Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Schliemann (; 6 January 1822 – 26 December 1890) was a German businessman and an influential archaeologist. He was an advocate of the historicity of places mentioned in the works of Homer and an archaeological excavator of Hisarlık, now presumed to be the site of Troy, along with the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns. His work lent weight to the idea that Homer's Iliad reflects historical events. Schliemann's excavation of nine layers of archaeological remains has been criticized as destructive of significant historical artefacts, including the layer that is believed to be the Homeric Troy.
Early life and education
Schliemann was born 6 January 1822, in Neubukow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin (part of the German Confederation) to Luise Therese Sophie Schliemann and Ernst Schliemann, a Lutheran minister. He was the fifth of nine children. The family moved to Ankershagen in summer 1823. Their second home houses the Heinrich Schliemann Museum today.
Heinrich's father was a poor pastor. His mother died in 1831, when Heinrich was nine years old, and his father sent Heinrich to live with his uncle Friedrich Schliemann, also a pastor. When he was eleven years old, his father paid for his enrollment in the Gymnasium (grammar school) at Neustrelitz, but he had to leave it after three months. Heinrich's interest in history was initially encouraged by his father, who had schooled him in the tales of the Iliad and the Odyssey and had given him a copy of Ludwig Jerrer's Illustrated History of the World for Christmas in 1829. Schliemann claimed that at the age of 7 he had declared he would one day excavate the city of Troy.
Heinrich had to transfer to the Realschule (vocational school) after his father was accused of embezzling church funds and made his exams in 1836. His family's poverty made a university education impossible. In his archaeological career, there was often a division between Schliemann and the educated professionals.
At age 14, after leaving Realschule, Heinrich became an apprentice at Herr Holtz's grocery in Fürstenberg. He later said that his passion for Homer was born when he heard a drunken miller reciting Homeric verses at the grocer's. In 1841, Schliemann moved to Hamburg and became a cabin boy on the Dorothea, a brig bound for Venezuela. After twelve days at sea, the ship foundered in a gale. The survivors washed up on the shores of the Netherlands.
Career
thumb|left|upright|Schliemann as a young man
On 1 March 1844, 22-year-old Schliemann took a position with B. H. Schröder & Co., an import/export firm. In 1846, the firm sent him as a General Agent to St. Petersburg.
In time, Schliemann represented a number of companies. He learned Russian and Greek, employing a system that he used his entire life to learn languages; Schliemann claimed that it took him six weeks to learn a language
Schliemann went to California in early 1851 and started a bank in Sacramento buying and reselling over a million dollars' worth of gold dust in just six months. When the local Rothschild agent complained about short-weight consignments, he left California, feigning illness.
According to his memoirs, before arriving in California he dined in Washington, D.C., with President Millard Fillmore and his family, but W. Calder III says that Schliemann didn't attend but simply read about a similar gathering in the papers.
Schliemann also published what he said was an eyewitness account of the San Francisco Fire of 1851, which he said was in June although it took place in May. At the time he was in Sacramento and used the report of the fire in the Sacramento Daily Journal to write his report.
On 7 April 1852, he sold his business and returned to Russia. There he attempted to live the life of a gentleman, which brought him into contact with Ekaterina Petrovna Lyschin (1826–1896), the niece of one of his wealthy friends, whom he married on 12 October 1852. Schliemann next made a good profit trading in indigo dye.
By 1858, Schliemann was 36 years old and wealthy enough to retire. In his memoirs, he claimed that he wished to dedicate himself to finding the site of the ancient Troy.
Amateur archaeologist
thumb|The '[[Mask of Agamemnon', discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876 at Mycenae now exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.]]
Heinrich Schliemann was an amateur archaeologist. He was obsessed with the stories of Homer and ancient Mediterranean civilizations. He dedicated the second part of his life to unveiling the actual physical remains of the cities of Homer's epic tales. Many refer to him as the "father of pre-Hellenistic archaeology".
In 1868, Schliemann visited sites in the Greek world, and published his second book Ithaka, der Peloponnesus und Troja in which he described ancient sites in Greece and the Ottoman Empire and asserted that Hissarlik was the site of Troy. He submitted this book as a dissertation to the University of Rostock. In 1869, he was awarded a PhD in absentia from the university for that submission.
Schliemann was an honorary member of the Society of Antiquaries of London and elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1880.
Troy and Mycenae
left|thumb|[[Sophia Schliemann (née Engastromenos) wearing finds recovered at Hisarlık]]
Schliemann's first interest of a classical nature seems to have been the location of Troy. At the time he began excavating in Turkey, the site commonly believed to be Troy was at Pınarbaşı, a hilltop at the south end of the Trojan Plain. The site had been previously excavated by English amateur archaeologist and local expert Frank Calvert. Schliemann performed soundings at Pınarbaşı but was disappointed by his findings. In 1870, Schliemann began digging a trench at Hissarlik, and by 1873 had discovered nine buried cities.
Schliemann found pure copper and metal molds as well as a lot of other metal tools, cutlery, shields, and vases which were found at around 28 to feet deep at the site.
