But of course, Homer was a poet and not a historian. It remains immensely difficult to link the Iliad specifically to the archaeology of Troy. Understanding of the site, its development over time and its place in the ancient world continues to grow. From an archaeological perspective, there is a rich history to be uncovered that stands quite apart from the myth of the Trojan War and is important in its own right.
Yet the myth and the site remain inextricably linked. Buy the book accompanying the exhibition here. Map Data. Terms of Use. Report a map error. Exhibitions and events The search for the lost city of Troy The myth of the Trojan War has captivated people for thousands of years and has led pilgrims, explorers and archaeologists to search for the location where the famed conflict took place.
But did the city really exist? In anticipation of our major autumn exhibition, curators Lesley Fitton and Alexandra Villing explore the reality behind the myth. Book tickets. Aerial view of the site of Troy It is this record of a people and their city that is preserved in archaeology. In , Heinrich Schliemann dug a huge trench right through the centre of the mound of Troy.
This showed that the mound was made up of the layers of successive settlements. Troy begins The original village of Troy Troy I was small, but it flourished and grew. The city flourishes Troy went from strength to strength. In its Late Bronze Age heyday, the site was impressive, as this imagined reconstruction shows.
Troy and Ilion Troy fell into ruin at the end of the Bronze Age, around BC, as did all the centres of power of the Mediterranean world, for reasons that are not completely understood. Even without his diaries and accounts, few would say Schliemann was not a man possessed of strong imagination—pioneers usually are—the issue is, did the fantasies well-evidenced in his writings pervade his scientific work as well as his personal life?
Unfortunately, there is some evidence it did. For instance, it has been suggested more than once that "Priam's Treasure" seems to be a collection of artifacts belonging to different periods, as we noted above, leading many to suspect that Schliemann gathered them from various graves and sites in and around Troy and later concocted a more newsworthy story of their discovery. His tale, replete with hidden treasure, female guile and bumbling Turkish guards, makes for a fairly theatrical script, in fact, almost the same plot as Mozart's opera The Abduction from the Seraglio.
But it's hard to assess this fairly now, because later in life Schliemann donated "Priam's Treasure" to the Berlin Museum where it stayed until The assumption was it had fallen into the hands of black-market art dealers and either was in a private collection somewhere—if so, it couldn't be put on public display without being confiscated by international authorities—or had been melted down because it couldn't be resold as such.
In any case, without the treasure itself, there was no way to analyze and date it conclusively. But in , all that changed. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russian authorities acknowledged that "Priam's Treasure" had for fifty years been housed in their land—some of it was in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and some in the Hermitage in St.
Now the hostage of several claims originating in at least three different countries Germany, Russia and Turkey , the Trojan hoard is back in the public eye.
Hopefully, answers about its nature and origin will one day be forthcoming. But other controversies continue to swirl around Schliemann and his legacy to archaeology. The most sensational of these surrounds the so-called "Mask of Agamemnon.
It is far and away the most presentable of the masks Schliemann discovered in Mycenae, lacking the bulging eyes and puffed cheeks that make several of the others look by modern standards ridiculous. In fact, the "Mask of Agamemnon" is particularly modern in its appearance, including a handle-bar moustache, something highly unusual in ancient art.
More than one art historian has noted it looks remarkably like Schliemann himself, or perhaps Schliemann's idol, King Ludwig of Bavaria. To make matters even more complicated, those analyzing Schliemann's diaries and records have found a note from him requesting that a friend in Paris find him a goldsmith who would work without putting his seal on the metal, an illegal activity. Schliemann himself visited France soon thereafter. This trip immediately preceded the discovery of the mask, and the question has naturally arisen: "Did Schliemann go to Paris to have this mask forged for the very reason that he was planning to say to the world 'I have looked on the face of Agamemnon,' but had not yet found a death-mask warranting such a pronouncement," in other words, a discovery worthy of the headline.
After all, he didn't want anyone to add, on the heels of such a momentous declaration, "Yes, and he looks like a rather large bug. Perhaps it's not him but his brother Arthro-memnon? It only complicates the issue further that Schliemann was himself directing the workers at Mycenae when they discovered this mask soon after he had returned from Paris.
But if he had it forged, how did Schliemann sneak it into the site past the Greek guards who were watching his every move to prevent him from stealing artifacts from Greece as he had from Turkey? Perhaps they weren't inspecting his bags when he came into the site, only when he left. This is, of course, speculation based on circumstantial evidence without clear or convincing proof.
