The Man Who Found Troy
In the realm of archaeology no exploit is more remarkable than that of Heinrich Schliemann, a born linguist who rolled up a big fortune as an exporter and who then proceeded to confound the scholars by tracking down the site of Troy and the treasures of Mycenae. C. W. CERAM tells the Schliemann story in fresh detail in his book, Gods, Graves and Scholars, which will be published by Alfred Knopf this autumn. Mr. Ceram, a German critic and publisher, was in 1915 editor of The World, a British-sponsored newspaper in Hamburg, and is today editor of Rowohlt Verlag, the Hamburg publishers.
by C. W. CERAM
1
THE life of Heinrich Schliemann is the story of the poor minister’s son who at the age of seven dreamed of finding a city, and who thirty-nine years later found not only the city but treasure such as the world has seldom seen.
It began this way. A little boy stood at a grave in the cemetery of the little village where he was born, far up in the North German state of Mecklenburg. The grave was that of the monster Hennig. He was said to have roasted a shepherd alive, then to have kicked the victim for good measure. For this cruelty, it was said, Hennig’s left foot, covered with a silk stocking, each year grew out of the grave like some strange plant.
The boy waited by the grave but nothing happened. He went home and begged his father to dig up the grave and find out where the foot was that year.
The father told the boy fables, fairy tales, and legends. Himself a confirmed humanist, he told the boy about the battles fought by Homer’s heroes, about Paris and Helen, Achilles and Hector, about mighty Troy, which was burned and leveled. For Christmas he gave his son Jerrer’s Illustrated History of the World. The boy looked at the pictures of the massive walls and the great Scaean Gate. “Is that how Troy looked?” he asked. The father nodded. “And it is all gone, and nobody knows where it stood?” “That is true,” the father replied.
“But I don’t believe that,” said the boy, Heinrich Schliemann. “When I am big, I shall go to Greece and find Troy and the King’s treasure.”
The father laughed. But that prophecy of the seven-year-old became a reality. Years later in the preface to his book Ithaca, the Peloponnesus, and Troy Schliemann wrote: “When my father gave me a book on the main events of the Trojan War and the adventures of Odysseus and Agamemnon — it was my Christmas present for the year 1832— little did I think that thirty-six years later I would offer the public a book on the same subject. And do this, moreover, after actually seeing with my own eyes the scene of the war and the fatherland of the heroes immortalized by Homer.”
Schliemann’s youth was filled with adventure. In 1841 he went to Hamburg and was signed as cabin boy on a vessel bound for Venezuela. After fourteen days at sea the ship ran into a wild storm and foundered off the Dutch island of Texel in the North Sea. He made shore but landed in a hospital, exhausted and in rags. A recommendation from a family friend enabled him to get employment as an office boy in Amsterdam.
In a miserable, unheated garret room he began his study of languages. Within two years, by an unusual method of self-teaching, he had mastered English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. After being promoted to correspondent and bookkeeper with another Amsterdam firm doing business with Russia, Schliemann began to learn Russian. Six hectic weeks later he was conversing fluently with Russian merchants come to Amsterdam to attend the indigo auction.
He was as successful in business as in languages. The shipwrecked cabin boy, the office worker — and master of eight languages — became first a small wholesaler, then, with dizzying speed, a royal merchant. Invariably he picked the shortest road to commercial success. When only twenty-four years old he went to St. Petersburg as agent for his firm. A year later he founded his own exportimport business and rose to be Judge ol the St. Petersburg Commercial Court and director of the Imperial State Bank in St. Petersburg.
He was wealthy before he was fifty. “My enterprises had been wonderfully blessed by Heaven,”he says with unconcealed pride, “to such a degree that by the end of the year 1863 I was already in possession of means far beyond my most ambitious expectations.’' And to this he added, in a casual tone: “ I [now] retired from business so that I could devote myself entirely to the studies that so completely fascinated me.” In 1868 he made his first expedition to Ithaca, through the Peloponnesus and the Troad. 2
Copyright 1951, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
IN Schliemann’s day Homer was conceived to be a mere name, his Ilium an indeterminate, lost world. The great chronicle of the siege of Priam’s citadel was deemed by some to be a tale containing a great deal of invention and a few grains of truth. And by others the Iliad was relegated entirely to the shadow realm of myth. But Schliemann read Homeric poetry as bare reality. He believed implicitly. This was as true when he was forty-six as it had been when, as a boy, ho had been fascinated by the picture of the fleeing Aeneas. He was aware that all Greek antiquity, including the great historians Herodotus and Thucydides, had accepted the Trojan War us an actual event, and its famous names as historical personages.
