HEINRICH SCHLIEMANN WAS WANDERING AROUND THE ancient mound in northwestern Turkey one morning in May 1873, observing his workers’ digging. He was certain that they were excavating ancient Troy but had not yet been able to convince all of the doubters.
He suddenly noticed one of the workers unearthing a copper pot, behind which he could see the glint of gold. Dismissing the worker, he and his wife Sophia “cut out the Treasure with a large knife,” working quickly because a large section of earth above them looked like it was about to cave in on them at any moment.
Sophia gathered the objects together in her shawl and carried them into their house, where the two of them catalogued the objects and realized what they had just found—a king’s treasure of gold necklaces, rings, and earrings, including two diadems, a headband, sixty earrings, and nearly nine thousand smaller ornaments. There were also cups, bowls, and other vessels made of gold, silver, and electrum, including a solid gold sauceboat, which is one of only two that has ever been found, and a golden vessel in the shape of a pomegranate. And there were other objects as well—a copper shield and vase; thirteen spearheads; fourteen battle-axes; daggers, a sword, and other objects of copper or bronze; stone hilts that probably belonged to bronze swords; and a multitude of other items, the like of which has never been found together elsewhere in the world.
They crated everything up, smuggled the treasure onto a boat, and sent it back to their residence in Athens. There, Sophia put on most of the jewelry that they had found. They took a photograph of her, which remains one of the most iconic images in archaeology to this day.
Schliemann announced to the world that they had found Priam’s Treasure. The discovery made them world-famous and the story has been repeated in exquisite detail ever since. But is there any truth to it? And had Schliemann really found Troy?
What we know about the story of the Trojan War comes primarily from the Iliad, written by the Greek poet Homer. Lesser-known poets, in what is known as the Epic Cycle, provide other details. Although the poems’ events are likely to have taken place during the Late Bronze Age, probably in the thirteenth or twelfth century BCE, it is important to keep in mind that the story probably wasn’t written down until at least five hundred years later.
Wall of Troy VI
According to Homer, the Greeks and the Trojans went to war for ten years over a woman named Helen. At the time, Helen was the wife of a man named Menelaus, who was the ruler of a small kingdom or citystate in the southern part of the Greek mainland. His brother was Agamemnon, king of kings, who ruled from the city of Mycenae. It is from this city that we derive the name Mycenaeans, the term that archaeologists use for the Greeks of that time.
A delegation from Troy, the important port city that controlled trade to the east and to the north from its location in northwest Turkey, came to visit Menelaus. Among its members was a man named Paris, sometimes referred to as Alexander. He was a prince of Troy, the son of King Priam. When the delegation returned home to Troy, Helen was among them. The Trojans claimed she had come with them willingly, because she was in love with Paris. The Greeks claimed that she had been kidnapped.
Led by Agamemnon and Menelaus, along with other Mycenaean heroes, including Odysseus and Achilles, the Greeks sent a large fleet of ships and men to besiege Troy and get Helen back. It took ten long years before they were able to do so, and even then it was only by using the trick of the Trojan horse that they were able to succeed. In the end, the Greeks destroyed Troy, burning it to the ground, and returned home with Helen.
Homer’s story is rich in detail and yet scholars continue to question it. Was there an actual, historical Trojan War that served as a basis for Homer’s epic? And could archaeological evidence for it ever be found? I believe that the answer to both questions is “yes” and that there is now evidence showing that the war was a historical event that took place sometime around 1184 BCE, which—as it turns out—is just about the time when the Mycenaean culture and the entire Late Bronze Age came crashing down. It may be that the Trojan War was part of a much larger catastrophe.
However, the ancient Greeks were divided on whether the Trojan War had taken place, and if so, when it had been fought. Most classical scholars of nineteenth-century Europe were convinced that the Trojan War had not taken place and that it was completely made up by Homer. Thus, when Heinrich Schliemann, a complete amateur in the field of archaeology, decided that he would search for the site of Troy, he was going against the thinking of most of the scholars of his day.
