Hello! Χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History Episode 2, Going for the Bronze: Heinrich Schliemann and the Rediscovery of Bronze Age Greece. I’m Scott Emmons. 

If you open any general book on Greek history, chances are it’ll start with a quick overview of the earliest human populations in Greece, there will be one or two paragraphs on the Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages, and then things will really get cooking when you get to the Late Bronze Age, known as the Mycenean period, with all its treasures and great palaces. Well, I’m going to get to all of that in the next episode, but I’m taking a slightly different approach. Because once in a great while, the story of a discovery is as fascinating as the thing discovered. So I’m devoting this episode to a couple of archaeological breakthroughs in the 19th century that revolutionized the way the world thought about early Greek history.

When I started planning this podcast, I realized pretty quickly that I’d often be talking about things that would need illustrations. That’s going to be especially true for these early episodes, because they deal with Greek prehistory — a long stretch of time when there are no historical writings to tell us what was going on, so we have to rely entirely on archaeology. Physical remains. Well, I can tell you about an ancient building or a vase painting, but even if I could describe it perfectly, it would never take the place of a picture. So I’ve set up a Substack that I’m going to use mainly to post photos of some things I talk about here. There will be a post for each episode, and you can find it at epicgreekhistory.substack.com.

 So, this is where I might say, “Let’s begin at the beginning” — but where’s that? I was recently talking with a friend about this podcast, and he asked me, “When does Greek history start?” Now, if he’d asked that question a couple of hundred years ago, there would have been a pretty straightforward answer. What we can legitimately call Greek history starts in 776 BCE with the first Olympic games. Before that, we don’t have any reliable historical information, only myths and legends — plus whatever we can deduce from archaeological remains. That point of view makes a good deal of sense when you consider that we get most of our historical information from ancient writings, and alphabetic writing didn’t even exist in Greece until the 8th century BCE. Actual history writing didn’t evolve until about three centuries later, but from the 8th century on, we at least have literary works that can tell us something about the world they came from. 

 Now, of course, 19th-century scholars had a variety of opinions, and they argued with each other just like professors today. But the most common view was that even though early Greek legends were worth knowing about and might contain a kernel of truth, they couldn’t be trusted to provide any solid historical facts. A classic example is the massive, 12-volume History of Greece by George Grote. In Volume One, he spends hundreds of pages retelling Greek legends in great detail. So clearly, Grote thought the legendary stuff was worth including, but he says, and I quote: “I begin the real history of Greece with the first recorded Olympiad, or 776 B.C .”

 So that was the prevailing 19th-century view of Greek legends, including the most famous of all — the story of the Trojan War, as told in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Quite a few scholars would have said there never was such a place as Troy, and anyone would be a fool to waste time looking for it. But what about someone who wasn’t in the inner circle of classical scholars? Someone who fell under the spell of the Homeric epics and thought, “This has to be a true story!” Well, one such person was an eccentric German businessman and amateur scholar by the name of Heinrich Schliemann, and he was about to prove the skeptics wrong.

 Schliemann was one of those peculiar characters with a combination of genius, crackpot ideas, and single-mindedness that can sometimes lead to major discoveries. He came from a poor family and seems not to have had the greatest childhood. His father was a pastor, and by all accounts a really bad one. So his family was always hard up for money, and he didn’t have the means to get a university education. But he had a lot of brains and a lot of ambition, and from his humble beginnings he managed to build a brilliant career, first as a businessman and then as an archaeologist. Before I go deeper into his history, I should mention that I’m relying heavily on a biography called Schliemann of Troy by David A. Traill. He quotes a lot from Schliemann’s published writings as well as his private diaries. Schliemann wrote in several different languages, so when I quote him, I’m using the translations in Traill’s book.

