In Search of the Trojan War (8 page)

TWO

HEINRICH SCHLIEMANN

Imagination is a very important qualification for an archaeologist to possess … but in proportion to the strength of this power, a counterpoise of judgement is necessary, otherwise the imagination gets loose and runs riot. Dr Schliemann is, undoubtedly, an able man; but he must be credited with a vast amount of this sort of unbalanced imagination in order to explain the creations which he has produced out of the explorations of Hisarlik
.

WILLIAM BORLASE,
Fraser’s Review
(1878)

IN THE SUMMER
of 1868, at five in the morning on 14 August, to be precise, an unlikely-looking visitor picked his way on horseback through the sandy riverbed and marshy thickets of the Menderes river in the north-west corner of Turkey, by the Dardanelles. He was a little man with a round, bullet-like head (as a friend described him), very little hair and a reddish face with spectacles; ‘round-headed, round-faced, round-hatted, great-round-goggle eyes’, as another said. At 10 a.m. he came to an extensive rubble-strewn plateau, the site of the classical city of New Ilium. He walked its 1½-mile circumference, noting the traces of its circuit wall. Finally he ascended a smaller hill, called Hisarlik, ‘place of the fort’, in the north-western corner, about 100 feet above the plain, 30 feet above the spur of the plateau; there he inspected an excavation made earlier by its owner, who had laid bare part of the podium of a temple. The site, he later wrote,

fully agrees with the description Homer gives of Ilium and I will add that, as soon as one sets foot on the Trojan plain, the view of the beautiful hill of Hisarlik grips one with astonishment. That hill seems destined by nature to carry a great city … there is no other place in the whole region to compare with it.

As the afternoon sun started to sink over the Dardanelles he headed for the coast to find lodgings for the night, trudging his way on foot through the marshy flats along the lower river.

On leaving Hisarlik I moved on to the town of Yenitsheri at Cape Sigeum … here one can take in a splendid panorama of the entire Trojan plain. When, with the
Iliad
in hand, I sat on the roof of a house and looked around me, I imagined seeing below me the fleet, camp and assemblies of the Greeks;Troy and its Pergamus fortress on the plateau of Hisarlik; troops marching to and fro and battling each other in the lowland between city and camp. For two hours the main events of the
Iliad
passed before my eyes until darkness and violent hunger forced me to leave the roof. … I had become fully convinced that it was here that ancient Troy had stood.

This account, which we now know is largely a fiction, was written in Paris that autumn. It marks the start of the most amazing story in archaeology.

A BIOGRAPHICAL PROBLEM

It is often said that we know so much about Troy today because of one man’s obsession, indeed of his childhood dream which he made come true. However, this is only so if we can believe his personal account of his early life. Schliemann’s is the most romantic story in archaeology and should be read in his own words in his great books
Ilios, Mycenae, Tiryns
, but it should be read with a large pinch of salt, for with Schliemann, as with the story of Troy, it is not always possible to distinguish myth from reality. The material about his life is copious, for like many geniuses Schliemann was a compulsive hoarder of all the outpourings of his life. There are eleven books, the so-called autobiography, eighteen travel diaries, 20,000 papers, 60,000 letters, business records, postcards, telegrams and all sorts of other ephemera; and there are also 175 volumes of excavation notebooks, though forty-six more are missing, including important
ones from Troy, Orchomenos and Tiryns (three lost albums of plans, drawings and photographs from Mycenae came into the hands of an Athens bookseller some years ago).Add to all this the vast amount of parallel material in the work of scholars who knew him, collaborated with him or argued with him, the newspaper files, the inevitable new finds (like the five letters found in 1982 in Belfast, of all places) and you have an idea of the size of the task involved in trying to disentangle fact from fiction in Schliemann’s life. It is a task beyond the scope of one lifetime, for Schliemann was a man of colossal energy, addicted to words and ideas, a correspondent in a dozen languages. Many books have been written about him since he began his dig at Troy–Hisarlik, but as yet there is no reliable biography; it is the main gap in our imperfect knowledge of Troy, and clearly now it will take a prodigious effort to reconstitute his finds. So the reader who is fascinated by the remarkable story of one of the most extraordinary people of the nineteenth century – a genius, let no one be in any doubt over that – needs to be wary of accepting the myth Schliemann put forward about himself, and which the world swallowed so willingly, for, as he himself admitted, ‘my biggest fault, being a braggart and a bluffer … yielded countless advantages.’ Addicted to hyperbole, braggadocio, and often downright lies, Schliemann presents us with the curious paradox of being at once the ‘father of archaeology’ and a teller of tall stories.