Despite the opposition, Schliemann was intent on finding Troy and proving that the Trojan War had taken place. Much later, Schliemann claimed that he first decided to do so in 1829, at the age of seven. His father gave him a book for Christmas that included an artist’s rendition of Aeneas fleeing from the burning city of Troy, complete with the huge walls that the Mycenaeans had been besieging for ten years. Aeneas was headed for Italy, where his later descendants Romulus and Remus would found the city of Rome, according to tradition. Schliemann said that he decided then and there to find Troy, declaring “Father, if such walls once existed, they cannot possibly have been completely destroyed: vast ruins of them must still remain, but they are hidden away beneath the dust of ages.” Eventually, he says, “we both agreed that I should one day excavate Troy.” Other scholars question this account because Schliemann mentions this story only much later in his life, despite leaving quite literally volumes of diaries, notes, letters, and other books from early in his career.
Schliemann was in his mid-forties before he had earned enough of a fortune to retire and devote the rest of his life to finding evidence for Troy and the Trojan War. The shenanigans that Schliemann pulled while accumulating this fortune illustrate that he was not a man whose word could be entirely trusted in either his personal or his professional life.
One particular example of his behavior is relevant because it pertains directly to Schliemann’s “discovery” of Troy—and one should definitely put “discovery” in quotes. In 1868 Schliemann took a trip to Greece and then proceeded on to Turkey. He says that he traveled around northwestern Turkey with Homer in one hand, looking for a site that was small enough so that Achilles could have chased Hector around it several times and that had both hot and cold springs, to match the description given by Homer.
He looked at a number of sites that had been suggested previously, but none seemed to quite fit the bill. Then he met the US vice consul to Turkey, a man named Frank Calvert. Calvert had also been looking for Troy and thought that he had found it. In fact, he had already bought the ancient mound, which now had the modern Turkish name Hissarlik, meaning “Place of Fortresses.”
Calvert had begun some preliminary excavations at the site but didn’t have enough money to continue working properly. Schliemann, on the other hand, had plenty of money and was happy to join forces with Calvert. Once they began excavating and Schliemann convinced himself that the mound was indeed the site of ancient Troy, he deliberately left Calvert’s name out of all of his subsequent official announcements, lectures, and publications, thereby claiming the fame and glory for himself. It was only in 1999, with a book published by Susan Heuck Allen, that Calvert was restored to his rightful place in history as the true discoverer of the location of ancient Troy.
The first excavation season by Schliemann at Hissarlik began in April 1870. He didn’t yet have an official excavation permit from the Turkish authorities, but that didn’t stop him. He didn’t find much that season, or the next. So, in 1872, with the help of a large team of local workers, he launched his greatest assault on the ancient site. This took the form of a huge trench that his workers dug right across most of the mound and down to a depth of about forty-five feet. Today it is known as Schliemann’s Great Trench and is still visible as a huge gash in the middle of the site.
Archaeology was still in its infancy at that time. Even though excavations had been ongoing at Pompeii for more than a century, there wasn’t that much digging going on elsewhere in the 1870s. But there were people who were knowledgeable, including Calvert, who warned Schliemann that such reckless digging might result in catastrophe. And sure enough, they were right.
In the Great Trench, Schliemann and his workers went down, down, down; right through all sorts of buildings and stratigraphic levels. It turned out that there were nine cities buried one on top of another in the mound, although Schliemann thought at first that there were only six. He stopped at the second city from the bottom, which he called the “Burnt City.” He was convinced that this was the city that Priam had ruled. But he was wrong. We now know, on the basis of pottery analysis and carbon-14 dating, that Troy II dates to about 2400 BCE, during the Early Bronze Age, more than a thousand years before the Trojan War would have been fought.