 So, how did this poor, small-town boy come by a lifelong obsession with Homeric Greece? Schliemann tells a couple of stories about it in his published works. At one point he says his father told him tales from the Iliadand the Odyssey when he was little, and that at the age of 7 he declared that some day he would excavate the city of Troy. In another passage he tells us that when he was 14 years old, he was working as an apprentice in a grocery shop, and one night a drunken miller staggered in and started reciting lines from Homer in the original Greek. Young Schliemann was absolutely transfixed. In his own words, quote:

 Although I did not understand a syllable, the melodious sound of the words made a deep impression on me, and I wept bitter tears over my unhappy fate. Three times over did I get him to repeat to me those divine verses, rewarding his trouble with three glasses of whiskey, which I bought with the few pence that made up my whole fortune. From that moment I never ceased to pray God that by His grace I might yet have the happiness of learning Greek. Unquote

 Yeah, they laid it on pretty thick in the 1800s.

 Well, he didn’t have the happiness of learning Greek right away, but he did have an exceptional gift for languages. He developed his own method of language study and claimed that he could master any language in only six weeks. Whether you believe that or not, his linguistic talent was a major asset as he made his way in the world. His Russian was good enough to get him a job as an agent for a trading firm in St. Petersburg. Later we find him in California, where he opened a bank during the gold rush. So he was already doing well, but his really big break came when the Crimean War broke out in 1853. He invested heavily in raw materials for weaponry — things like saltpeter, lead, and sulfur — that he could sell to the Russian government. So by his early forties, he’d done what most of us only dream of. He'd made his money and could spend the rest of his life following his passion.

 A part of that passion was world travel, and he now had the means to plan his own Grand Tour of Europe. Now, the Grand Tour was a time-honored rite of passage for young people, especially young men, of the European upper class. It was a chance to get firsthand experience of classical and Renaissance art and architecture, and also to make connections with other high society types. I imagine Schliemann must have felt some envy for those upper crust dilettantes who could take it for granted that they’d get to visit all of Europe’s great monuments and museums. Well, now he had his chance. And his diaries show that he was the most diligent tourist you could imagine. If there was a church or a museum of any importance, he was going to check it out. Naturally, he spent some time in Rome and Pompeii, where he first got to see archaeological work in progress. And that may have given him more of an itch do some digging of his own.

 Well, as you might expect, one high point of his European tour was the Greek island of Ithaca, because that was the legendary home of the hero Odysseus. Schliemann explored it thoroughly, in pretty much the way any 19th-century tourist would. The standard travel guides, the Rick Steve’s of the time, were a series of books called Handbooks for Travellers by John Murray. So with Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Greece in hand,he visited all the locations that were thought to have been important in Odysseus’s life. One of those was Mount Aetos, which the guidebook identified as the site of the hero’s palace. Schliemann visited, saw some ruined walls, and concluded that, yes, this must be the spot. And here we have an entry in his diary that marks a turning point in his career. Quote: 

 Concerning the interior arrangement of this palace, it is impossible to form any idea, but I will bring a spade with me to excavate. Unquote

 Now, with that statement, we’ve clearly entered into Indiana Jones territory. We’re not going to worry about applying for a permit or dealing with any officials, we’re just going to grab a pick and shovel and start digging. Just try that today and see how fast the Greek archaeological service comes down on you. I wouldn’t recommend it. But in Schliemann’s time, there was a lot of that going on, not just in the name of archaeology, but for straight-up treasure hunting. Plenty of locals were digging up pots, coins, whatever ancient artifacts they could find, to sell to antiquities dealers or directly to tourists. Schliemann himself bought quite a few items that way. 

 In any case, he came back to Mount Aetos with not only a spade, but a hired workman, and soon they dug up a few pots containing cremated human remains. His description of this dig in his diary is enough to make any archaeologist tear their hair out. Quote:

 After digging a little, the workman smashed a clay vessel, and then a second and a third. Because of this, we dug with great care and succeeded in getting five or six vessels out whole, with only their handles broken. Unfortunately, we were too hasty and because of this we damaged many vessels. If we had loosened or cut the soil with a knife, we would perhaps have saved almost all the vessels. Unquote.