The scholars of his time believed that the site of ancient Troy — if Troy had existed at all — was near a little village called Bunarbashi. At Bunarbashi were two springs, and some more daring archaeologists argued that ancient Troy might possibly be located thereabouts. For it is written in Homer, in the twenty-second song of the iliad (verses 147-52): “And [they] came to the two fairflowing springs, where two fountains rise that feed deep-eddying Skamandros. The one floweth with warm water, and smoke goeth up there from around us as it were from a blazing fire, while the other even in summer floweth forth like cold hail or snow or ice that water formath.”
For a fee of 45 piasters Schliemann hired a Greek guide and rode out bareback to have his first look at the land of his boyhood dreams. “I admit,” he savs, “that I could scarcely control my emotion when I saw the tremendous plain of Troy spread out before me, a scene that had haunted my earliest childhood dreams.”
But this first impression was enough to convince him, believing literally in Homer as he did, that Bunarbashi was not the site of ancient Troy. For the locality was fully three hours away from the coast, and Homer describes Ids heroes as able to travel back and forth several times daily between their moored ships and the beleaguered city. Nor did it seem likely to Schliemann that a great palace of sixty-two rooms would ever have been built on such a small knoll. The setting was not right for cyclopean walls, breached by a massive gate through which the crafty Greeks entered in a wooden horse.
Schliemann examined the springs of Bunarbashi and was surprised to find that in a space of 1650 feet he could count not merely two — the number mentioned by Homer—but thirty-four of them. He made a careful survey of the countryside in his Iliad and reread the verses telling how Achilles, the “brave runner,” chased Hector three times around the fortress of Priam, “with all the gods looking on.” Following Homeric directions as best he could, Schliemann traced out a likely course about the hill. At one point, however, he encountered a drop so steep that he had to crawl down it backwards on all fours. Since, in Schliemann’s view, Homer’s description of the landscape was as exact as a military map, surely the poet would have mentioned the incline had his heroes scrambled down it three times “in hasty flight.”
With watch in one hand and Homer in the other, he paced out the road between what were purported to be the two hills securing Troy, this road winding through the foothills to the shore off which the Achaean ships were supposed to have been anchored. He also re-enacted the movements of the first day of battle in the Trojan War, as portrayed in the second to the Severn h songs of the Wad. He found that if Troy had been located at Bunarbashi, the Aehaeans would have had to cover at least 52 miles during the first nine hours of battle.
The complete absence of ruins clinched his doubts about the site. “ Mycenae and Tiryns,”Schliemann wrote in 1868, “were destroyed 2335 years ago, but their ruins are of such solid construction that they can last another 10,000 years.” And Troy was destroyed only 722 years earlier. It seemed highly unlikely that the walls described by Homer would have disappeared without a trace. Yet in the environs of Bunarbashi there was not a sign of ancient masonry.
Ruins there were aplenty, however, in other not too distant places. Even the untrained eye could not miss them at New Ilium, now called Hissarlik, a town some two and a half hours northward from Bunarbashi and only one hour from the coast. Twice Schliemann examined the flat top of the mound at Hissarlik, a rectangular plateau about 769 feet long on each side. This preliminary survey pretty well satisfied his mind that he had located ancient Troy.
He began to cast about for proof and discovered that others shared his opinion, among them Frank Calvert, American vice-consul, but Englishman by birth. Calvert owned a part of the mound of Hissarlik and had a villa there.
For a short while Schliemann wavered when he found no springs at all at Hissarlik, in striking contrast to his discovery of thirty-four at Bunarbashi. But Calvert pointed out that in this volcanic region he had heard of several hot springs suddenly drying up, only to reappear after a short period. And so Schliemann casually cast aside everything that hitherto had seemed so important to the scholars.
Moreover, the running fight between Hector and Achilles was plausible enough in the Hissarlik setting, where the hill sloped gently. To circle the city three times at Hissarlik they would have had to run 9 miles. This feat, Schliemann thought, was not beyond the power of such warriors.
Again Schliemann was more influenced in his thinking by the judgment of the ancients than by the scholarship of his day. He recalled how Herodotus had reported that Xerxes once visited New Ilium to look at the remains of Priam ‘s Pergamos,” and there to sacrifice a thousand cattle to the Ilian Minerva. According to Xenophon, Mindares, the Lacedaemonian general, had done the same. Arrian had written that Alexander the Great, after making an offering at New Ilium, took ancient weapons away with him and ordered his bodyguard to carry them in battle for luck. Beyond this, Caesar had done much for New Ilium, partly because he admired Alexander, partly because he believed himself to be a descendant of the Hians.