If one stands at the bottom of the Great Trench today, at the level where Schliemann and his workers stopped digging, and looks straight up, it is possible to see—way high above—a level that contains a building made out of huge blocks of stone. It’s just a few feet below the top of the mound, shaded from the sun by the limbs and leaves of a slender tree now growing on the modern surface. This is a building that dates to Troy VI and was reused in Troy VII. It is all that is left of a palace that dates to the Late Bronze Age, the time period for which Schliemann was looking.
Most of that palace, however, is missing. And it’s missing because of Heinrich Schliemann. In his haste, Schliemann and his workers dug right through the stone walls of Priam’s palace and threw most of it out on their dirt pile. If we were to dig in that spoil heap now, it is highly likely that we would find all sorts of things from the Troy of Priam and Hector, including perhaps clay tablets used by ancient scribes.
So, what was it that convinced Schliemann that Troy II was Priam’s Troy? For one thing, he found a huge city gate in that level, which he identified as Homer’s Scaean Gate. This was supposedly so wide that two chariots could be driven in side by side. And then came his report of Priam’s Treasure.
The story that he told about the day he and Sophia found the treasure has long been repeated in introductory archaeology textbooks, although it is unlikely to be true. Schliemann later admitted that he lied about Sophia’s role in his story. She wasn’t even at the dig on the day that he claims to have found the treasure. His own diaries and journals show that she was in Athens at the time. Schliemann explained that his intention was to involve her more in his career, in the hopes that she would become more interested in what he did. So he wrote her into the story so that she could share in his triumph. No respectable archaeologist today would dare do what Schliemann did.
Some scholars have also suggested that Schliemann didn’t find the treasure all in one place. Instead, they think he gathered the best of his finds from the entire season and announced to a gullible public that he had found them all together as a single treasure. Moreover, since the objects were found in Troy II, they are a thousand years too early to have belonged to Priam. It seems that Priam’s Treasure might not be either Priam’s or a Treasure.
Soon after he announced his discovery of the objects, Schliemann donated them to the Berlin Museum, perhaps in exchange for being given his doctorate in archaeology at a German university. But the treasure disappeared in the aftermath of World War II and was presumed lost for nearly fifty years. It was only in the early 1990s that the Russians admitted that they had it. They had taken it back to Russia as part of the spoils of war and claimed it as recompense for the losses that they suffered.
Today, Priam’s Treasure is on display at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. It remains there despite the fact that four countries now lay claim to it: Turkey, because that’s where Troy is and they say that Schliemann smuggled the treasure out illegally; Greece, because that’s where Schliemann first stored the treasure, in his residence in Athens; Germany, because Schliemann gave the treasure to the Berlin Museum and that’s where it was until it disappeared in 1945; and Russia, because they took it while liberating that part of Berlin and now claim it as reparation for Nazi aggression. So who really owns it? That still hasn’t been resolved and Russia shows no signs of handing it over to anyone else.
What is most interesting about these objects is that they bear a great deal of resemblance to objects found elsewhere, from the islands of the northeast Aegean to the so-called Death Pits of Ur that Leonard Woolley excavated in what is now Iraq. The gold earrings, pins, and necklaces that Schliemann found may not have belonged to Priam, or his wife or daughter, but they did belong to a class of jewelry that was in fashion across much of the Aegean and the ancient Middle East at the end of the third millennium BCE. They may give us clues about ancient trade and interconnections at that time—and that makes them even more interesting to archaeologists than their fictional connection to Priam and Homer’s Iliad.
Schliemann continued to dig at Troy throughout the 1870s and 1880s, though he also was digging at Mycenae at that time, looking for material remains of King Agamemnon. To help him at Troy, he hired Wilhelm Dörpfeld, an architect with some previous archaeological experience, who eventually persuaded Schliemann that he had been wrong and that it was Troy VI or Troy VII at Hissarlik that he should have been investigating all along. Schliemann began to make plans for an additional attack on the mound, focused on these later levels, but on Christmas Day in 1890, he collapsed on a street in Naples and died the next day.