And many possibilities besides outright forgery exist, for example, that the "Mask of Agamemnon" is genuine but Schliemann "improved" it by making it look more stylish for the day, adding or accentuating the moustache in particular.
But if it was, in fact, counterfeited in any way, it would be one of the greatest con-jobs in history and would leave many a modern scholar red-faced at having been so completely taken in.
Needless to say, the Greek government hasn't as yet allowed the sorts of tests to be done on the mask that could prove or refute its antiquity. Their official reason is that great damage could result to the mask in the testing process—the truth is greater damage could result to the Greek tourist industry if this national treasure were shown to be counterfeit—so the mystery remains a mystery, and Schliemann, too, is as controversial today as he ever was.
One thing is for certain: Schliemann would love all the press coverage he is still getting. In the end, the lesson here has less to do with archaeology than human nature and history in general. Schliemann, a master of ancient languages, was also a master of modern media, particularly newspapers and the popular press which he played as well as any Hollywood agent ever has. It's also important to bear in mind the world before whom his drama unfolded.
It was an age in which people believed Charles Darwin was telling them they were related to monkeys, whereas Schliemann pitched his discoveries as offering "scientific" validation of a romantic, mythological past, if not biblical, a history much more palatable to them than some sort of simian ancestry.
Thus, the same populace who reveled in lush, pseudo-historical operas like Verdi's Aida , Bellini's Norma and Wagner's Ring Cycle crowded eagerly around the archaeologist's tent for a glimpse of historical Homer. Nor did its merchant promoter fail to keep himself in the public eye but looked eagerily into the "face of Agamemnon" and caught an image that was as much his own as any of his cultural ancestors'. To a world fractured along ideological lines, this well-crafted reflection presented more than just a past which people at the time could agree was worth sharing but common ground where science and myth collaborated, and as such it did a great deal of good for its day.
For Agamemnon's day—if there ever was an Agamemnon's day—the benefits are less clear. So, despite inconsistencies in the data and the bourgeois showmanship of its leading man, the very things this same age made such a show of deploring in Herodotus, Schliemann and his dream of Troy overwhelmed, for the most part, his contemporaries' educated skepticism and has continued to live in the hearts of their scholarly descendants.
The entrepreneur and romantic served evidence—and to many, proof—that Western Civilization rests on a glorious, civilized, Homeric foundation, that we are the heirs of legend. If on the other side of the argument many doubt that today, it's probably all for the best. Still, to Schliemann's sense of history, no matter what amount is invented, we owe much of modern archaeology, which is without doubt the single most consequential contribution of our day to the understanding of what-really-happened-in-the-past.
The dirty data covered by time and uncovered by archaeology are the greatest historical story of our age. In the last section we looked at Troy in light of literary history. Here we focus on Troy again but this time as it relates to archaeology.
While digs at ancient sites have in general revealed much important information about what-really-happened-in-the-past, archaeology is still a mixture of science and art, with a hefty helping of media relations thrown in.
Its usefulness to historians in particular depends on the sensible assessment of the data recovered. Schliemann married the year-old Sophia in Greece in Here, she's seen wearing a head dress from the cache of gold known as Priam's Treasure, which Schliemann excavated from the Troy site in and smuggled back into Germany.
Schliemann also hoped to uncover additional sites from early Greek history, other places featured in Homer's "Iliad. There, too, he made a sensational discovery. During his excavations in Mycenae, Schliemann discovered a grave with two skeletons.
Obsessed with his idea to uncover traces of the Trojan War, he dubbed one of the death masks "Mask of Agamemnon. Despite being an archeological pioneer, Schliemann was ridiculed by his German compatriots. In initial excavations, he destroyed important findings at the Troy site. Later, he began to examine the site more closely with meticulously planned trenches, discovering ceramics which he used as "index fossils. Heinrich Schliemann was a complex character, part dreamer and part genius in disguise.
Many of his contemporaries regarded him as somewhat of a fantasist, as he traveled around in Turkey equipped with little but a beat-up edition of Homer's Iliad. Schliemann was determined to discover the site of ancient Troy — and so he is believed by many to have done.
For the longest time, the German public used to make light of Schliemann's achievements. His biggest rival, the top archaeological expert Ernst Curtius, for one, repeatedly mocked him in a bid to polish his own professional profile. Schliemann was, however, much more appreciated in Britain, where the German researcher has always been celebrated as the man who discovered the location of a place that up to that point had been shrouded in mystery.
