Word: traille
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...Gordon Traill, a former warrant officer who served in secdet 4 in Baghdad in early 2004, says he was not aware that any videos of his fellow troops had been posted on the Web. But he confirmed that photography by soldiers is tolerated. "The only time you could not take cameras was when you went to Abu Ghraib [prison]," he says. Dr. Ben Wadham, a former Military Police member who is now a lecturer at Adelaide's Flinders University specializing in army culture, described some of the posted images as "trophy shots." He said soldiers would be admonished if they...
...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...
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...
...Traill eventually turned up so many discrepancies that he branded Schliemann a "pathological liar" who invented events in his diaries and books or appropriated them from other people's lives. The discovery of Priam's Treasure was evidently one more such invention. Schliemann wrote that he slipped the objects into the shawl of his second wife, Sophia, to hide them from larceny-minded laborers. According to his field notes, it didn't happen that way at all. Besides, Sophia was in Greece at the time...
...dress up a story. But as an archaeologist, Schliemann committed an even greater sin: he claimed to have found together within what he called a royal palace some objects that were almost certainly discovered separately and outside the nearby city wall. Why did he twist the facts? Probably, says Traill, because his obsession with verifying the Iliad--quite real, even if it didn't date from childhood--demanded proof that King Priam, Helen's father-in-law, existed. What better proof than a royal treasure...