Heinrich Schliemann

Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Schliemann (German: [ˈʃliːman]; 6 January 1822 – 26 December 1890) was a German businessman and an influential archeologist. He was an advocate of the historicity of places mentioned in the works of Homer and an archaeological excavator of Hisarlık, now presumed to be the site of Troy, along with the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns.

His work lent weight to the idea that Homer's Iliad reflects historical events. Schliemann's excavation of nine layers of archaeological remains has been criticized as destructive of significant historical artefacts, including the layer that is believed to be the Homeric Troy.

Schliemann was born 6 January 1822, in Neubukow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin (part of the German Confederation) to Luise Therese Sophie Schliemann and Ernst Schliemann, a Lutheran minister. He was the fifth of nine children. The family moved to Ankershagen in summer 1823. Their second home houses the Heinrich Schliemann Museum today.

Heinrich's father was a poor pastor. His mother died in 1831, when Heinrich was nine years old, and his father sent Heinrich to live with his uncle Friedrich Schliemann, also a pastor. When he was eleven years old, his father paid for his enrollment in the Gymnasium (college preparatory secondary school) at Neustrelitz, but he had to leave it after three months. Heinrich's interest in history was initially encouraged by his father, who had schooled him in the tales of the Iliad and the Odyssey and had given him a copy of Ludwig Jerrer's Illustrated History of the World for Christmas in 1829. Schliemann claimed that at the age of 7 he had declared he would one day excavate the city of Troy.

Heinrich had to transfer to the Realschule (non-college preparatory secondary school) after his father was accused of embezzling church funds and took his exams in 1836. His family's poverty made a university education impossible. In his archaeological career, there was often a division between Schliemann and the educated professionals.

At age 14, after leaving Realschule, Heinrich became an apprentice at Herr Holtz's grocery in Fürstenberg. He later said that his passion for Homer was born when he heard a drunken miller reciting Homeric verses at the grocer's. He laboured for five years until he was forced to leave because he hurt his chest, lifting a heavy barrel and coughing up blood. In 1841, Schliemann moved to Hamburg and became a cabin boy on the Dorothea, a brig bound for Venezuela. After twelve days at sea, the ship foundered in a gale. The survivors washed up on the shores of the Netherlands. Schliemann became a messenger, office attendant, and later, a bookkeeper in Amsterdam.

On 1 March 1844, 22-year-old Schliemann took a position with B. H. Schröder & Co., an import/export firm. In 1846, the firm sent him as a General Agent to St. Petersburg.

In time, Schliemann represented a number of companies. He learned Russian and Greek, employing a system that he used his entire life to learn languages; Schliemann claimed that it took him six weeks to learn a language and wrote his diary in the language of whatever country he happened to be in. By the end of his life, he could converse in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Latin, and Arabic, besides his native German.

Schliemann's ability with languages was an important part of his career as a businessman in the importing trade. In 1850, he learned of the death of his brother, Ludwig, who had become wealthy as a speculator in the California gold fields.

Schliemann went to California in early 1851 and started a bank in Sacramento buying and reselling over a million dollars' worth of gold dust in just six months. When the local Rothschild agent complained about short-weight consignments, he left California, feigning illness. While he was there, California became the 31st state in September 1850, and Schliemann acquired United States citizenship. Schliemann propounded this story in his autobiography of 1881, though he clearly was in St Petersburg that day, and "in actual fact, ...obtained his American citizenship only in 1869."

According to his memoirs, before arriving in California he dined in Washington, D.C., with President Millard Fillmore and his family, but W. Calder III says that Schliemann didn't attend but simply read about a similar gathering in the papers.

Heinrich Schliemann was an amateur archaeologist. He was obsessed with the stories of Homer and ancient Mediterranean civilizations. He dedicated the second part of his life to unveiling the actual physical remains of the cities of Homer's epic tales. Many refer to him as the "father of pre-Hellenistic archaeology".

In 1868, Schliemann visited sites in the Greek world, and published his second book Ithaka, der Peloponnesus und Troja in which he described ancient sites in Greece and the Ottoman Empire and asserted that Hissarlik was the site of Troy. He submitted this book as a dissertation to the University of Rostock. In 1869, he was awarded a PhD in absentia from the university for that submission. David Traill claims that the examiners gave him his PhD on the basis of his topographical analyses of Ithaca, which were in part simply translations of another author's work or drawn from poetic descriptions by the same author. Other researchers who worked with documents from the university archives clearly contradict Traill's statements.

