In Search of the Trojan War (11 page)

By now the November rains were turning Schliemann’s trenches to mud. When he reached the bedrock he found the top of a shaft cut down into the rock. It was the first of five rectangular grave shafts in which he uncovered the remains of nineteen men and women and two infants: they were literally covered in gold. The men’s faces were covered with magnificent gold masks so distinctively modelled as to suggest portraits; on their breasts were extraordinary decorated ‘sunbursts’ of thick gold leaf impressed with rosettes; two women wore gold frontlets and one of them a diadem; around the bodies lay bronze swords and daggers, with elaborate gold hilts and gold and silver inlay on the hilts and blades – in two cases wonderfully vivid scenes of hunting and fighting were inlaid in gold, silver and lapis lazuli on the ridges of the dagger blades. There were gold and silver drinking cups, gold boxes, ivory containers and plaques, and hundreds of gold discs decorated with rosettes, spirals, animals and fish: these had perhaps been sewn on to the clothes and the shrouds. The artistic accomplishment was simply dazzling – exemplified best, perhaps, in some of the least significant articles, such as a decorated ostrich egg or (to choose an item from a later excavation) an exquisite little bowl of rock crystal adorned with a bird’s head and neck: a thing of fragile, translucent beauty to set beside the grim, golden, bearded warlords and their arsenal of weapons.

For Schliemann, of course, there was no doubt: this was the world of Homer and the
Iliad
, and these were the graves of Agamemnon and his companions. Pausanias had mentioned five graves and Schliemann had dug five; tradition even insisted that Cassandra had two infant twins who were killed with her – and there were two infant burials in one of the shafts! The climax of his search came in the fifth and, for him, last tomb, where, as with the ‘Jewels of Helen’, Schliemann found exactly what he had wished so passionately to find. There were three male bodies, richly adorned with inlaid war accoutrements, gold coverings on
their breasts, and gold face masks. The first two skulls were in such a state of decomposition that they could not be saved, but the third

had been wonderfully preserved under its ponderous golden mask … both eyes perfectly visible, also the mouth, which owing to the enormous weight that had pressed upon it was wide open and showed thirty-two beautiful teeth … the man must have died at the early age of thirty-five. … The news that the tolerably well preserved body of a man of the mythic heroic age had been found … spread like wildfire through the Argolid, and people came by thousands from Argos, Nauplia, and the villages to see the wonder.

So ran Schliemann’s own thrillingly evocative account, published in 1880 in
Mycenae
. As usual it was probably embellished in the retelling. The dispatch to
The Times
dated 25 November 1876 is more prosaic: ‘In one of these [the gold masks] has remained a large part of the skull it covered.’ Nothing more! As for the famous and often told story, that he sent the King of Greece a telegram saying: ‘I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon,’ we can at least say that, though he did not say it, the sentiment was in character. (Schliemann, incidentally, made efforts to preserve the body by pouring on it alcohol containing dissolved gum, but it has not survived. The painting made at the time by a local artist has, however, recently resurfaced in one of Schliemann’s lost albums.) Schliemann’s interpretation of this discovery, perhaps the single most remarkable one in the history of archaeology, was characteristically to the point:

For my part, I have always firmly believed in the Trojan War; my full faith in the tradition has never been shaken by mode and criticism, and to this faith of mine I am indebted for the discovery of Troy and its treasure. … My firm faith in the traditions made me undertake my late excavations in the acropolis [of Mycenae] and led to the discovery of the five tombs with their immense treasures. … I have not the slightest objection to admitting that the tradition which assigns the tombs to Agamemnon and his companions may be perfectly correct.

Needless to say, the finds at Mycenae caused a sensation and also brought Schliemann world fame. He was fêted in the high society of Europe; the British Prime Minister Gladstone, a classical scholar himself, wrote the preface to the English edition of
Mycenae
; Schliemann lectured to learned societies all over Europe. There were, of course, still many critics: some claimed the graves were a post-Roman, barbarian cemetery with ‘Scythian’ masks; others even said they were Christian, Byzantine; but most accepted them as ‘Homeric’, that is, pertaining to a Bronze-Age heroic world which had some connection with Homer’s tale – for had not Schliemann found depictions of boar’s-tusk helmets such as Homer had described? On the inlaid dagger blades there were representations of ‘tower shields’ such as Ajax carries in the
Iliad
; there were, too, ‘silver-studded’ swords like the one given by Hector to Ajax. At last the new science of archaeology had done what had previously been impossible: it had demonstrated some kind of connection between the world of Homer and real history. And Schliemann could no longer be dismissed as a mere crank. The great Oxford Sanskrit scholar Max Müller wrote:

I am delighted to hear of your success, you fully deserve it. Never mind the attacks of the Press in Germany. … Your discoveries are open to different interpretations – you know how much I differ from your own interpretation – still more from Gladstone’s. But that does not affect my gratitude to you for your indefatigable perseverance. I admire enthusiasm for its own sake, and depend upon it the large majority of the world does the same. You are envied – that is all, and I do not wonder it.

