Heinrich Schliemann: The archaeologist was born 200 years ago – culture

Treasure hunters watch out: “Once such walls have been there, they cannot be completely destroyed, but are probably hidden under the dust and rubble of centuries.” – Those are the words of an eight-year-old child, which the very rich businessman, world traveler and archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann later put into his mouth.

For Christmas in 1829, the story goes, his dear father, a really dissolute pastor, gave him a children’s world story. And this book aroused in him, the curious little boy, the decision to expose the mythical Troy, about which Homer’s “Iliad” tells, as a very real, physical place. (The epic of the Trojan War for the beautiful Helena originated in the 8th century BC and takes place in the time before the destruction of the great palaces of the Mediterranean around 1200 BC)

Heinrich Schliemann, who was born in Mecklenburg on January 6, 200 years ago and was actually supposed to dig up Troy from 1871, created his own long-lasting Schliemann myth: That he “could carry out the big plans that I had in the autumn of my life designed as a poor boy “. In fact, the idea only matured in him when he got into a midlife crisis as a businessman.

The second important component of this story is Schliemann’s assertion that he only found the Hisarlık hill on his own with his Homer edition in hand. So the town of Troy / Ilion near the northwest coast of today’s Turkey, which, as we know today, was inhabited with interruptions in ten layers of settlement from the early Bronze Age to late antiquity and then sank under that “dust and rubble”. In reality, historical-topographical handbooks helped Schliemann identify the hill, as did the English diplomat and archaeologist Frank Calvert, who gave him the crucial tip.

The finder of the “treasure of Priam” is now considered a fraud

Heinrich Schliemann’s life is full of such rumors, not only in the public self-portrayal in his newspaper reports and books, but also in his private correspondence and diaries. Today, however, the former hero, finder of the “Priam’s treasure” and honorary citizen of Berlin, seems to be standing naked: as a swindler and, because of his adventurous archaeological methods, also as the ancestor of all robbery graves.

The Schliemann anniversary this year, the with new books and exhibitions is a good occasion to reflect on this legacy of archeology, but also to do justice to the figure between the extremes. First of all, as far as the impostor is concerned.

Self-made millionaire, world traveler – he hardly needed the biographical cheating

In order to look good overall, Heinrich Schliemann hardly needed the biographical cheating. As an autodidact, he mastered 16 modern foreign languages, plus he learned Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Sanskrit. After he had to leave the grammar school again immediately because his brutal and unfaithful father was relieved of his office and could no longer pay the school fees, he had worked his way up as a clerk in Hamburg and Amsterdam and had already become a millionaire by the age of thirty. Schliemann earned fantastic earnings everywhere, in California in the gold rush and in Saint Petersburg in the Crimean War. He published a book on China and Japan in French, owned houses in Paris and Berlin, and built a palace in Athens with his second wife, Sophia.

No, the purpose of this man’s auto-fictions was rather to give his whole life a context from the start. A new biography of Leoni Hellmayr tries to sound out psychologically, published under the somewhat misleading title “The man who invented Troy” (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2012).

The great era of excavation began with Schliemann

The restless cultural curiosity and making money in the epoch of flourishing industrialization, plus the failure of his first marriage in Russia, led to a return to history, which then also wanted to be tangibly developed. Schliemann’s decision to “withdraw my fortune from the vicissitudes of trade”, from this reorientation away from business and towards science, had to become a plan that he had allegedly cherished from childhood.

The great era of excavation began with Schliemann; Historicism then went hand in hand with the rise of capitalism. In the midst of social upheavals and global shifts, it was precisely with the in-depth exploration of the oldest past that it was possible to acquire particular fame; Scientific spirit of discovery, tenacity, heroic coincidences, solved puzzles that again raised new puzzles – this mixture was exactly to the taste of the time, and on the sensational side of archeology this continues to have an effect in public perception to this day.

Schliemann’s attempt to create a unity between his discoveries in the Mediterranean Sea and the dreams of childhood in northern Germany corresponds to the overcoming of epochs in human history – by exposing historical objects that were supposed to prove the truth of the mythical tales. In his first report on an excavation attempt on the island of Ithaka, he wrote: “And with a single jump we feel transported over a hundred generations into the most brilliant epoch of Greek chivalry and Greek poetry.” So the little vases he pulled out of the floor must have undoubtedly contained the ashes of Odysseus and Penelope, he was convinced.

Which brings us to Heinrich Schliemann’s excavation methods. In Troy he started out as an enthusiastic charlatan: He dug a trench and destroyed some of the upper layers because he was certain that he would come across the “Homeric” Troy at the bottom. When he actually found sensational jewelry and vessels from the Early Bronze Age there on May 31, 1873, Schliemann did not realize that these finds were around a thousand years older than the time of the heroes that Homer sang about. He did not want to hear anything about the correction of this error until the end of his life. Similarly, it was historically wrong by a few centuries when he uncovered the shaft graves at the castle of Mycenae in the Peloponnese and assigned the spectacular find of a ruling gold mask (today in the National Museum in Athens) to King Agamemnon.

Open detailed view

His discoveries were epoch-making, but how Schliemann got the “treasure of Priam” away from the place where it was found was also questionable. He had received an excavation license in Constantinople, but according to the law of the time, the Ottoman Empire was entitled to half of the finds, and the finder was not allowed to take his half abroad with him. Nevertheless, Schliemann hid the precious items and shipped them to his house in Athens. His triumph was so great that he couldn’t help but put on his wife’s thousand-year-old gold diadem and in her Augsburgers General newspaper publish a report that made him world famous.

Over time the adventurer became more and more scientific

The museum in Constantinople, however, filed a civil lawsuit in Athens and demanded that it be returned. The legal dispute ended with a settlement: Schliemann paid 50,000 francs, more than required, and the Ottoman Empire waived all claims in return. Thus Schliemann was able to leave the “treasure of Priam” to the German people – while his finds from the Greek excavations of Mycenae, Tiryns and Orchomenos remained in Greece: On January 24th, 1881 the emperor confirmed the gift “for perpetual possession and unseparated safekeeping” in Berlin. But it didn’t stop there: the Soviet Union took the treasure with them after the Second World War, and it was considered lost until the Pushkin Museum in Moscow announced in 1992 that it had it. Today Berlin wants him back – but so does Turkey.

Open detailed view

Dreamy hobby digger, destroyer of found contexts – this is how Heinrich Schliemann can serve as a deterring symbolic figure for today’s dealings with cultural appropriation. But it’s not that simple either. Because Schliemann, who died in Naples in 1890, learned a great deal in the course of his excavation campaigns, including from experts of his time; the adventurer became more and more scientific and, as the ancient historian Claudia Tiersch writes, “gave the excavation method enormous impetus”. For archeology, “historical research with a pickaxe and spade”, according to Schliemann, this is his legacy: a warning against wild digging and also against wild historical speculations; but also a lesson in carefully researching and documenting the past, which can protect against cultural arrogance.