For most of the nineteenth century, educated Europeans regarded the Iliad as a magnificent poem but not, in any meaningful sense, a historical document. The Trojan War, the wrath of Achilles, the walls of Troy itself — these belonged to myth, not geography. Heinrich Schliemann, a self-made German businessman with no formal archaeological training, disagreed, and his conviction that Homer's Troy was a real, findable place drove one of the most consequential — and most controversial — excavations in the history of archaeology.
A Merchant's Obsession
Schliemann made his considerable fortune through trade and finance in Russia, the United States, and elsewhere, amassing enough wealth by his mid-forties to retire from business entirely and devote himself to a childhood fascination with ancient Greece. Convinced that the Iliad preserved genuine geographical and historical memory beneath its poetic embellishment, Schliemann set out to locate the city it described, relying heavily on the topographical details Homer provided about Troy's setting relative to the Aegean coast, the Hellespont, and nearby landmarks.
He was not working entirely alone in this conviction. The British diplomat and amateur archaeologist Frank Calvert, who had already conducted preliminary digging on land he partly owned, had independently identified the mound of Hisarlik, in the Ottoman Empire's Turkish territory near the entrance to the Dardanelles, as the most plausible site of ancient Troy, and shared this view with Schliemann when the two met. Schliemann, with far greater financial resources than Calvert, took up excavation at Hisarlik in 1870, and continued digging there through several campaigns into the 1890s.
Digging Straight for Priam
Schliemann's excavation methods were crude even by the standards of his own era, and became a byword for destructive archaeology in the decades that followed. Convinced that Homeric Troy lay at a specific, relatively deep layer of the mound, he drove a massive trench straight down through Hisarlik's accumulated layers, shifting enormous quantities of earth with little regard for the archaeological information contained in the strata he was cutting through. Hisarlik, as later, more careful excavation would establish, was not a single city but a sequence of at least nine major settlements built one atop another across thousands of years, from the early Bronze Age through the Roman period. Schliemann's trenching plowed through several of these layers indiscriminately in his haste to reach what he believed was the Homeric city, very likely destroying evidence from the layer — now generally identified by later archaeologists as Troy VIIa — that best matches the approximate era and destruction-by-conflict scenario the Trojan War tradition describes.
"Priam's Treasure"
In 1873, Schliemann announced his most sensational find: a hoard of gold and silver objects, including diadems, earrings, and other jewelry, which he claimed to have discovered together near the level of the city walls he believed belonged to Homeric Troy. He named the hoard "Priam's Treasure" after the legendary Trojan king, and photographed his wife, Sophia, wearing some of the jewelry, a striking image that helped cement the find in the public imagination as tangible proof of Homer's world.
Later analysis complicated Schliemann's dramatic narrative considerably. The layer in which the treasure was found is now understood to belong to Troy II, a Bronze Age settlement roughly a thousand years earlier than the period usually associated with the Trojan War as later Greeks understood it — meaning that whatever the hoard represented, it almost certainly had nothing to do with Priam or the war described in the Iliad. Questions have also long persisted about Schliemann's own account of the discovery, including whether the objects were genuinely found together as a single hoard, as he reported, or assembled from separate finds over a longer period and presented as one dramatic moment.
Smuggled Out of the Empire
Schliemann's excavation had been conducted under a permit from Ottoman authorities that entitled the government to a share of any significant finds. Rather than share or surrender the treasure, Schliemann smuggled it out of Ottoman territory and eventually arranged for it to be housed in Berlin, provoking a lasting legal and diplomatic dispute with the Ottoman government, which had already grown wary of his excavation practices and briefly suspended his permit over earlier disputes.
The treasure's later history added another layer of intrigue. Housed for decades in Berlin museums, it disappeared amid the chaos of the closing months of the Second World War and was widely presumed lost or destroyed. Decades later, in the early 1990s, it was revealed that Soviet forces had taken the hoard to Moscow at the war's end, where it had remained in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, undisclosed, for nearly half a century. Its ownership remains disputed today among Germany, Russia, and Turkey.
Correcting the Record
After Schliemann's death in 1890, more disciplined excavation of Hisarlik continued under his former collaborator Wilhelm Dörpfeld, and later, in the twentieth century, under the American archaeologist Carl Blegen and, still later, a long-running German-led project under Manfred Korfmann. These later campaigns brought genuine stratigraphic rigor to a site Schliemann's trenching had badly compromised, gradually reconstructing the sequence of nine major city layers and offering a far more nuanced, if less romantically satisfying, picture of Hisarlik's long occupation than Schliemann's single-minded hunt for Priam's city ever allowed.
A Flawed Pioneer
Schliemann's legacy in archaeology remains deeply ambivalent. He proved, against the settled opinion of most scholars of his day, that Homer's Troy corresponded to an identifiable, physical place, and his excavations helped establish that the Bronze Age Aegean world described in Greek epic had a real historical foundation. Yet the same drive and impatience that led him to Hisarlik also led him to destroy irreplaceable evidence in his rush to find the city he had already decided must be there — a cautionary case study, still taught to archaeology students, in the difference between finding a site and understanding it.