 Well, he continued his dig and uncovered some remains of a small building. Not exactly the magnificent palace of the great Homeric king. But that doesn’t seem to have dampened his enthusiasm. In his published account of his excavation, he concludes, quote: “It is very possible that I have in my five little vases the bodies of Ulysses and Penelope or their offspring.” Ulysses being the Latin name for Odysseus. It’s yet another illustration of how real the Homeric heroes were in Schliemann’s mind. 

 I think this is a good place for a break. Epic Greek History is ad-free, but we can all use a chance to pause if we need to, grab a cup of coffee, or just relax our brains after focusing on one topic for a while. So instead of ads, I’m going to try dropping a couple of short segments into each episode. The first one I’m going to call “A Moment of Greek,” and it’ll just be a nugget of information about a word or some other aspect of the ancient Greek language. So, here it is...

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 I’ve been talking a lot about epics in this episode, and I’ve even put “epic” in the title of the podcast. The word “epic” comes from the Greek “epos,” which in its basic sense just means “word.” But the word “word” often takes on bigger meanings — like when we say, “I give you my word.” Or even “the word of God.” So “epos,” especially in the plural “epea,” evolved to mean poetry, and more specifically epic poetry, with narratives about great deeds of heroes and gods. Come to think of it, there’s a scene in the Iliad where the warriors are holding athletic contests, and the hero Aias, while running a foot race with Odysseus, slips on a pile of cow dung. Which may be the first instance in western literature of an “epic fail.” And that’s your moment of Greek!

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 We were talking about Schliemann’s travels in Greece. And of course, they eventually took him to Athens, where he made connections with classical scholars and archaeologists — including a few who shared his belief in a literal Troy. That seems to have given him the push he needed, and soon he was off to search for the legendary city. Now, the Iliad was very clear about the general location of Troy. It was across the Aegean Sea from Greece, in the northwest part of what’s now Turkey, close to the straits of the Dardanelles. But the specific location within that region was another question. So where was he going to look?

 For those who believed in Troy, the top contender was a village called — and I’ll give this my best shot — Pınarbaşı (puh-NAR-bah-shuh). I’m afraid I don’t speak Turkish, so I apologize for all the Turkish names I’m going to butcher along the way. Anyway, there were a few clues in the Iliad that seemed to point in the direction of Pınarbaşı. Spoiler alert — This turned out to be a bust. But I’m including it because it’s such a great example of how Schliemann based his conclusions on his literal belief in the Homeric epics. Near the end of the Iliad, Homer says Achilles chased the Trojan hero Hector three times around the city walls. Well, Schliemann took a walk around the site, and at one point there was a slope that was so steep, he had to get down on his hands and knees and crawl his way down. There was no way that Achilles and Hector could have run up or down that slope the way Homer described, and that was enough to convince him that this couldn’t be the site of Troy. Case closed.

 Well, the watershed moment for Schliemann came when he connected with another amateur archaeologist by the name of Frank Calvert. The Calverts were an influential British family that often served as consular officials in that part of Turkey. But Frank wasn’t so much interested in the diplomatic work as he was in history and archaeology. He devoted most of his time to becoming an expert on the ancient Troad. So, if you were a traveler in that part of the world and wanted to learn about the local history and legends, Frank Calvert was the guy to see.

 Like Schliemann, Calvert was a true believer in the Trojan War. And he was convinced that ancient Troy was buried under a site called Hisarlik. He’d even done some digging on a plot of land he owned there, and he’d turned up some promising pottery and masonry, but he hadn’t been able to get funding for a full-scale dig. Bear in mind that digging in search of Troy would have struck most experts as a ridiculous idea, so applying for a grant from, say, the British Museum would be a long shot at best. Well, it’s not quite clear whether Schliemann knew about this site before he met Calvert, but after they’d talked it over, he was all in on digging at Hisarlik. For Calvert, this was the answer to his prayers. Here was this rich European ready to throw his own money into the search for Troy.

