Milton C. Fisher
Heinrich Schliemann as Business Tycoon in Russia and
Engrossed in His Massive Excavation at Troy
David, great king of Israel, said, “Lord, my heart is not haughty, Nor my eyes lofty. Neither do I concern myself with great matters, Nor with things too profound for me” (Ps 131:1). By way of contrast, Heinrich Schliemann, the successful entrepreneur and antiquarian who located and excavated ancient Troy, wrote to his father from Russia in 1854, “Here in Moscow I am considered the slyest most cunning and most capable of merchants…” Later (1870), he admonished his schoolboy son Serge, “You ought to try to follow the example of your father, who in whatever situation always proved what a man can accomplish by unflagging energy alone.”
In that same letter he wrote of his four years’ employment in Amsterdam during his early twenties, “I truly performed wonders. My achievements there have never been equalled, and never will be equalled in the future.” Concerning his wholesale merchant days in St. Petersburg he wrote, “I was the most brilliant and at the same time the most astute dealer on the stock exchange.” And of his archaeological career, taken up upon retirement from business a multi-millionaire at age thirty-six, “As an archaeologist, I am the sensation of Europe and America because I have discovered ancient Troy,… for which the archaeologists of the entire world have searched during the past two thousand years.’* [*Quotations are from C. W. Ceram, The March of Archaeology. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1958, p. 33]
BSP 3:1 (Winter 1990) p. 9
We’ve let Schliemann speak for himself to suggest why so many, in reaction, have branded his digging at Troy and elsewhere “unprofessional.” For though he on his own learned about ten modern languages and a couple classical ones (Latin and Greek), and though he earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rostock (writing his dissertation in classical Greek!), academic conceit on the part of established orientalists labeled him a treasure seeker and bungler.
Actually, it was Heinrich Schliemann and associate Wilhelm Dörpfeld who first discerned potentially datable stratification in ancient ruins, seven distinct occupation levels at Troy. This was a remarkable discovery and a giant step forward for the science of archaeology.
Heinrich Schliemann can be admired for his singleness of purpose and persistence in its pursuit. Few men have set their sights as did he on such an imaginative and difficult goal—at age eight! For it was then, inspired by reading his own Christmas copy of Universal History for Children that he announced to his father, a poor German pastor, that he would some day dig up Homer’s Troy. All his learning, those many languages, plus four or five years of delving into history books and museums and conversing with scientific researchers before setting out for Troy, all was geared toward that one end.
Though he also dug in Greece—at Mycenae (unearthing the now celebrated “Mycenaean culture”), at Orchomenos (discovering the Treasury of Minyas), and Tiryns (uncovering the so-called “Cyclopean” palace walls)—and made a survey of Crete (identifying but not excavating the “Palace of Minos”), it is for his locating lost Troy on the Aegean coast of Turkey that he is most remembered. With clues from the battle scenes in Homer’s Iliad (trusting its historical accuracy), he paced around a hill called Hissarlik with watch in hand and pronounced it the site of Troy.
That was in 1869, the year he was remarried, nearing fifty, to an eighteen year old Greek girl named Sophia. His first wife had long since been alienated by his dedication to travel and archaeological pursuits. From 1870 to 1873 he did over eleven months of digging at Troy, employing at least a hundred workmen at a time. But it was his enthusiastic wife Sophia who assisted him in safely removing, at a depth of some thirty feet, 8,750 pieces (and fragments of gold jewelry—which he wrongly called “Priam’s Treasure.”
A second season at Troy was undertaken, 1878–9. Then the young architect Wilhelm Dörpfeld assisted him in 1882. This is when greater deliberation and caution in method became the rule, and distinctive patterns of Trojan strata were recognized and recorded. Schliemann’s final work at Troy was undertaken in 1890, and all further plans for Troy and elsewhere were terminated when, on Christmas Day of that year, he collapsed on the street in Naples and died in a hospital there.
Half a century after the Schlieman-Dörpfeld excavation of Troy, a University of Cincinnati dig was directed by Carl Blegen, 1932 to 1938. A recent campaign was begun the summer of 1988 by a twenty-five member team from West Germany’s Tüibingen University. Director Manfred Korfmann projects a 15 to 20 year effort, remarking that “You could actually spend a hundred years here.” [From an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, 10/ 9/88.]