Heinrich Schliemann

Heinrich Schliemann was a German businessman who became a major figure in archaeology. He believed that the places described in Homer’s epics were real and dug at Hisarlık, now thought to be ancient Troy, as well as at the Mycenaean sites of Mycenae and Tiryns. His excavations supported the idea that Homer’s *Iliad* was based on actual events. However, his method of digging through nine layers of remains has been condemned for destroying important artifacts, including the layer linked to the Troy of Homer.

Schliemann was born on 6 January 1822 in Neubukow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, then part of the German Confederation. His parents were Luise Therese Sophie Schliemann and Ernst Schliemann, a Lutheran minister. He was the fifth of nine children. The family moved to Ankershagen in 1823, and their second home there now houses the Heinrich Schliemann Museum. His father was a poor pastor. When Heinrich was nine, his mother died, and his father sent him to live with his uncle Friedrich, also a pastor. At age eleven, his father paid for him to attend the Gymnasium in Neustrelitz, but he left after three months. His father had sparked his interest in history by teaching him the *Iliad* and *Odyssey* and giving him a copy of Ludwig Jerrer’s *Illustrated History of the World* for Christmas in 1829. Schliemann later claimed that at age seven he declared he would one day excavate Troy.

After his father was accused of embezzling church funds, Heinrich transferred to the Realschule and took his exams in 1836. The family’s poverty prevented him from attending university, and a divide often existed between him and professional scholars in his archaeological work. At fourteen, he became an apprentice at Herr Holtz’s grocery in Fürstenberg. He later said his passion for Homer began when he heard a drunken miller reciting Homeric verses there. He worked for five years until a heavy barrel injured his chest and he coughed up blood. In 1841, he moved to Hamburg and became a cabin boy on the brig *Dorothea*, bound for Venezuela. After twelve days at sea, the ship wrecked in a gale, and survivors washed ashore in the Netherlands. He then worked as a messenger, office attendant, and bookkeeper in Amsterdam.

On 1 March 1844, at age twenty-two, Schliemann joined the import/export firm B. H. Schröder & Co. In 1846, the firm sent him as a General Agent to St. Petersburg. Over time, he represented several companies. He learned Russian and Greek using a method he employed his whole life, claiming it took him six weeks to learn a language. He wrote his diary in the language of whatever country he was in. By the end of his life, he could speak English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Latin, and Arabic, in addition to his native German. His language skills were key to his business career.

In 1850, he learned that his brother Ludwig had died wealthy from speculating in the California gold fields. 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 six months. When a local Rothschild agent complained about short-weight shipments, he left California, pretending to be ill. While there, California became the 31st state in September 1850, and Schliemann acquired U.S. citizenship. He told this story in his 1881 autobiography, though he was actually in St. Petersburg that day and only obtained American citizenship in 1869. According to his memoirs, he dined with President Millard Fillmore in Washington, D.C., before arriving in California, but W. Calder III says he did not attend and simply read about a similar event in the papers. He also published what he claimed was an eyewitness account of the San Francisco Fire of 1851, saying it was in June when it actually occurred in May; he was in Sacramento at the time and used a report from the *Sacramento Daily Journal*.

On 7 April 1852, he sold his business and returned to Russia. There he tried to live as a gentleman, which led him to meet Ekaterina Petrovna Lyschin, the niece of a wealthy friend. They married on 12 October 1852. He then made a good profit trading indigo dye. By 1858, at age thirty-six, he was wealthy enough to retire. In his memoirs, he said he wished to dedicate himself to finding ancient Troy.

Schliemann was an amateur archaeologist, obsessed with Homer’s stories and ancient Mediterranean civilizations. He devoted the second half of his life to uncovering the physical remains of the cities in Homer’s epic tales. Many call him the “father of pre-Hellenistic archaeology.” In 1868, he 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 argued that Hissarlik was Troy. He submitted this book as a dissertation to the university.