Word: schliemann
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From the time he was a child growing up in Ankershagen, Germany, in the early part of the 19th century, Heinrich Schliemann knew his destiny. He vowed that when he was a man, he'd prove that the people, places and events that had entranced him in Homer's Iliad--Helen and Agamemnon, the siege of Troy and the magnificent city itself--were more than just legends. Or so he later wrote. Like many of Schliemann's tales, this one may have been a trifle exaggerated. "In general, scholars accept the fact that Schliemann told a great many lies," says...
None of that will matter much to people who visit Moscow's Pushkin Museum over the next year, though. For all his character flaws and sloppy science, Schliemann still unearthed one of the richest archaeological troves ever found. And beginning this week, 259 of the thousands of objects he dug from the Turkish soil in the late 1800s will go on public display for the first time in 50 years: diadems of woven gold, rings, bracelets, intricate earrings and necklaces, buttons, belts and brooches as well as anthropomorphic figures, bowls and vessels for perfumed oils...
...consensus is that despite Schliemann's penchant for improving on the truth, most of his findings were legitimate and remarkable. No doubt remains that Troy existed, or that the mound known to Turks as Hissarlik is the site of the ancient city. Says Traill: "The great majority of Schliemann's reporting was borne out in detail after detail by subsequent archaeologists...
Where the story breaks down, though, it breaks down in a big way. That's almost certainly the case with what Schliemann called Priam's Treasure, a group of spectacular objects he found in 1873. "I cut out the treasure with a large knife," Schliemann wrote, "which it was impossible to do without the very greatest exertion and the most fearful risk of my life, for the great fortification wall, beneath which I had to dig, threatened every moment to fall down upon...
Exciting stuff but almost certainly fictional. Traill, who has studied Schliemann for nearly 20 years, first became skeptical of the archaeologist's veracity in 1978, when he found an eyewitness account Schliemann wrote about a San Francisco fire. Schliemann lived in California in the early 1850s, amassing a fortune as a banker during the gold rush (he also made millions as an indigo trader and a sometimes shady profiteer in Russia during the Crimean War). But the fire occurred while Schliemann was out of town, and a month earlier than the report said...