It was left to Dörpfeld to carry on. And so he did, with the financial assistance of Sophia Schliemann, who wanted him to continue her husband’s work at the site. He concentrated on excavating the remains that Schliemann had left untouched, mostly around the edges of the mound. As it turned out, those remains were extremely impressive. He unearthed tall stone walls, each several meters thick, that would have stymied any attackers, and large gateways allowing entrance to the interior, but only after one got past the guards.
These were the remains of Troy VI, which seems to have lasted for nearly five hundred years, from about 1700 BCE to 1250 BCE. Dörpfeld found numerous phases of the city, which he labeled “a” through “h.” The last phase, Troy VIh, showed signs of an almost-complete destruction of the city. For Dörpfeld, this was the evidence for the Trojan War that they had been seeking. He ended his excavations and published his results.
In the meantime, travelers venturing elsewhere in Turkey, especially to the inland central plateau, had been finding the ruins of another ancient civilization. Back in 1879, while Schliemann was still excavating at Troy, a British Assyriologist named A. H. Sayce suggested a daring hypothesis—that the ruins belonged to the ancient Hittites.
The hypothesis was daring because the Hebrew Bible seemed to place the Hittites in the region of Canaan, if the biblical stories mentioning Uriah the Hittite and other figures were any indication. Sayce’s arguments were convincing and were ultimately accepted by other scholars. By 1890, the year that Schliemann died, the second edition of Sayce’s book on the Hittites was already in print. It was entitled The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire.
In 1906 excavations began at what turned out to be the capital city of the Hittites—Hattusa, located by the modern-day town of Bogazköy, 125 miles to the east of Ankara. Within a year, the archives of the city began to be uncovered; thousands of clay tablets that included treaties, records, and royal letters. It turned out that the Hittites had been active across Anatolia from about 1700 to 1200 BCE. They had even held territory in northern Syria, which is why the later biblical writers placed them in that region.
We now know a tremendous amount about the Hittites, thanks in part to the German excavations that have been going continuously at Hattusa for the past century. The decipherment of the Hittite tablets by a Czech orientalist named Bedřich Hrozný, just a decade after their initial discovery, ultimately proved that the Hittites were a major player in the world of the ancient Middle East during the second millennium BCE, both trading and warring with the other powers, especially the Egyptians and the Assyrians.
Among the tablets are a few that document the ongoing troubles that the Hittites had with a small vassal kingdom located in northwestern Anatolia, which they called Wilusa. Eventually, sometime early in the thirteen century BCE, probably about 1280 BCE, the Hittites signed a treaty with the king of Wilusa, a man named Alaksandu.
It was not long after this tablet was deciphered that some scholars began suggesting that this was a Hittite reference to the same man whom Homer calls Alexander (Paris) of Ilios and who was responsible for beginning the Trojan War because of his romance with Helen. Philologically, Wilusa is close to the Greek name (W)Ilios—the original “W” sound in Greek, known as a digamma, dropped out over time, so that by Homer’s time it was simply Ilios. And, of course, Alaksandu sounds very much like Alexander.
Although it is by no means clear that the two identifications are correct, at the very least these tablets show that the Hittites were involved with an area, and a city, in northwest Anatolia that they called Wilusa. The tablets also record that at least four wars were fought here, the last three of which were all during the thirteenth century BCE, in other words the probable time of the Trojan War. For those scholars who believed that Wilusa is the Hittite name for Troy, this provided additional data that the Trojan War could very well have been an historical event, rather than simply the stuff of myth and legend.
Not everyone was convinced, however, by Dörpfeld’s argument that Troy VIh was Homer’s Troy. Carl Blegen, an archaeologist at the University of Cincinnati, examined Dörpfeld’s results and concluded that an earthquake caused the destruction of Troy VIh, not warfare. He decided as he did because a number of walls were found off-kilter, with large stones thrown about, which he thought could have been caused only by Mother Nature. On the other hand, it looked to him as if the first phase of the next level, known as Troy VIIa, was a city that had been besieged and then destroyed by an army. So he reopened the excavations at Hissarlik in the 1930s in an attempt to see whether he was right.