Had they all been misled by a dream? By the bad reporting of their day?'
And so a man possessed went to work. All the energy that had made him a millionaire Schliemann concentrated on realizing his dream.
In 1869 he married a Greek girl named Sophia Engastromenos, who was as beautiful as his image of Helen. Soon Sophia, too, was absorbed in the great task and was sharing his fatigues, hardships, and worries. He began to dig at Hissarlik in April, 1870. In 1871 he dug for two months, and another four and a half months in the two succeeding years. He had a hundred workers in his employ. Nothing could hold him down, neither deadly mosquitoborne fevers and had water nor the recalcitrance of the laborers. He prodded dilatory authorities and he ignored the incomprehension of narrow-minded experts who mocked him as a fool.
The Temple of Athena had stood on the highest ground in the city, and Poseidon and Apollo had built the walls of Pergamos— so it was recorded in Homer. Therefore the temple should be located in the middle of the mound, Schliemann reasoned, and somewhere round about, on the original level ground, would be the walls constructed by the gods. Me struck into the mound, boldly ripping down the walls that to him seemed unimportant, lie found weapons and household furnishings, ornaments and vases, overwhelming evidence that a rich city had once occupied the spot. And he found Something else as well: under the ruins of New Ilium he disclosed other ruins, under these still others. The hill was like a tremendous onion, which he proceeded to dismember layer by layer.
Each day brought a new surprise. Schliemann had gone forth to find Homeric Troy, but as time went on he and his workers discovered no fewer than seven buried cities, then two more—nine glimpses, all told, of primitive ages that previously had not been known to exist.
The question now arose which of these nine cities was the Troy of Homer, of the heroes and the epic war. It was clear that the bottommost or first level had been a prehistoric city, much the oldest in the series, so old that the inhabitants had not known the use of metals. And the uppermost level had to be the most recent, and no doubt consisted of the remains of ihe New Ilium where Xerxes and Alexander had made sacrifice.
Schliemann dug and searched. In the second and third levels he found traces of fire, the remains of massive walls, and the ruins of a gigantic gate, lie was sure that these walls had once enclosed the palace of Priam, and that he had found the famous Scaean Gate.
He unearthed things that were treasures from the scientific point of view. Part of this material he shipped home, part he gave over to experts for examination, material that yielded a detailed picture of the Trojan epoch, the portrait of a people.
It was Heinrich Schiiemann’s triumph, and the triumph, too, of Homer. He had succeeded, the enthusiastic amateur, in demonstrating the actual existence of what, had always counted as mere saga and myth, a figment of the poetic fancy.
A wave of excitement coursed through the intellectual world. Schliemann, whose workers had moved more than 325,000 cubic yards of earth, had earned a breathing spell and he set June 15, 1878, as the date for the termination of the diggings. On the day before the last shovelful of earth was to be turned, he found a treasure that crowned his labors with a golden splendor.
3
IT happened dramatically. Even today, reading about this amazing discovery takes one’s breath away. The discovery was made during the early hours of a hot morning. Schliemann, accompanied by his wife, was supervising the excavation. The workmen were down 28 feet, at the lower level of the masonry that Schliemann identified with Priam’s palace. Suddenly his gaze was held spellbound. He seized his wife by the arm. “Gold!" he whispered. She looked at him in amazement. “Quick,”he said. “Send the men home at once.”The lovely Greek stammered a protest. “ No buls, he told her. “Tell them anything you want. Tell them today is my birthday, that I’ve just remembered, and that they can all have the rest of the day off. Hurry up, now, hurry!”
The workers left. “Get your red shawl!” Schliemann said to his wife as he jumped down into the hole. He went to work with his knife like a demon. Massive blocks of stone, the debris of millennia, hung perilously over his head, but he paid no attention to the danger. “With all possible speed I cut out the treasure with a large knife,”he writes. “I did this by dint of strenuous effort, and in the most frightful danger of losing my life; for the heavy citadel wall, which I had to dig under, might have crashed down on me at any moment. But the sight of so many immeasurably priceless objects made me foolhardy and I did not think of the hazards.