Schliemann was an honorary member of the Society of Antiquaries of London and elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1880.

Schliemann's first interest of a classical nature seems to have been the location of Troy. At the time he began excavating in Turkey, the site commonly believed to be Troy was at Pınarbaşı, a hilltop at the south end of the Trojan Plain. The site had been previously excavated by English amateur archaeologist and local expert Frank Calvert. Schliemann performed soundings at Pınarbaşı but was disappointed by his findings. It was Calvert who identified Hissarlik as Troy and suggested Schliemann dig there on land owned by Calvert's family.

Schliemann was at first sceptical about the identification of Hissarlik with Troy but was persuaded by Calvert. In 1870, Schliemann began digging a trench at Hissarlik, and by 1873 had discovered nine buried cities.

Schliemann found pure copper and metal molds as well as a lot of other metal tools, cutlery, shields, and vases which were found at around 28 to 29+1⁄2 feet deep at the site.

The day before digging was to stop, 15 June 1873, Schliemann discovered gold, which he took to be Priam's Treasure trove. Recent research has confirmed several settlements on the site spanning 3,600 years. The layer that Schliemann referred to as "the Burnt City" and believed to be Troy is now thought to be from 3,000 to 2,000 BCE, too early to be the location of the Trojan War as Homer describes it.

He later wrote that he had seen the gold glinting in the dirt and dismissed the workmen so that he and his wife Sophia could excavate it themselves; they removed it in her shawl. However, Schliemann's oft-repeated story of the treasure being carried by Sophia in her shawl was untrue. Schliemann later admitted fabricating it; at the time of the discovery, Sophia was in fact with her family in Athens, following the death of her father.

After learning that his childhood sweetheart Minna had married, Schliemann married Ekaterina Petrovna Lyschin (1826–1896) on 12 October 1852. She was the niece of one of his wealthy friends in St Petersburg and they had three children; a son, Sergey (1855–1941), and two daughters, Natalya (1859–1869) and Nadezhda (1861–1935). As a consequence of his many travels, Schliemann was often separated from his wife and children. He spent a month studying at the Sorbonne in 1866 while moving his assets from St. Petersburg to Paris to invest in real estate. He asked his wife to join him, but she refused.

Schliemann threatened to divorce Ekaterina twice before doing so. In 1869, he bought property and settled in Indianapolis for about three months to take advantage of Indiana's liberal divorce laws, although he obtained the divorce by lying about his residency in the U.S. and his intention to remain in the state. He moved to Athens as soon as an Indiana court granted him the divorce and married again two months later.

On 1 August 1890, Schliemann returned reluctantly to Athens, and in November travelled to Halle, where his chronic ear infection was operated upon, on 13 November. The doctors deemed the operation a success, but his inner ear became painfully inflamed. Ignoring his doctors' advice, he left the hospital and travelled to Leipzig, Berlin and Paris. From the last, he planned to return to Athens in time for Christmas, but his ear condition became even worse. Too sick to make the boat ride from Naples to Greece, Schliemann remained in Naples but managed to make a journey to the ruins of Pompeii. On Christmas Day 1890, he collapsed into a coma; he died in a Naples hotel room the following day; the cause of death was cholesteatoma.

His corpse was then transported by friends to the First Cemetery in Athens. It was interred in a mausoleum shaped like a temple erected in ancient Greek style, designed by Ernst Ziller in the form of an amphiprostyle temple on top of a tall base. The frieze circling the outside of the mausoleum shows Schliemann conducting the excavations at Mycenae and other sites.

La Chine et le Japon au temps présent (1867)

Ithaka, der Peloponnesus und Troja (1868) (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-108-01682-7)

Trojanische Altertümer: Bericht über die Ausgrabungen in Troja (1874) (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-108-01703-9)

Troja und seine Ruinen (1875). Translated into English as Troy and its Remains (1875) (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-108-01717-6)

Mykena (1878). Translated into English as Mycenae: A Narrative of Researches and Discoveries at Mycenae and Tiryns (1878) (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-108-01692-6)