Word: schliemann
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...late to complain about Irving Stone, who provides novelized biographies for readers who want Vincent Van Gogh and Michelangelo to wear boxer shorts and talk like members of the local school board. Perhaps that is why Stone, in his latest book, persistently calls the historical Heinrich Schliemann "Henry...
...Schliemann was the self-taught amateur archaeologist who a century ago used clues in The Iliad to discover and excavate Priam's Troy. He was a truly astonishing man, a German who grubbed away his early youth as an impoverished clerk, then by his middle 20s made a fortune in Russia selling tea, olive oil and indigo. Schliemann traveled to California in 1850, when he was 28, and made another fortune provisioning gold miners. He returned to Russia and accumulated still an other pot of money, and finally retired at 41 with an ambition that seemed to have blown...
...played a lonely second fiddle to Franz Joseph's imperious mother Sophie. Eventually, the vivacious queen declared a kind of independence, becoming the adored champion of the cause of home rule for Hungary, traveling incessantly: now to England to ride after hounds, now to Turkey to explore Schliemann's diggings at Troy. She even translated Shakespearean plays into modern Greek. Primping and dieting narcissistically, Elisabeth remained an international beauty until she was 60, when she was killed by an Italian anarchist while boarding a steamer on Lake Geneva...
Troy, they "came to the two fair-flowing springs, where two fountains rise that feed deep-eddying Skamandros." As it happens, Berve notes, Schliemann's excavations revealed not one Troy but a city that had been repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt over a period of more than a thousand years...
...archaeologists have identified at least a dozen different layers within Schliemann's hillside. None of these historic Troys, Berve savs, would in any way be familiar to the Iliad's readers, except that they overlooked a plain near the Aegean Sea. In fact, the layer that most closely coincides with the date suggested by Homeric scholars for the Trojan War (circa 1200 B.C.), and that is known as Trov VI to archaeologists, seems entirely improbable as the battle site. Berve gives two reasons: 1) the fortifications enclose an area where no more than a few hundred people could...