Had Schliemann really found Agamemnon? Alas, no! This is not the place to analyse Schliemann’s finds and their real dating. Sufficient to say that the shaft graves date from the sixteenth century BC, long before the possible date for the Trojan War in the thirteenth or twelfth century BC – it is not even certain that they are from the same dynasty as Agamemnon’s, if he existed,
though they may be. Nor were the six shaft graves (the last found by Stamatakis in 1877) all from the same time, as Schliemann thought; rather, they were added to over a number of generations. (A second grave circle was found in 1950 with equally fabulous riches.) We now know that the great architectural achievements of the Mycenaean period – the Lion Gate, the Cyclopean walls and the great ‘treasuries’ of Atreus and Clytemnestra – date from the thirteenth century BC, and that it was at this time that the area of ancient royal tombs of the shaft graves was refurbished and enclosed as an object of public cult. Some of Schliemann’s misconceptions were evident at the time; as we have seen, it was Charles Newton who brilliantly observed to Schliemann that the thousands of fragments of stirrup jars – the most typical Mycenaean pottery – found by Schliemann in 1876 could be compared with pottery found at Ialysus in Rhodes, which by association with Egyptian material found in the same levels could be dated to the early fourteenth century BC; near enough to the traditional dating of the Trojan War. In his publication of his finds Schliemann very fully and commendably set out the comparisons with the Rhodes material. But as far as the connections he really wanted were concerned, connections between his finds at Mycenae and at Troy, all he could point to was the ‘champagne glass’ of a kind he had here, and had seen at Tiryns (and from the Rhodian tomb), and the goblets ‘found by me in Troy at a depth of 50 feet’. The more he found, the more
his
‘Homeric Troy’ appeared backward and strangely isolated.

GOLDEN ORCHOMENOS

Of all the hundreds of places mentioned in the
Iliad
, Homer singles out only three as being ‘rich in gold’. For Schliemann, two of them, Troy and Mycenae, had lived up to the epithet sensationally. It was inevitable that he should be drawn next to the third ‘golden city’, and with the permission of the Greek government he undertook a small excavation at Orchomenos, a ruined site in central Greece which had occupied a long hill
above Lake Copais. According to the legends Orchomenos had once ruled even mighty Thebes, the city of Oedipus. Pausanias told how in the Heroic Age the people of Orchomenos – the Minyans – had constructed a great dyke system to drain Lake Copais; it was one of the chief centres which sent ships to Troy, according to Homer’s catalogue of the ships; its wealth was proverbial – ‘not for the riches of Orchomenos,’ says Achilles in the
Iliad
. Furthermore there was Pausanias’ reference to the great tholos tomb there:

The Treasure House of Minyas is one of the greatest wonders of the world, and of Greece. It is built in stone, circular in shape … they say the topmost stone is a keystone holding the entire building in place. Greeks are terribly prone to be wonderstruck by the exotic at the expense of home products: distinguished historians have explained the Pyramids of Egypt in the greatest detail and not made the slightest mention of the Treasure House of Minyas, or the walls of Tiryns, which are by no means less marvellous!

The site of Orchomenos had never been lost, neither had the name: we find it in the journal of Cyriac of Ancona who sniffed around there in the 1440s. In more recent times Gell, Morritt and Leake had searched out the place, a five-hour horse ride from Athens, along the malarial plain of Copais; Lord Elgin too had come, looking for
objets d’art
.

Like those before him Schliemann found the great tholos collapsed, though enough survives today to see what a masterpiece it was; virtually identical in measurement to the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, it may well have been planned by the same architect (as was suggested to Schliemann on site by the twenty-seven-year-old Wilhelm Dörpfeld, then the architect for the German archaeological team at Olympia, soon to become Schliemann’s invaluable collaborator). But trial excavations on the citadel brought Schliemann no gold this time; in fact there was tantalisingly little sign of the legendary wealth of Homeric Orchomenos, and Schliemann soon gave up. There was, however,
one bonus. In the tomb chamber of the tholos Schliemann and Sophie found many fragments of carved greenish slate plates which seemed to have covered the ceiling of the tomb, which had collapsed only years before. The relief comprised beautifully interwoven spirals of leaves and rosettes which the Schliemanns were able to reconstruct, and today’s visitor to Orchomenos may once again walk into the tomb chamber and see the ceiling in place. It is, incidentally, likely that the entire chamber was originally decorated in this way: inspection of the earth debris in the corners of the chamber shows that small fragments of the slate plaques are still in position on the side walls.