Now there was even less left for him to dig, since Dörpfeld had excavated much of what Schliemann had left untouched. But Blegen found enough to convince himself that Troy VIIa had been destroyed by humans, in a protracted siege. And his evidence is fairly convincing, including arrowheads buried in the walls, bodies left lying in the streets, and other indications that at least one major battle had taken place.
He discovered that the large buildings and palaces of the previous city had been subdivided, so that several families could now live where only one had been previously. He also found that the storage capacity of the city had been increased tremendously, by burying very large jars up to their necks in the ground. To Blegen, all of this indicated a city that was under siege, just as Homer had written. And the timing was still consistent; this city had been destroyed about 1180 BCE or so, which was still within the timeframe suggested by the ancient Greeks.
Moreover, the material culture of the city—that is, the pottery and other artifacts—indicated to Blegen that there was continuity between Troy VIh and VIIa. That is, there was no evidence in Troy VIIa that a new group of people was living there; rather it appeared that the people of Troy VIh had renovated, reconstructed, and rebuilt their city after the earthquake as Troy VIIa. In fact, it was so similar that both Blegen and Dörpfeld, who was still alive, thought that what the archaeologists were calling the first phase of Troy VII was more likely to be the last phase of Troy VI—so Troy VIi, rather than Troy VIIa—but it was too late by that time to change the terminology. And thus Blegen was convinced that an earthquake destroyed Troy VIh, and the Mycenaean Greeks had destroyed Troy VIIa in the process of trying to get Helen back.
Blegen may well have been correct. But fifty years went by, a new generation of archaeologists emerged, and a new team decided to investigate the mound of Hissarlik all over again, beginning in 1988. This time it was an international team of archaeologists, led by two men, Manfred Korfmann from the University of Tübingen, investigating the Bronze Age remains, and Brian Rose from the University of Cincinnati, investigating the post–Bronze Age remains.
Apart from cleaning up and reexamining Schliemann’s Great Trench, probably the most important thing that Korfmann’s team did was to survey the agricultural fields around Hissarlik. They employed remote sensing devices to peer beneath the surface of the earth without having to excavate first. It took some experimentation to figure out which type of remote sensing worked best, but they eventually realized that a cesium magnetometer was what they needed in that type of soil.
Since human activity, including things like burning, can alter the magnetism of tiny iron particles in the soil, things like pits, ditches, and even walls can sometimes be detected even when buried, especially when burnt or partially burnt materials are present. Preliminary findings need to be interpreted carefully, however, as Korfmann’s team found out to their chagrin.
In 1993, more than a century after the legendary excavations at Troy by Heinrich Schliemann, Korfmann announced that their remote sensing images indicated the presence of a huge buried wall that ran around Hissarlik, at a distance of about 1300 feet from the citadel. This, they said, was probably the great wall of the city that had kept Agamemnon, Achilles, and the other Mycenaean Greeks out for ten years during the famous Trojan War immortalized by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
When they went to excavate the wall, though, it wasn’t there. In its place was a ditch, measuring up to six feet (two meters) deep in places. Over the centuries, the ditch had filled up with all sorts of junk, from broken pottery to stones to random bits of garbage. These had shown up on their remote sensing images as a solid mass running around the city. In the aftermath, the team argued that a ditch would have been as good as a wall in protecting the city, but not everyone agrees with that assessment.
One lesson that Korfmann and the rest of the archaeological world learned was to be wary of holding press conferences to announce remote-sensing findings until some excavating to confirm those presumed discoveries has occurred. Another was that, regardless of their dramatic misinterpretation, it was clear that remote sensing could be successfully used at the site, for Korfmann and his team soon realized that additional images indicated the existence of an enormous Lower City for Troy that lay beneath modern agricultural fields, which nobody had suspected was there.
