Heinrich Schliemann
Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Schliemann, known as Heinrich Schliemann (Neubukow, Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, January 6, 1822 - Naples, Kingdom of Italy, 26 December 1890), was a Prussian millionaire who, after amassing a fortune, dedicated himself to his great dream: archaeology. In Hisarlik, and in other Homeric sites such as Mycenae, Tiryns and Orchomenus, proving that the Iliad really described historical scenarios. The discovery of Troy was made in 1864 after reading Homer, he would receive several criticisms from the scholars of the time for his blind belief in Homer as a historical source to find the place, a situation that Later it ended in his favor and he came to be considered a benchmark in archaeological research. From the excavation it would be his wife who would wear the jewels unearthed from Priam's royal treasury house.
Biography
Birth and Youth
He was the son of a humble Protestant minister with a passion for ancient history. Through his stories, he became interested when he was a child in the Homeric poems. Schliemann recounts in his autobiography that at Christmas 1829 he received a volume of Universal History for Children by Georg Ludwig Jerrer as a gift from his father and that he was greatly impressed by an engraving depicting Aeneas with his father Anchises and his son Ascanius fleeing from burning Troy.
Heinrich did not have a happy childhood, however. His father drank, mistreated his wife, had a relationship with the maid; his sons were afraid of him. His mother died of the consequences of her ninth birth when Heinrich was nine years old. His father, either due to financial problems or lack of attachment to his children, distributed them among his uncles, who took care of them for good or bad. Heinrich only went to the Gymnasium for a few months because his father couldn't afford it. Very young he had to start working as an apprentice in a store. Because of the long hours he worked, he had no time to study, but on one occasion a drunk miller named Niederhoffer walked into it and, as Schliemann explains in his autobiography, the miller, who had also been a Protestant pastor:
He had not forgotten his Homer, since that night he entered the store he recited more than a hundred verses of the poet, observing the rhythmic cadence of them. Although I did not understand a syllable, the melodious sound of the words caused me a profound impression. From that moment I never stopped begging God to grant me the grace of learning Greek someday.
Generating your fortune
Heinrich worked in stores for five years, but after an accident he decided to change his occupation. He embarked for Venezuela, but his ship was wrecked off the coast of the Netherlands. However, he was saved along with several companions in a lifeboat. In Amsterdam he pretended to be sick to be taken to a hospital and was helped by a friend from Hamburg who was a shipping agent. Soon after, with the help of the Prussian Consul General, he began working in a commercial office. There he stamped bills of exchange and brought letters to the post office. During this period, despite living in precarious conditions, he dedicated himself to studying several languages. As he explains in his autobiography, he spent half his salary on language classes, and became fluent in Dutch, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Greek and Arabic. Also, at a level that he himself deems acceptable, Ancient Greek, Turkish, Danish, Swedish, Slovene, Polish, Hindi, Hebrew, Persian, Latin, and Chinese.
The "Schliemann Method"
We know the method he used thanks to the explanations he left to posterity. The first language was English. He read aloud, and wrote his own texts, which he then memorized, under the teacher's supervision. To improve his pronunciation, he attended a mass in English, and expanded his vocabulary by reading quality prose, memorizing fragments. According to Schliemann, he applied the same method to other languages.
At the age of 22, he was fluent in seven languages and started working at a commercial company, the Schröder house. At the age of 24, she learned Russian, since the Schröder house exported indigo to Russia. He was sent as a representative to St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1846. There he developed successfully and became an independent businessman. In 1851 he opened a gold dust resale office. At the age of 30 he already had an enormous fortune. Meanwhile, he traveled to the great European capitals and, when he was in London, he used to visit the British Museum, where he enjoyed Egyptian antiquities.
In 1852, he married a Russian aristocrat, Ekaterina Petrovna Lishin (1826-1896), with whom he would have three children: Sergei (1855–1941), Natalja (1859–1869), and Nadeschda (1861–1935). The marriage lasted, with great difficulty, until 1869, the year in which they finally divorced. At 33, he was fluent in 15 languages. Between 1851 and 1859 he made various business trips, eventually settling temporarily in California, where, inheriting the concession from a deceased brother, he became a banker and increased his fortune. During this time he was seriously ill with typhus, but recovered and returned to Europe.
He traveled through the Middle East and, upon returning to Russia, took advantage of the blockade caused by the Crimean War to trade in arms, supplies and steel.
Switching Activities
In 1866, after moving to Paris, he began studying Ancient Sciences and Oriental Languages at the Sorbonne University. Meanwhile he bought a sugar cane farm in Cuba.
Despite his financial comfort, he made his trips in second class, visiting Egypt, China, India and Japan.
A visit to Pompeii, long believed to be the stuff of legend, reminded her of her father's tales of the Trojan War, the mythical expedition by a Greek coalition to rescue Helen from captivity at the hands of the trojans, and he began to wonder if it might not also be based on true events.
In 1868 he traveled to Greece for the first time. Among the places he visited was the island of Ithaca, where he hired some men to carry out small excavations in which he made few finds. He too was in Mycenae and, after crossing the Dardanelles, rode across the plain of Troy. That year he met Frank Calvert, British consul in the Dardanelles, who had bought half of the Hisarlik hill in Turkey, where some ancient scholars located Troy.
In 1869 Schliemann divorced and on September 23 of the same year he married a second time with a Greek girl of just 17 years old, Sophia Engastromenos (1852-1932), niece of a priest friend whom he had met in San Petersburg, called Vimpos. That same year he obtained his doctorate in Archaeology.
With Sophia he had two other children, whom he named after Homeric characters: Andromache (1871–1962) and Agamemnon (1878–1954).
Convinced that Homer's poems described a historical reality, he undertook expeditions in Greece and Asia Minor to find the places described in them.