We cannot, for instance, even be sure of the truth of his famous tale about his childhood, which is accepted unquestioningly even by his critics. At the age of eight, he recounts in
Ilios
, published in 1880, he received from his father a Christmas present of Jerrer’s
Universal History
which contained the story of Troy with an engraving of Aeneas escaping from the burning towers of Troy.

‘Father, Jerrer must have seen Troy,’ [Schliemann
says
he said]

‘otherwise he could not have represented it here.’

‘My son,’he replied, ‘that is merely a fanciful picture’…

‘Father!’ retorted I, ‘if such walls once existed they cannot have
been completely destroyed: vast ruins of them must still remain, but hidden away beneath the dust of ages’ …

In the end we both agreed that I should one day excavate Troy.

This story first appears in a less developed form, and with differences of fact, in
Ithaque, le Péloponnèse et Troie
, written in 1868 when Schliemann was forty-six: this is the first mention in
any
source of what Schliemann claimed had been a lifelong obsession, namely to uncover the ruins of Troy and prove the truth of Homer’s story. But is it true? In December 1868 he wrote a letter to his eighty-eight-year-old father regarding the new book:

In the foreword I have given my biography, I have said that when I was ten … I heard the tale of the Trojan War from you … I have said that you were the cause of this [i.e. the thirty-six-year obsession] because you often told me of the Homeric heroes, and because that first impression received by me as a child lasted throughout my life.

The sceptic might infer that this was the first old Schliemann had heard of it, and indeed a cool look at his son’s correspondence suggests that the story of Schliemann’s obsession is indeed an invention. After a childhood in Mecklenburg Schliemann became a wealthy businessman in St Petersburg and the United States. He was often involved in unscrupulous dealings – for instance he cornered the saltpetre market for gunpowder in the Crimean War, bought gold off prospectors in the California gold-rush, and dealt in cotton during the American Civil War – at least, that was his story. In the late 1850s he seems to have wanted to break away from his business career into more intellectual pursuits in order to gain respectability. His first hopes were to become a landed proprietor, devoting himself to agriculture. When this failed, he wanted to turn to some sort of activity in a scientific field, perhaps philology, but was soon discouraged: ‘It is too late for me to turn to a scientific career,’ he wrote. …‘I have been working too long as a merchant to hope I can still achieve something in the scientific field.’ (
Letters
, I, nos 62 and 67,
1858–9.) Like many European people in the nineteenth century he knew Homer and loved his tale, but it was probably only his visit to Greece and Troy in the summer of 1868 – and his meeting with Frank Calvert – which gave Schliemann the inspiration to turn to archaeology, and the idea of discovering Homer’s Troy by excavation.

This kind of textual criticism has revealed other discrepancies about incidents in Schliemann’s career; for instance his story of the San Francisco fire (which he says he witnessed), his alleged meeting with President Fillmore, and now even the find of the so-called ‘Jewels of Helen’ at Troy, which Schliemann has been accused of forging or buying on the black market and planting on site. These doubts have now reached such fever pitch that a request was submitted in 1983 to the National Museum in Athens to test the gold of one of the masks Schliemann found at Mycenae, implicitly suggesting that he faked part of the Mycenae treasures too. It must be said that such allegations are not new: in his own lifetime he was accused of ‘fixing’ his evidence, and some who met him were suspicious. The poet Matthew Arnold thought him ‘devious’ and Gobineau, a French diplomat, called him a ‘charlatan’. Ernst Curtius, the excavator of Olympia, thought him ‘a swindler’. However, these criticisms do not tell the whole truth, as, for example, in the case of the ‘Jewels of Helen’, whose find circumstances can be plausibly established. But there are still some serious discrepancies which make a proper biography all the more desirable. For instance, one question bearing on the archaeology is the disturbing revelation by his contemporary William Borlase that Sophie Schliemann was not present, as her husband alleged, at the discovery of the ‘Treasure of Priam’. She was not even in Turkey! If Schliemann could lie (or fantasise) about this – he said he did it ‘to encourage her interest in archaeology by including her’ – could he have lied about the finds themselves? We know enough about him to say that he could indeed be unscrupulous; he cheated and lied to get his way; he was surreptitious and conniving; he sometimes dug in secret and purloined material; he smuggled his Trojan treasures abroad rather than give them to the
Turks; he desperately craved acceptance by the academic world as a serious scholar and archaeologist, and yet, we now know, he lied about something as trivial as the provenance of some inscriptions he had bought in Athens. All this is admitted – and may be thought damning enough. But set against this are the record of the finds in the books and journals and the brilliant letters to
The Times
, and of course the amazing finds themselves in the Mycenaean room in Athens Museum. Wayward, naïve, enthusiastic, unashamedly romantic, easy to hurt and anxious to learn, Schliemann is a bundle of contradictions; but judgement on him should be made on the basis of his finds. It was his luck – or skill – to achieve the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made by one person. But before we turn to the tale of Schliemann’s incredible finds there is one more question we must ask: why did he turn to archaeology in particular, rather than, say, philology? The story of the search for Troy is inextricably bound up with the beginnings of archaeology as a science.