 Now, even with Schliemann’s money and Calvert’s connections, they had to get through lot of red tape to get permits from the Turkish authorities. But that didn’t keep Schliemann from starting a dig on his own, even on private land. His own accounts of these excavations reveal a lot about his arrogance and contempt for the locals. He says, quote, “Knowing in advance that the two Turkish owners would refuse to give me permission, I did not ask them.” Unquote. And when they showed up to stop him, he says he “crushed them with insults.” None of that could have made negotiations with the authorities easier. But he still had a lot of money and connections, and after pulling the right strings, he eventually got the permit he needed for a full-scale excavation. So between 1871 and 73, he went after Hisarlik with a full force of up to a hundred workers.

 But he didn’t strike Trojan gold right away. In theory, at an archaeological site, you dig down through a series of layers. Newer stuff gets built on top of older stuff, so the deeper you dig, the farther back in time you go. But it’s not always that simple, as I can say from my own personal experience. I’ve only been involved in one archaeological excavation in my life. It was a two-week training dig in ancient Corinth, and each student was put in charge of a trench. In the first few days, my fellow students were turning up Roman-era pottery, coins, inscriptions, bits of sculpture, parts of buildings, all the stuff we were looking for. In my trench, someone in the period of Turkish rule had dug a huge trash pit. So instead of ancient artifacts, I spent two weeks digging up bits and pieces of Turkish-era pottery. Which was shiny and colorful, but it was nothing like what we were after. 

 So that’s the kind of thing that can happen, and Hisarlik turned out to be trickier than Schliemann expected. What he didn’t know was that in the Greco-Roman era, several earlier layers had been shaved off from the top of the hill. So the finds were disappointing at first, and for a while he thought maybe his only accomplishment would be to establish that Hisarlik was not the site of Troy. But he kept digging, and at the lowest levels he started finding some copper and bronze tools and weapons, things that made him think maybe he’d found Bronze Age Troy after all. After a while, some gold jewelry started to turn up. When one of his trenches ran up against a wall that sat on bedrock, he concluded It must be Great Tower of Ilion that Homer mentions as part of the acropolis. So now he was confident that he was in Homeric Troy. And soon, when he discovered a building complex, he declared it to be the palace of King Priam.

 Then, on May 31st, 1873, just one day before excavations were scheduled to end, he was digging near the wall of the citadel, and he discovered the most sensational find yet — a hoard of precious objects including silver and gold vases and drinking vessels, two gold diadems, thousands of gold rings, a copper shield and weapons, and a great many other items. Schliemann being Schliemann, he immediately dubbed this collection “Priam’s Treasure.” And in one of his classic Indiana Jones moments, he gives us an account of the discovery. He says he caught a glimpse of gold and then sent the workers off on a lunch break so they wouldn’t be tempted to pilfer anything. Quote:

 While the men were eating and resting, I cut out the treasure with a large knife, which was impossible to do without the very greatest exertion and the most fearful risk of my life, for the great fortification-wall, beneath which I had to dig, threatened every moment to fall down upon me. But the sight of so many objects, every one of which is of inestimable value to archaeology, made me foolhardy, and I never thought of any danger. It would, however, have been impossible for me to have removed the treasure without the help of my dear wife, who stood by me ready to pack the things which I cut out in her shawl and to carry them away. Unquote.

 Now, if you think Schliemann might be embellishing here, you’re right. In fact, he admitted later that his wife Sophia wasn’t on site when he discovered the treasure. But he was never shy about playing to the media, and there’s a famous photo of Sophia wearing the gold diadems and other jewelry, which Schliemann of course had identified as “the Jewels of Helen.”

It’s only natural that Schliemann would assume all these riches came from Homer’s Troy. In fact, they were too early by over a thousand years. A real understanding of Troy’s chronology had to wait for studies by later archaeologists. Those studies identified nine successive cities and a lot of subdivisions within those. Schliemann’s big discoveries were from what’s now known as Troy II, dating roughly 2500 to 2300 BCE. Now, in classical times, the most widely accepted date for the fall of Troy was 1184 BCE, which accords pretty well with what we know was going on in the Greek world at the time. If the stories of the Trojan War are really based on one historical event — and that’s a very big “if” — the level now known as Troy VIIa would best fit that time frame. 