Discovery of Troy
In Hisarlik, in 1870 Heinrich Schliemann began to excavate the ruins of Troy. Frank Calvert had carried out preliminary excavations seven years before Schliemann's arrival, and suggested to him that Hisarlik Hill was the site of the mythical city. Later, Schliemann would minimize in his writings the role that Frank Calvert had really played in the discovery.
Schliemann's collaborators destroyed some remains of the central layers in their rush to reach the oldest strata. In some phases of the excavations he was accompanied by his Greek wife, who used to classify the pottery fragments and other archaeological remains that were found.
There were numerous difficulties during the excavations, some of them derived from the fact that few excavations of such magnitude had been carried out until then and the inexperience of the participants, plus those produced by the climate of the place, which favored diseases such as malaria.
Schliemann distinguished between several strata corresponding to different phases of occupation of Troy. He initially believed that the one corresponding to Troy II was the Troy sung in the Iliad .
In 1873 he discovered a collection of gold objects and jewelry that he called Priam's Treasure. He had her illegally transferred to Greece and for this, in 1874, he was accused of theft of national property by the Ottoman Empire and later sentenced to pay a fine. To regain the chance that the Turkish authorities would allow him to excavate again in the future, he paid a larger compensation and donated some finds to the Constantinople museum. On the other hand, the scientific community questioned his methods and his results.
Finds in Mycenae
Shortly after he made great discoveries in Mycenae, of whose ruins until then only the Gate of the Lions, the cyclopean wall attached to it and the so-called Treasury or tomb of Atreus were known.
Schliemann reached an agreement with the Greek authorities whereby he was able to excavate at Mycenae with the exclusive right to report his discoveries for a limited period in exchange for turning over everything he found in the excavations and paying all expenses.
He used the work of Pausanias to locate the tombs which were believed to be the one corresponding to the legendary Agamemnon. Scholars had previously misinterpreted the indications for the tombs Pausanias spoke of, believing that they were all located outside the acropolis wall.
During the excavations, he found five tombs (in an area that has been called Funeral Circle A) with a total of 20 corpses, and around them abundant and rich grave goods, with numerous objects made of gold, bronze, ivory and amber. He also found sixty wild boar teeth and a large group of seals with engravings of religious scenes, fights or hunting. Among these finds was the so-called mask of Agamemnon, dated, however, several centuries before the chronology traditionally attributed to the legendary king.
Christos Stamakatis, who had been appointed by the Greek government to monitor Schliemann's work and see that whatever was found stayed in Greece, continued the excavation in 1877, but only uncovered one more tomb.
Other excavations
In 1876 he had started some small soundings in Tiryns, and in 1877 he returned to Ithaca, explored the island in search of archaeological remains and carried out some soundings, but without results.
In 1880 he excavated in Orchomenus, where he found a type of ceramic that he called minia ceramics. He also discovered a tomb of the tholos type, from the Mycenaean period.
In 1882-1884, together with Wilhelm Dörpfeld -a young German architect and archaeologist already famous for his campaigns in Olympia-, he returned to excavate on a larger scale, inspired by the data that Homer and Pausanias had written about this city. He unearthed a sizable Mycenaean palace.
His last campaigns in Troy
Schliemann returned for three campaigns to Troy. In them, his most valuable collaborator was the aforementioned Wilhelm Dörpfeld. Due to the ceramic discoveries in these campaigns, Schliemann admitted his error in his initial belief that the Troy II stratum was the one corresponding to the Homeric city, and instead this should be identified with Troy VI. One of the most striking finds of the last campaign was the so-called L treasure, consisting of four ceremonial axes, which he also illegally transported to Greece.
Death and burial place
In the last months of his life he suffered serious ear ailments that led him to undergo surgery in 1890. Ignoring medical advice, he left the hospital to go to Leipzig, Berlin and Paris. While returning from this city to Athens, he collapsed on Christmas Day in Piazza Carità in Naples and lost the ability to speak. When his identity was finally ascertained, the doctor observed that the reinfection of his ears had affected his brain, and he died the next day. His death was on December 26, 1890.
His mortal remains were taken to Athens, as was his will, and deposited in the sumptuous mausoleum he had built for himself in the so-called "Proto-Nekrotafio" or "First Cemetery" from the city. The mausoleum, crowning a hill, reproduces a Doric temple presided over by his bust and an inscription that reads "For the hero Schliemann", while the relief on the frieze graphically recounts the excavations themselves. of the.
Excavation campaigns
- Troy
- Years 1870, 1871, 1872, 1873, 1878-1879, 1882 and 1889-1890.
- Micenas
- 1876
- Tirinto
- 1876 and 1884
- Orcomeno
- 1880
Legacy
His career began before archeology developed as a professional science, so by today's standards the field technique of Schliemann's work left much to be desired. However, he is recognized for the importance he attached to pottery fragments as indicators of different chronologies of stratigraphic layers and also for being the first archaeologist to document his discoveries with photographs in his publication Atlas trojanischer Alterthümer.
He had to face many criticisms in life, such as having falsified evidence or destroyed traces for his unorthodox methods. The scientific community many times denied his discoveries, although in the end they agreed with him in several aspects.
British scholar Walter Leaf (1852-1927) said of him:
A man who manages to make the world known a whole new problem can leave the definitive solution entrusted to those who come after him.
Books he published
- Autobiography (1892) Composed by Adolf Brückner and Sophia Schliemann on texts by Schliemann himself
- China and Japan (1864)
- Ithaca, Peloponnese and Troy (1868)
- Antiquity of Troy (1874)
- Ilion (1879)
- Orcomeno (1881)
- Troy (1883)
- Tirinto (1886)
Eponymy
- Moon crater Schliemann bears this name in his memory.
- The asteroid (3302) Schliemann also commemorates its name.