There was the soft sheen of ivory, the jingle of gold. Schliemann’s wife held open the shawl to be filled with Priam’s treasure. It was the golden treasure of one of the mightiest kings ol prehistory, gathered together in blood and tears, the ornaments of a godlike people, buried for three thousand years until dug front under the ruined walls of seven vanished kingdoms. Not for one moment did Schliemann doubt that he had found Priam’s treasuretrove. And not until shortly before his death was it proved that Schliemann had been misled in the heat of enthusiasm. Troy lay neither on the second nor on the third level, but on the sixth. The treasure had belonged to a king who had antedated Priam by a thousand years.
What to do now with this golden hoard? Schliemann allowed news of the find to get out, but by various adventurous means, aided by his wife’s relatives, was able to smuggle the treasure to Athens, thence out of the country. When Sehliemann’s house was searched and sealed on orders from the Turkish Ambassador, not a trace of gold was found.
Was he a thief? The law regulating the disposal of antiquities found in Turkish territory was loosely framed, and highly subject to interpretation according to the caprice of local officials. Having sacrificed his whole career to the fulfillment of a dream, Schliemann could hardly be expected to be excessively scrupulous at this point in the game. He was determined to preserve his hoard of golden rarities for the delectation of European scholarship.
4
ONE of the darkest and most sinister chapters in the semilegendary history of ancient Greece is the impassioned story of the Pelopidae of Mycenae, especially that part of it dealing with Agamemnon’s return and death. For ten years Agamemnon had been away, laying siege to Troy, and Aegisthus had made good use of his absence.
Afar, enduring the hard toils of war,
While he, securely couched in his retreat
At Argos, famed for steeds, with flattering words
Corrupted Agamemnon’s queen.
Aegisthus ordered a lookout to be kept for the returning husband and then lay in wait with twenty men. He invited Agamemnon to a banquet — “thinking shameful knavery” — and “struck him down at the banquet, as one slaughters the ox at the crib. None of Agamemnon’s friends escaped, all following him.” Eight years passed before Orestes, the filial avenger, appeared to kill his adulterous mother, Clytemnestra, and Aegisthus, his father’s assassin.
Tragic poets have often dramatized this famous theme, and the memory of the “king of men,” ruler of the Peloponnesus, one of the mightiest and richest of historical characters, has remained forever green in posterity’s mind.
Mycenae had golden as well as sanguinary connotations. According to Homer, Troy was rich, but Mycenae even richer, and the word golden was the adjective that he characteristically used in describing the city. Enchanted by his discovery of Priam’s treasure, Schliemann was eager to find new riches. And—contrary to universal expectation — this he actually did.
There was no doubt whatever about the site of the city called Mycenae. The dust of thousands of years covered the ruins, and sheep were grazing where once kings had held sway. Still, the ruins were there to behold. The Lion Gate, main palace entrance, stood high and open in full view. Accessible, too, were the so-called “treasuries” (once thought to be bakers’ ovens), the most famous of which was that of Atreus, first Pelopid and father of Agamemnon. This subterranean room is 50 feet high and shaped like a dome, the bold arch of which, made of huge unmortared blocks, is a selfsupporting span.
Schliemann found that several ancient authors had located the graves of Agamemnon and his murdered friends at Mycenae. The citadel she was obvious enough, but the graves were another matter entirely. Schliemann had found Troy by depending on his Homer. In this instance he staked has claim on a certain passage in Pausanias which, he declared, previous archaeologists had incorrectly translated and misunderstood. Up to this time it had been assumed — and two of the greatest experts of the day, Dodwell, an Englishman, and Curtius, a German, supported the idea — that Pausanias had pictured the graves as outside the walls of the citadel of Mycenae, but Schliemann maintained that they must be inside the walls. He went ahead and dug, and his diggings shortly proved that again he was on the right track.
“I began the great work on August 7, 1876, with 63 workers. . . . Since August 19 I have carried on the excavating with 125 laborers and four carts, on the average, and have made good progress.”
The first important find, after he had uncovered an enormous number of vases, was a curious circular structure, made of a double row of stone slabs set on edge. Schliemann believed immediately that the stone circle was a bench on which the elders of the Mycenaean citadel had sat in the agora while addressing assemblies, taking counsel, and dispensing justice. Here, he believed, Euripides’ heraid had stood — as recorded in Electra — while he called the people to the agora.
“Learned friends” confirmed his view. Presently he found the following sentence in Pausanias, relating, to be sure, to another agora: “Here they built the place of senatorial assembly, in such fashion that the heroes’ graves would be in the midst of the meeting place.” Thereafter he knew with the same certainty that had led him safely through six layered cities to the “treasure of Priam” that he was standing on Agamemnon’s grave.