 Well, chronology aside, Schliemann’s discoveries made a huge splash, both in scholarly circles and in the general public. Of course, he hadn’t proved anything about the stories from the Homeric epics, but he had shown that there was a wealthy, complex city at Hisarlik centuries before the classical Greek and Roman periods. More scholars were coming around to the view that Troy had really existed, and that this was where it had stood. Today, Hisarlik is widely accepted as the site of Troy, although there are still quite a few doubters. I’ll go into more detail about the evidence in a later episode on the Trojan War. But even if it is Troy, there’s still the question of what exactly that means. The way I look at it, the question is not so much “Is this Troy?” but “In what sense is it Troy?”

 And that brings us to our second break. When we pick up again, we’ll follow Schliemann back to Greece, where he makes his next game-changing discovery. Meanwhile, here’s a short segment I’m just calling “Random Facts.”…

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 A weird quirk of history is that the Greeks never called themselves “Greeks.” Not in ancient times and not today. In the classical era they called themselves “Hellenes,” or “Hellenes” in its anglicized form. We get the word “Greek” from the Romans, who called them “Graeci.” Nobody knows exactly how the Romans came to use that name, but the most likely theory is that a group of Hellenes who called themselves “Graikoi” took part in one or more of the Greek settlements in southern Italy, and after the Romans came into contact with them, they used “Graeci” to refer to all the Hellenic people. So I guess this podcast is really about Hellenic history, but hey — it’s Greek to me.   

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 When we left Schliemann, he’d just rocked the scholarly world with his discovery of Troy in northwestern Turkey. In 1876, he continued making waves with his excavation at the Greek site of Mycenae, which according to legend was the kingdom of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek expedition to Troy. In most accounts, Schliemann gets all the glory, but it should be pointed out that he didn’t work alone. We’ve already seen that he could play fast and loose with the rules, and the Greek authorities were concerned about that. So they granted him a permit to dig at Mycenae on the condition that he’d be under the supervision of a Greek archaeologist by the name of Panagiotis Stamatakis. As you can imagine, there was often quite a bit of friction between them. In any case, with Stamatakis doing his best to keep an eye on him, Schliemann made spectacular discoveries at Mycenae.

 Now, the situation here was a little different from Troy, because there was no need to search for the site. The location had been known ever since ancient times. In fact, parts of Bronze Age Mycenae were still above ground in the 19th century. At least the famous Lion Gate leading into the citadel was visible. A Greek geographer by the name of Pausanias in the 2nd century CE gave a detailed description of his observations at Mycenae, and Schliemann used that account to guide his own excavation. 

 In his description of Mycenae, Pausanias mentions a spot near the Lion Gate where Agamemnon is supposed to have been buried with some of his followers. Schliemann followed Pausanias’s account and soon discovered the area that archaeologists call Grave Circle A, which contained six shaft graves. These are just what they sound like, deep shafts dug into the ground with human remains at the bottom. And not just the bodies of the dead, but grave goods buried with them. The men were buried with full sets of weapons, including some swords with inlays showing scenes of fighting and hunting. The women were often buried with gold jewelry. There were gold and silver cups, gold rings, and most strikingly, in a couple of the shaft graves, the faces of the men were covered with gold death masks. 

 Well, you can guess how Schliemann interpreted these finds. What could they be but the graves of Homeric heroes? There’s a popular legend that after discovering the death masks he fired off a telegram to the King of Greece proclaiming, “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon!” The real story — at least the verifiable story — isn’t quite so dramatic. In a telegram to a Greek newspaper he said that one of the ancient corpses, quote: “very much resembles the image which my imagination formed long ago of wide-ruling Agamemnon.” Unquote. If you visit the National Archaeological Museum in Athens today, one of the first objects you’ll see is the so-called “Death Mask of Agamemnon.” And whether you believe anything in Homer or not, it really is an amazing experience to come face to face with this king or nobleman from over three millennia ago.