In the late 19th century, Schliemann went on to invent research methods that are still in use today. His work helped shape the face of archaeology unlike any other. From his early childhood, the world of antiquity always fascinated Schliemann. Yet his career path had initially pointed him in a different direction. Raised alongside eight other siblings in a pastor's family in the eastern part of the German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Schliemann started out as a tradesman, as his family could not afford to send him to higher education.
He ended up in Amsterdam, where within one year, he learned to speak not only Dutch but also Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, to be complemented by Russian later on. His extraordinary gift for foreign languages paved the way for a different career prospect: archaeology.
In , German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered spectacular golden masks in a grave. One of them became known as the "Mask of Agamemnon," even though later research determined that the masks were some years older than the king.
The masks are highlights of the exhibition "Mycenaean Greece: The legendary world of Agamemnon. The Tholos Tombs of Routsi were fortunately untouched by grave robbers. This piece, known as the "Crown of Routsi" dates back to the 15th - 16th century BC and still puzzles experts: "Its scientific interpretation has just begun; some believe it's a priest's crown, others rather think it's a precious helmet," said the exhibition's co-curator Bernhard Steinmann.
The center of power of a Mycenaean palace is a great hall known as the megaron, along with the throne room. The ruler, or wanax, held political and religious ceremonies there. Visitors of the exhibition in Karlsruhe can walk through impressive replicas of these palaces displaying elaborately decorated vases, amphorae, frescoes, swords as well as stone and gold jewelry from that era.
Mycenaean artists were renowned for their intricate gold art. This button from the 16th century BC was found in in the Mycenaean shaft graves excavated by Heinrich Schliemann. It is made of bone that was then covered with gold foil. The spiral ornamentation is typical of the art of the early Mycenaean period. With a burning city behind, he is depicted carrying his elderly father and clutching the hand of his son as they flee to Italy, where he will found a new Troy, the city now known as Rome.
Meanwhile, Paris is wounded by a poisoned arrow to which only the nymph Oenone has an antidote. But it was she that Paris had abandoned for Helen, and despite his pleading, she refuses and he dies. As for Helen herself, when Menelaus raises his sword to deal the killer blow to his unfaithful wife, she opens her dress and reveals her body.
Captivated once again, Menelaus spares her. The tale of Troy teems with memorable characters, but perhaps its most fascinating figure is the one that never speaks—the wooden horse. This has been frequently reimagined in literature, poetry, art, and cinema. Theories about the wooden horse abound. One proposes that it was a poetic representation of the wooden ships on which the Greeks arrived that evolved into a tangible aspect of the myth. Another suggests that a Trojan betrayed the city, sketching a horse on a secret gate as a sign to the Greeks.
Recent scholars have offered more pragmatic theories, including that the wooden horse was actually a siege engine. The device described was a portable wooden shelter around 26 feet in length and six feet wide from which hung a foot-long pointed stake. Beneath the protective shelter besieging warriors would repeatedly slam the stake against the wall of the city to pry open a gap between the stones and weaken the structure.
Troy I is founded near the Dardanelles Strait. This first city seems to have been destroyed by fire. It had 6, inhabitants. Two more will succeed it in Hisarlik. Homer composes The Iliad and The Odyssey. In they inspire Heinrich Schliemann to hunt for the real Troy.
Thus the Trojan Horse can be rationalized as a siege weapon of equine appearance. But even if this is as satisfactory an explanation as we are ever likely to get, many questions remain: Who were the men attacking Troy? And who were the Trojans who fought so desperately, and so hopelessly, to save it from the flames? All rights reserved. History Magazine. How archaeologists found the lost city of Troy This doomed city at the heart of the Trojan War was lost for thousands of years until a team of German archaeologists uncovered the ancient site.
This magnificent 16th-century saddle shows the Trojans bringing the wooden horse into their city, unaware of the Greek enemies hidden inside. Ambrosiana Gallery, Milan. Digging up the past. Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited. Over the course of several centuries, Troy was repeatedly destroyed, but a new city would rise up on the ruins of the last. People lived there until Roman times. The ruins can still be seen today, about miles to the southwest of Istanbul.
The city's eastern gate surrounded by the walls of Troy VI B. The Many Layers of Troy. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London.
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