And when, in short order, he found nine stelae, four of them with well-preserved bas-reliefs, his last doubt vanished, and with it, too, all scholarly restraint. “Indeed, I do not hesitate for a moment,” he wrote, “to announce that here I have found the graves that Pausanias, following tradition, ascribes to Atreus, to Agamemnon, king among men, to his charioteer, Eurymedon, and to Cassandra and her companions.”
Meanwhile the work on the treasuries near the Lion Gate progressed slowly. Masses of stony rubble aggravated the difficulties of excavation. But here, too, Schliemann’s mystical certainty would not be shaken. “I am convinced,” he wrole, “of the absolute validity of the tradition which says that these mysterious structures were used as storage places for the treasure of primeval kings.” The first find, taken from the debris that he had heaped to one side in an attempt to gain entrance, exceeded in delicacy of form, beauty of execution, and quality of material anything of a similar sort discovered in Troy. There were fragments of friezes, painted vases, terra-cotta idols of Hera, stone molds for casting ornamental articles (“these apparently of gold and silver”), as well as glazed clay objects, gems, and beads.
The amount of work involved in the project is suggested by Schliemann’s following observations: “So far as the diggings have progressed to date, nowhere do I find debris piled deeper than 26 feet, and this extreme depth only near the big circular wall.”
5
THE discovery of the first grave was noted in Schliemann’s journal on December 6, 1876. The grave must have been opened with great care. For twenty-five days Sophia, the tireless helper, explored the earth with fingers and pocketknife. Eventually five graves were found, in them the skeletons of fifteen dead. On the strength of this revelation Schliemann sent a cable to the King of Greece: —
“It is with extraordinary pleasure that I announce to Your Majesty my discovery of the graves which, according to tradition, are those of Agamemnon, Cassandra, Eurymedon, and their comrades, all killed during the banquet by Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus.”
Schliemann did not entertain the least doubt about his discoveries. “The bodies were literally covered with gold and jewels,” he wrote at the time. Would such valuables have been interred with the bodies of ordinary persons, he inquired, lie found expensively fashioned weapons, seemingly placed in the grave so that the dead would be armed against any contingency in the shadow world. Schliemann pointed to the obviously hasty burning of the corpses. The burial crew, it appeared, had hardly taken time to let the fire do its work before piling gravel and earth on the scorched victims. This implied the haste of murderers frantic to hide their crime. True, the corpses had been furnished with funerary gifts and accouterments, but ibis concession could be explained by the force of custom. As for the graves as such, they were anything but pretentious — indeed, as unworthy, one might imagine, of the rank of the deceased as hatred could make them. Had it not been said that the murdered were “thrown like the carcasses of unclean animals into miserable holes”?
Schliemann sought to buttress his identification of the graves by recourse to his beloved authorities, the writers of antiquity. He quoted from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, from Sophocles’ Electra, from Euripides’ Orestes. It simply did not occur to him to question the correctness of his notions. Today, however, we know that his theory was false. He had, it is true, found royal graves under the agora of Mycenae; they were not, however, the graves of Agamemnon and his followers, but of people who most likely had lived some four hundred years earlier.
This discrepancy did not really matter. The important thing was that Schliemann had taken a second great step into the lost world of prehistory. Again he had proved Homer’s worth as historian. He had unearthed treasures which provided valuable insight into the matrix of our culture. “It is an entirely new and unsuspected world,” Schliemann wrote, “that I am discovering for archaeology.”
The golden relics found by Schliemann were of enormous value, and not exceeded in opulence until Carnarvon’s and Carter’s finds in Egypt. “All the museums of the world taken together,” Schliemann said, “do not have one fifth as much.”
In the first of the five graves he found on each of three skeletons five diadems of pure gold, laurel leaves, and crosses of gold. In another grave, containing the remains of three women, he collected no fewer than 701 thick golden leaves, together with wonderful ornaments in the shape of animals, flowers, butterflies, and cuttlefish. Besides these he found golden decorative pieces showing figured lions and other beasts, and warriors engaged in battle. There were precious pieces shaped like lions and griffons, and others showing deer at repose and women with doves. One of the skeletons wore a golden crown, on the fillet of which were fastened thirty-six golden leaves. The head wearing the crown had almost completely crumbled to dust. In another grave was a skeleton so near dissolution that only a fragment of the skull was still stuck to the elegant diadem at its head.