ARCHAEOLOGY: THE BEGINNINGS OF A NEW SCIENCE

In Schliemann’s time the very word ‘archaeology’ had only recently begun to be used in its present meaning. It would need a whole book to sketch the intellectual background of mid-nineteenth-century prehistoric scholarship. Without a definitive biography of Schliemann we remain uncertain as to how much contemporary scholarship he had imbibed. For instance, what was he reading in Paris when he was a ‘mature student’ there in the late 1860s? Certainly in the following twenty years he shows an astonishing breadth of reading, especially in archaeological and antiquarian studies, but also ranging far and wide in linguistics and comparative ethnology. He also made it his business to visit all the major museum collections for the purpose of comparison with the often perplexing finds at Troy. If his thought lacked true scholarly discipline (‘industrious but not clear-thinking,’ said his schoolmaster) and if his theories were often far-fetched, he was
usually thinking in the right direction. His ideas became clearer as his career progressed because he enlisted the help of specialists – Virchow, Sayce, Müller, Dörpfeld and so on, many of them the most distinguished scholars in their own field. Today it is customary to deride Schliemann’s archaeological technique as well as his character, but it is worth remembering that, in terms of the general study of the past, the period of Schliemann’s adult life, 1850–90, was perhaps the most revolutionary in the history of science. In 1859, the year of Schliemann’s first visit to Athens and the islands (a brief account of his travels appears in
The Times
of 27 May that year), Charles Darwin published
The Origin of Species
and created an entirely new climate for the study of man, history and the development of civilisation. (Interestingly enough, one of the first scholars to praise Darwin’s work in public was the English antiquary John Evans, father of the excavator of Knossos – Schliemann, incidentally, would come to know them both.) At this stage the very idea of prehistory had barely entered into the language of science. The word itself only came into common currency in Europe with Daniel Wilson’s
Prehistoric Annals
(1851) and John Lubbock’s
Prehistoric Times
, published in 1865: it was Lubbock who coined the words Paleolithic and Neolithic to describe phases in prehistory. Lubbock visited Schliemann at Troy in 1873 and Schliemann used his book when writing
Ilios
, of 1880. Lubbock’s crowning work,
The Origin of Civilisation
(a title intended to echo Darwin), came out in 1870, six years before Schliemann’s dig at Mycenae would alter forever our perceptions about the origins of European, and especially Aegean, civilisation.

At the time of Schliemann’s maturity, before he dug Troy, most western intellectuals viewed ‘civilisation’ as meaning their own culture: a Christian, western, capitalist, bourgeois, imperialist democracy. Their texts were the classical writers and the Bible, and empires such as the British and German were seen as the logical culmination of ancient culture, whose traditional components were Rome (for its government and law), Israel (for religion and morals) and Greece (for intellectual, artistic and democratic ideals). This was ‘civilisation’, and hence ‘history’ was
simply a matter of the Greek, Roman and Hebrew ideas shaping the western tradition. But from the middle of the century archaeology started to reveal the riches of civilisations far more ancient – Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Sumerian – which, when their languages were deciphered, turned out to have had an incalculable influence on the development of the ‘younger’ civilisations of the Mediterranean. In the century that followed
The Origin of Species
we became almost blasé about our state of knowledge: the discovery of the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Hittites and Minoans were all important steps forward, to be followed by the non-western civilisations of India, China and pre-Columbian America. And so was born the science of archaeology, an old word which in the seventeenth century referred to the study of history in general, but which appears in the strict modern sense, as the scientific study of the material remains of prehistory, in Wilson’s
Prehistoric Annals
in 1851. Only thirty years later, in 1880, R. Dawkins could write in
Early Man
: ‘The archaeologists have raised the study of antiquities to the rank of a science.’ This was essentially the achievement of Schliemann, as Virchow wrote: ‘Today it is pointless to ask whether Schliemann started from right or false premises when he began his studies. Not only did success decide in his favour but also his scientific method proved a success.’