It turns out that all the previous archaeologists, from Schliemann to Dörpfeld to Blegen, had simply been excavating the citadel—or upper part—of the city, where the king and his direct family and retinue would have lived. The remains that Korfmann’s team found increased the size of the city at least tenfold, showing that it covered at least fifty acres with a population of between four thousand and ten thousand inhabitants at the end of the Late Bronze Age, which established it as a city that would indeed have been worthy of a ten-yearlong siege, if Homer’s story has any truth to it. Korfmann began referring to the city in his scholarly publications as Troy/Wilusa—a nod to the Hittite records, which he believed were a reference to this city.
Other findings by Korfmann’s team seemed to confirm Blegen’s earlier work. For example, in both the citadel and the Lower City, they also found evidence for earthquake destruction in Troy VIh and human destruction—that is, warfare—in Troy VIIa. In one case, they found a house from Troy VIh that had been destroyed by the earthquake and then a house from Troy VIIa that had been built right on top of its ruins, only to be destroyed in war.
Among the evidence for fighting, Korfmann found more unburied bodies, including one of a young girl about age seventeen who was partially burned, as well as arrowheads of an Aegean (or Greek) type. There also was a quantity of what appear to be slingstones, which were gathered together in at least one pile, perhaps ready to be thrown at the attackers by someone inside the walls of the city.
Korfmann’s work also confirmed Blegen’s earlier findings in other ways. After the Troy VIIa city was destroyed in about 1180 BCE, the next one was occupied by what seem to be a completely new people. In this phase, which archaeologists call Troy VIIb, we see completely new types of pottery, new architecture, and other material culture, including an inscribed seal that has the first writing ever found at Troy.
These are all indications that the inhabitants of the previous city had been completely replaced by a new group. Therefore, it is possible to see the human destruction of Troy VIIa as being evidence of the stories of Homer about the Trojan War. In his story, though, Homer seems to have added in elements from Troy VI, so that he described the beautiful buildings and high walls of the earlier city but the destruction of the later city, thereby compressing the two cities into one, which was his prerogative as an epic poet.
It may even be that the Trojan Horse is a poetic metaphor for the earthquake that leveled Troy VIh, for the Greek god of earthquakes was Poseidon. Just as the goddess Athena was represented by an owl, so a horse represented Poseidon for the Greeks. It is conceivable, at least in the poetic imagination, that “earthquake = Poseidon = the Trojan Horse.” At least that’s what a German scholar named Fritz Schachermeyer suggested back in the 1950s.
As the Hissarlik digs continued, the post–Bronze Age team, led by Brian Rose of the University of Cincinnati, also found a lot of new material, including a larger-than-life statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian in 1993 and a large marble head of Augustus in 1997. The later Hellenistic Greeks and then the Romans had built upon the citadel and established a nicely gridded city down below, which Korfman had found in addition to the Bronze Age remains in this area.
These later inhabitants were also convinced that this was the site of ancient Troy and, in fact, they gave it the name “New Troy” in both Greek and Latin. Even Alexander the Great came to visit and pay his respects, as did Julius Caesar and others over the centuries. It was initial discoveries from these later periods that first persuaded Frank Calvert, and then Heinrich Schliemann, that they were digging in the right place.
A temple to Athena, and then one to Jupiter, also were later built on top of the mound itself. That explains why Priam’s Troy was far closer to the top of the surface today than Schliemann expected it to be. The builders in both the Hellenistic and the Roman periods had shaved off the top of the mound as it stood in their time. This gave them level ground on which to build the temples, theaters, and other structures that went with their cities, now numbered Troy VIII and IX, which were the last to be built at the site.
Manfred Korfmann died suddenly in 2005, but the international excavations continue under new directors. Interest in digging and doing remote sensing in and around the site continues, so perhaps Hissarlik has even more secrets to reveal about the ancient town that inspired one of the greatest epics ever written.