Most important of all, he found certain gold masks and breastplates, which, according to tradition, were used in outfitting dead kings to protect them against malign influence after death. Down on his knees, his wife hovering over him ready to lend a helping hand, Schliemann scraped away the layers of clay sheathing the five corpses in the fourth grave. After a few hours exposure to the air the heads of the skeletons dissolved into dust. Hut the shimmering golden masks kept their shape, each mask representing completely individual features, “so utterly different from idealized types of god and hero that unquestionably each of the same is a facsimile of the dead person’s actual appearance.”
Evenings, when the day was done and the shadows of night were creeping over the acropolis of Mycenae, Schliemann had fires lit “for the first time in 2344 years.” Watch fires — recalling those which once had warned Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus, of the approach of Agamemnon, but this time serving to frighten thieves away from great treasures.
6
SCHLIEMANN’S third series of excavations failed to reveal any more buried gold. Of vastly greater significance, however, they brought to light the dead city of Tiryns. Schliemann’s discoveries at Tiryns, coupled with what he had already turned up at Mycenae, and with additional finds made a decade later on Crete by the English archaeologist Arthur Evans, made possible the world’s first picture of the prehistoric Minoan culture that once dominated the Mediterranean littoral.
There is no doubt that in the interval between the time he attacked the mound of Hissarfik like a child smashing at a toy with a hammer and the time he excavated at Mycenae and Tiryns, Schliemann had grown immensely in archaeological stature. Hoth Dorpfeld and the great English investigator Evans attest this fact. Sehliemann’s scientific development cannot be minimized merely because of fallacies bred by an excess of enthusiasm and impel uosity.
In 1870, at the age of fifty-four, Schliemann first drove a spade into the ruins of Mycenae, and in 1878—79, with Virchow s assistance, he dug for the second time at Troy. In 1881, at Orchomenus, the third city characterized as “golden by Homer, he uncovered the Treasury of Minyas. In 1882 with Dorpfeld, he dug for the third time in the Troad, and two years after this began his excavations in Tirvns.
Once more the familiar pattern unfolded. The archaeologists had previously contended that the walls were medieval remains. As usual, Schliemann paid no attention. Tiryns was supposedly the birthplace of Heracles, and among the ancients the walls of the citadel were thought of as one of the world’s wonders. Pausanias compared them with the pyramids of Egypt.
Schliemann dug and brought to light the foundation walls of a palace exceeding in grandeur all found hitherto. Soon there appeared the outlines of a citadel crowning the limestone crag. In the outer bailey, which contained stores and stables, the wall was 7 to 8 yards thick, but in the inner enceinte, where the ruler lived, its thickness reached 11 yards. Here the spade brought to light the outlines of the Homeric palace, with pillared walls and chambers, The men’s court with the altar, the stately megaron wilh porch and antechamber, and even a ha I broom where Homers heroes had bathed and anointed themselves.
But there were still more interesting discoveries: the character of the pottery and the wall paintings. Schliemann immediately recognized the similarity of the pottery, the vases, and the jars to those he had found in Mycenae and to those unearthed by other archaeologists at Asine, Nauplia Eleusis, and the islands, most notably Crete. Here he found also vases displaying the so-called “geometric pattern, which had allegedly been brought by the Phoenicians to the court of Thotmes III as early as 1600 B.C. So he set out to establish in detail that he had discovered traces of a cultural complex of Asiatic or African origin — a culture, indeed, which had spread over the whole east coast of Greece, which embraced most of the islands, but which probably had a cultural focus in Crete. We now call this culture Minoan-Mycenaean. Schliemann had found the first t races of it.
Schliemann wanted to be home with his wife and children for Christmas of 1890. He was tortured by an ear ailment. Yet he was so preoccupied with his plans that he was satisfied with a superficial examination by hotel physicians in Italy. They reassurcsl him. But on Christmas Day he collapsed in the Piazza della Santa Carita in Naples and lost his power of speech. Through the long night Heinrich Schliemann struggled for his life, never losing consciousness. Then he died.
“When his body was brought to Athens, the King and the Crown Prince of Greece, the diplomatic representatives stationed in the Greek capital, the head of the Greek government, and the leaders of all the Greek scientific institutes came to pay their respects ;it the bier. Looking down on this ardent lover of all things Greek, on him who had enriched the knowledge of Hellenic antiquity by a thousand years, was the bust of Homer. Sehliemann’s wife and two children also stood by the coffin. These children were called Andromache and Agamemnon.