So Schliemann left Orchomenos after a few weeks. One enigma about his dig there remains unsolved. It is, we now know, supremely important in the search for Troy and the Trojans. He had turned up large quantities of a strange monochrome grey pottery – thrown and glazed – which he called Grey Minyan, after the ancient people of the site. He had already found a very similar kind of pottery in an upper level of Troy, far above his ‘Homeric Ilium’. Why did Schliemann not see the significance of the parallels between them? Had he known it, the answer to the riddle of Troy lay there. But Schliemann’s eyes were elsewhere, on a site he had known for some years: Tiryns.

‘TIRYNS OF THE GREAT WALLS’

Rising like a ship from the plain of Argos, Tiryns lies 9 miles south of Mycenae, on a low, rocky promontory now about a mile from the sea. In the Bronze Age the sea came only 100 yards from the western walls, and Tiryns must have been a port. From here, says Homer, King Diomedes took eighty black ships to Troy. Tiryns’ position probably enabled it to dominate the plain, for from its gates prehistoric roads went south to Nauplia, south-east to Asine, east to Kasarma and Epidavros, north-east to Midea, north to Mycenae and Corinth, and north-west to Argos. From the top Tiryns is seen to be completely encircled by mountains, in the foothills of which the great natural fortresses of Argos and Midea
stand out; Mycenae is tucked away in its valley to the north. The panorama is splendid, as Schliemann himself remarked:

I confess that the prospect from the citadel of Tiryns far exceeds all of natural beauty which I have elsewhere seen. Indeed the magic of the scene becomes quite overpowering when in spirit one recalls the mighty deeds of which the theatre was this plain of Argos with its encircling hills.

Like Mycenae, Tiryns was a ruin in classical times, deserted when Pausanias came there and made his famous remark about the Cyclopean walls – ‘by no means less marvellous’ than the Pyramids of Egypt. In medieval times there was an impoverished little village below the acropolis, doubtless the reason for the existence of a small Byzantine church and cemetery on top of the ruins, the traces of which Schliemann removed in his excavation. The medieval settlement lasted from the tenth century to around 1400. Many early travellers found their way to Tiryns when the Morea became open to foreigners in the seventeenth century; since it lay on the road from the main port, Nauplion, to Argos, the site was easily accessible where Mycenae was less so. The first modern visitor was a Frenchman, Des Mouceaux, in 1668, who described the vaulted galleries and the construction of the Cyclopean walls. After him came the Venetian Pacifico, but it was again the English travellers, Gell, Leake, Clarke and Dodwell, who laid the foundations for modern archaeology, and Dodwell in particular who made the first plan and engravings of the fortification.

Despite the increase of interest in these monuments there was no attempt to dig at Tiryns before Schliemann, apart from a one-day affair by the German Thiersch in 1831. For Schliemann it was an obvious choice: unable to locate Homeric Pylos or Sparta, it was the other great mainland palace in Homeric tradition. Schliemann had inspected the place on his visit to Greece and the Troad in 1868, and to him its great history in legend betokened a truly ancient centre, possibly, as he would
assert, ‘the oldest town in Greece’. He dug trial shafts in the summer of 1876 (causing much damage), and in 1884 set about the place in earnest. Unfortunately, once again, his finds were vitiated by his failure to record findspots, depth and context. It may be that he was led more by architectural considerations: having uncovered ‘palace’ or ‘temple’ buildings at Troy, he hoped to compare them with a Mycenaean citadel which he thought contemporaneous. Fortunately, however, Dörpfeld was with him, otherwise he would very possibly have demolished the Mycenaean palace buildings on top, which were immediately below the Byzantine church. In the event Schliemann seems to have left Dörpfeld to it, and as a result the vast building complex the visitor can see today emerged without being wrecked. If anything Tiryns represents Schliemann’s archaeological maturity, egged on by Dörpfeld, and their publication,
Tiryns
, was very much a joint effort. It is interesting that at this time Schliemann and Dörpfeld still supported the widely held view that the Phoenicians were the founders and builders of the Mycenaean citadels. Adler, co-director of the excavations at Olympia, wrote an appendix to Schliemann’s book in which he denied this, saying that he was convinced that these were Bronze-Age Greeks. Though Schliemann himself was privately attracted to this idea, he was perhaps reluctant to go publicly against the academic orthodoxy, the Phoenician theory.