 Well, just as with Priam’s Treasure, later archaeological study showed that Schliemann’s chronology was off by centuries. The shaft graves date from the 16th century BCE, about three to four hundred years before the traditional time of Agamemnon. Here again, Schliemann’s big achievement was not proving that Homer was history, but discovering that there had been a rich, vibrant Bronze Age city of Mycenae that no one had known about. The Late Bronze Age in Greece is known as the Mycenaean period, which may be a little misleading. It’s not as if Mycenae dominated all of Greece. But because it’s where the Greek Bronze Age civilization was discovered and because of its leading role in the Trojan War legend, Mycenae has given its name to that whole era.

 So, there’s no question that Schliemann’s work has been enormously consequential for Greek Bronze Age archaeology. But we can’t leave Schliemann without confronting one uncomfortable fact. He was kind of a sketchy character. When I mentioned David Traill’s book at the beginning of this episode, I held back the subtitle. The complete title is Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit. We’ve seen that Schliemann didn’t have any qualms about opening a dig where he didn’t have permission from the authorities or the owners. Soon after he discovered Priam’s Treasure, he smuggled it out of the country to keep it out of the hands of the Turkish authorities. When they found out, they took him to court, and he ended up paying a stiff fine.

 In recent years there’s been a lot of controversy about some of Schliemann’s claims. Those are often minor things that we can chalk up to embellishment. For example, his diaries don’t really bear out the idea that he had a lifelong dream of discovering Troy. His interest in archaeology seems to have grown as he traveled and got a taste for it. So that episode about the drunken miller reciting Homer makes a good story, but there’s reason to doubt that it ever really happened. More seriously, there have been allegations that he fudged his reporting of some finds. Looking again at Priam’s Treasure, the find spot was outside the fortification wall. That location makes sense, because a hoard of objects like this would commonly be buried in the grave of a nobleman, and burials took place outside the city walls. But in his early reports, Schliemann says he found the treasure inside the wall, which fits better with his narrative that he’d discovered Priam’s palace. Without going into too much detail, there are some indications that he may have done what archaeologists call “salting” his finds — meaning he may have held back objects that he’d found earlier in the dig and then planted them in a later spot to make the find look more impressive. I haven’t studied this in enough depth to form a strong opinion, but he does seem to have had a suspicious way of making spectacular finds just before the end of an excavation.

 All of this is controversial. Schliemann has his defenders, and I may be making some people mad just talking like this. But whether or not you can believe everything Schliemann reports, he certainly couldn’t have faked the whole discovery of Troy or the shaft graves at Mycenae. There’s no denying that he made huge discoveries that changed the way people thought about prehistoric Greece. He was certainly an outlier with his belief in the historical accuracy of Homer. But sometimes it takes someone with wild ideas to make a big advance in knowledge.

 Well, this has been an unusual way to start a history podcast. Instead of starting right in with the early history of Greece, I’ve focused on a couple of discoveries that helped shape our understanding of that history. But I think it’s important to remember that we look at the past through our own lenses. Before Schliemann, the conventional wisdom was that the world depicted in Homer was the stuff of myth and legend. The discoveries at Troy and Mycenae showed that the epics, for all their distortions and embellishments, looked back to an earlier time, which we now call the Mycenaean age. In the next episode we’ll look at that Mycenaean civilization, its debt to an earlier civilization on the island of Crete, and its place in the vibrant world of the Bronze Age Mediterranean. 

 And that’s it for this episode of Epic Greek History. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and if you did, please subscribe and help spread the word. If you have comments, corrections, or additional information, please email me at scott@epicgreekhistory.com. I’m Scott Emmons; the music for my theme song and interstitials was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp; my logo and other artwork are by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.