The day before digging was to stop, 15 June 1873, Schliemann discovered gold, which he took to be Priam's Treasure trove. The layer that Schliemann referred to as "the Burnt City" and believed to be Troy is now thought to be from 3,000 to 2,000 BCE, too early to be the location of the Trojan War as Homer describes it.
He later wrote that he had seen the gold glinting in the dirt and dismissed the workmen so that he and his wife Sophia could excavate it themselves; they removed it in her shawl. However, Schliemann's oft-repeated story of the treasure being carried by Sophia in her shawl was untrue. Schliemann later admitted fabricating it; at the time of the discovery, Sophia was in fact with her family in Athens, following the death of her father.
Schliemann smuggled the treasure out of the Ottoman Empire into Greece. The Ottoman Empire sued Schliemann in a Greek court, and Schliemann was forced to pay a 10,000 gold . Schliemann ended up sending 50,000 gold francs to the Constantinople Imperial Museum, and got permission for further excavations at Hissarlik. In 1874 Schliemann published Troy and Its Remains. Schliemann at first offered his collections, which included Priam's Gold, to the Greek government, then the French, and finally the Russians. In 1881, his collections ended up in Berlin, housed first in the Ethnographic Museum, and then the Museum for Pre- and Early History, until the start of WWII. In 1939, all exhibits were packed and stored in the museum basement, then moved to the Prussian State Bank vault in January 1941. In 1941, the treasure was moved to the Flakturm located at the Berlin Zoological Garden, called the Zoo Tower. Dr. Wilhelm Unverzagt protected the three crates containing the Trojan gold when the Battle of Berlin commenced, right up until SMERSH forces took control of the tower on 1 May. On 26 May 1945, Soviet forces, led by Lt. Gen. Nikolai Antipenko, Andre Konstantinov, deputy head of the Arts Committee, Viktor Lazarev, and Serafim Druzhinin, took the three crates away on trucks. The crates were then flown to Moscow on 30 June 1945, and taken to the Pushkin Museum ten days later. In 1994, the museum admitted the collection was in their possession.
In 1876, he began digging at Mycenae, under the supervision of Panagiotis Stamatakis, a Greek archaeologist attached to the excavation as a condition of Schliemann's permit. There, he discovered the Shaft Graves, with their skeletons and more regal gold, including the so-called Mask of Agamemnon. These findings were published in Mycenae in 1878.
In 1880 Schliemann began excavation of the Treasury of Minyas at Orchomenus (Boeotia).
From 1882 to 1883 Schliemann made a sixth excavation at Troy, in 1884 an excavation of Tiryns with Wilhelm Dörpfeld, and from 1889 to 1890 a seventh and eighth excavation at Troy, also with Dörpfeld.
Personal life
After learning that his childhood sweetheart Minna had married, Schliemann married Ekaterina Petrovna Lyschin (1826–1896) on 12 October 1852. She was the niece of one of his wealthy friends in St Petersburg and they had three children; a son, Sergey (1855–1941), and two daughters, Natalya (1859–1869) and Nadezhda (1861–1935).
A former teacher and Athenian friend, Theokletos Vimpos, the Archbishop of Mantineia and Kynouria, helped Schliemann find someone "enthusiastic about Homer and about a rebirth of my beloved Greece...with a Greek name and a soul impassioned for learning." The archbishop suggested the 17-year-old Sophia Engastromenos, daughter of his cousin. They were married by the archbishop on 23 September 1869. They later had two children, Andromache and Agamemnon Schliemann.
His corpse was then transported by friends to the First Cemetery in Athens. It was interred in a mausoleum shaped like a temple erected in ancient Greek style, designed by Ernst Ziller in the form of an amphiprostyle temple on top of a tall base. The frieze circling the outside of the mausoleum shows Schliemann conducting the excavations at Mycenae and other sites.
Legacy and criticism
thumb|The Schliemann mansion in [[Athens, ca. 1910, now housing the Numismatic Museum of Athens]]
Schliemann's magnificent residence in the city centre of Athens, the Iliou Melathron (Ιλίου Μέλαθρον, "Palace of Ilium"), today houses the Numismatic Museum of Athens.
Along with Sir Arthur Evans, Schliemann was a pioneer in the study of the Aegean civilization in the Bronze Age. The two men knew of each other, Evans having visited Schliemann's sites. Schliemann had planned to excavate at Knossos but died before fulfilling that dream. Evans bought the site, started excavations in 1900 and stepped in to take charge of the project, which was then still in its infancy.
Further excavation of the Troy site by others indicated that the level Schliemann named the Troy of the Iliad was inaccurate, although they retain the names given by Schliemann. In a 1998 article for The Classical World, D.F. Easton wrote that Schliemann "was not very good at separating fact from interpretation" and claimed that, "Even in 1872 Frank Calvert could see from the pottery that Troy II had to be hundreds of years too early to be the Troy of the Trojan War, a point finally proven by the discovery of Mycenaean pottery in Troy VI in 1890."
In 1972, Professor William Calder of the University of Colorado, speaking at a commemoration of Schliemann's birthday, claimed that he had uncovered several possible problems in Schliemann's work. Other investigators followed, such as Professor David Traill of the University of California.
A 2004 article of the National Geographic Society called into question Schliemann's qualifications, his motives, and his methods: