his business, he divorced his first wife. In a letter to a Greek friend, he put in his order for a new one. She must be poor, but well educated, someone who shared his passion for Homer. He wanted someone beautiful, who had black hair and looked Greek. The friend managed to find a woman who met these specifications, and later that year Schliemann and Sophia Engastromenos were married. She was to be his partner in archaeology as well as in life.

Schliemann toured the Aegean with Homer as his guide. From the descriptions in the Iliad, he became convinced that Hissarlik, Turkey, was the site of ancient Troy. It took him two years to get a government permit to excavate there, and he had to finance the dig himself. He also had to promise to turn half his finds over to a Turkish museum, and leave any ruins in the same condition in which he found them. When the digging finally began in 1871, these promises were completely ignored.

Schliemann worked in an era when archaeology was mostly treasure-hunting. Some of the most advanced archaeologists were beginning to understand that excavation is a destructive process. It must be done slowly and carefully, while recording detailed information, to learn as much as possible. But Schliemann was not among these pioneers of scientific archaeology. He attacked the Hissarlik site as enthusiastically as he did everything else.

Ruins were uncovered soon after the excavation began. But Schliemann reasoned that the ancient city he was looking for would be deep under the layers of eons. He had his workers dig down to the lowest level and push aside the intervening rubble. It wasn't until a year later that he realized he had gone too far. Settlement at the Hissarlik site predated the Troy he sought by as much as 1,700 years. And his excavation had damaged or destroyed everything in the path of his deep trenches.

In 1873, digging in a newer layer, he found a palace he was sure was of the right period. He also found a paved road and a sacrificial altar. This, he was convinced, was the real Troy of the Iliad. But the archaeological community, not convinced of Schliemann's credibility, paid little attention.

Then, one day Schliemann's pick struck a shiny object. Immediately he dismissed his workers, and continued digging. He unearthed jewelry of gold and silver, goblets, plates and vessels of gold and copper, and a shield. This hoard, which Schliemann called "Priam's treasure," attracted a great deal of publicity. Schliemann became a famous archaeologist almost overnight. He smuggled the treasure out of Turkey and displayed it in his house in Athens. A later photograph of Sophia Schliemann draped in the heavy jewelry became one of the most famous images of its time.

Schliemann eventually gave the treasure to the Berlin Museum. More than 50 years after his death, during World War II, the entire hoard disappeared. A long-standing rumor that it was hidden away deep in Russian vaults was proven true when these began to open up at the end of the Cold War. In April 1996, the treasure went on display in Moscow.

Yet scholars agree that "Priam's treasure" never belonged to the king for which it was named. It was a remnant of a much earlier culture. The bedrock layer in which Schliemann dug first, called Troy I, dates from about 3,000 B.C., the Early Bronze Age. Its ruins include brick walls and crude pottery. After Schliemann realized he had excavated too deeply, he found the treasure in the next layer up, now called Troy II, a city of stone walls with artifacts of finely worked metal. But this was still about 1,000 years before the events of the Iliad.

After Schliemann's death in 1890, his widow vowed that his work would continue. She funded further excavations by Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1853-1940), who was more scientific in his orientation. He found nine separate cities, one atop the other, at the Hissarlik site. He believed that the sixth of these was the Troy of the Iliad. It was larger than its predecessors, with high limestone walls protecting its perimeter.

In 1932, a University of Cincinnati expedition led by Carl Blegen (1887-1971) studied the site. Like Dörpfeld, Blegen found nine layers, but recognized that Troy VI had been destroyed by an earthquake. This meant it wasn't Priam's city, fallen in a war or raid. The city now believed to be the Troy of legend is the next layer, Troy VIIa. It is built of similar materials, as if rebuilt after the earthquake. But it lasted only about 100 years before being destroyed by fire and looting.

Troy VIII, which stood while Homer actually lived, was a small Greek village. Troy IX was the city of Ilium, ruled by the Greeks and later by the Romans. Alexander the Great held athletic games there in the 300s B.C. to honor Achilles, from whom he believed himself to be descended. The city lasted until the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in the 300s A.D.

SHERRI CHASIN CALVO