Schliemann found Troy by destroying it

In 1873 a German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann announced he had found Troy. He had — sort of.He had dug a seventeen-metre trench straight down through nine stacked cities, blasted past the Bronze Age levels that are Homer's likeliest setting, and stopped only when he hit a layer about a thousand years too early. The hoard of gold and copper he smuggled out of the Ottoman Empire as der Schatz des Priamos — the Treasure of Priam — is now thought to belong to a king who lived a millennium before any Trojan War. The Mask of Agamemnon, which he hammered out of a Mycenaean grave three years later, is also off by several centuries.But he was right about the place. Troy was real, and the dirt under it has been telling its own story for forty centuries.The hill nobody believed inFor most of European intellectual history, Troy was assumed to be a fiction. Aristotle had thought it was real; the post-classical world stopped thinking about it at all. By the early nineteenth century the educated consensus was that Homer was a poet, not a historian, and that whatever city he was describing — if any — was lost beyond recovery.Then, in 1822, a Scottish journalist named Charles Maclaren — who had never been to Anatolia — published a quiet pamphlet, A Dissertation on the Topography of the Plain of Troy, suggesting that the hill of Hisarlık on the Turkish coast, a low mound about five kilometres inland from the Dardanelles, fit Homer's geography. The plain was the right size, the rivers were in the right places, the sea was the right distance away. Nobody listened. Maclaren was a journalist; the academy was elsewhere.A man named Frank CalvertThe first person who did was an English diplomat. Frank Calvert was the British consular agent at the Dardanelles, the youngest son of a trading family that had settled there. He had grown up in the area. He owned the eastern half of the Hisarlık mound. From 1865 he had been digging in test pits — quietly, on his own land, with his own money — and finding pottery, walls, and ceramics that did not match the Roman period above them. He could not afford to dig the whole hill himself.

In 1868 a wealthy German businessman, in Anatolia for the first time in his life, knocked on his door. Calvert told the businessman everything. He showed him the test pits. He shared his theory. He pointed to the spot. He had found his patron.The patron's name was Heinrich Schliemann.Schliemann's trenchSchliemann was forty-six. He had grown up poor in Mecklenburg, apprenticed to a grocer at fourteen, and built a fortune over twenty years as a war contractor — first selling indigo and saltpetre to the Russian army during the Crimean War, then expanding into commodity speculation across Europe. By his mid-forties he had retired from business, divorced his Russian wife, married a seventeen-year-old Greek girl chosen by his old Greek teacher in Athens, and decided to spend the second half of his life proving the Iliad was history.He had taught himself ancient Greek by reading Homer aloud in his garden. He had no archaeological training. There was barely such a thing as archaeological training; the field was being invented in real time. He hired Calvert as a consultant, then increasingly ignored him.In 1871 Schliemann began digging. His method was a trench — a long open cut driven straight down through the mound from the north side. Modern archaeology proceeds by stripping a single layer at a time, recording each one in plan and section, and only descending when an entire stratum has been excavated. Schliemann did the opposite. He went straight down. He used dynamite. He had a hundred and fifty workers. Within two seasons his trench was seventeen metres deep and forty wide — a wound in the side of the hill that is still partly visible today.He was looking for Homer's city, which he assumed was the oldest. He drove past the Late Bronze Age levels — the layers most likely to be Homer's Troy — without recognising them, and pressed on into the Early Bronze Age below. There he stopped. He had reached, in his words, die brandgeröteten Schichten, the fire-reddened layers, and decided this was Priam's.It wasn't."Priam's Treasure"The legal terms of Schliemann's dig were not vague.

The firman — the imperial decree, dated 30 June 1871 — granted him permission to excavate Hisarlık on three conditions: he would pay for the dig himself, an Ottoman official would supervise on site at all times, and any antiquities he found would be divided equally between him and the new Imperial Museum (the Müze-i Hümayun) in Constantinople. Schliemann signed. He began work that autumn.For two seasons he complied, more or less.Then on 31 May 1873 — the date is contested; his diaries are unreliable in places — workmen turned up a cache of gold, silver, copper, and electrum objects in a single deposit near the citadel wall: diadems, bracelets, earrings, vessels, a copper helmet. Schliemann sent the labourers away on the pretext of his wife's birthday and removed the hoard himself. He hid it from the Ottoman supervisor assigned to watch him. The next day he photographed Sophia Schliemann wearing the largest gold diadem — a publicity image that travelled the European press within weeks. He then packed the entire find into her luggage and crossed the Aegean to Athens.He named it Priam's Treasure and announced to the world that he had recovered the personal possessions of the king from the Iliad.The hoard is real. It is also from Troy II, dated to roughly 2400 BC. The Trojan War, if there was one, took place in the late thirteenth or early twelfth century BC. The treasure is older than Homer's Troy by a thousand years. It belongs to a city that already lay buried twelve hundred years before any plausible Hector lit a funeral pyre.Schliemann never accepted this in print. By the time of his death in 1890 he was still calling it Priam's gold.The Ottoman lawsuitThe Ottoman government did not let it go. In April 1874 it filed suit against Schliemann in a Greek court of first instance in Athens — the first time, in any forum, that the Empire had attempted to recover smuggled antiquities through international litigation. Greek jurisdiction was the practical choice: the treasure was in Athens, and Schliemann lived there. The case is now studied in Turkish law schools as the foundational document of Ottoman cultural-property litigation.

It took a year. In April 1875 the court ruled for the Ottoman state. Schliemann was ordered to return the treasure or pay £400 in compensation to the Imperial Museum — about 50,000 francs at the time, a figure pegged to the Ottoman government's estimate of the hoard's value. He paid £2,000 instead. The over-payment, five times the judgment, has never been fully explained. The most plausible reading, supported by his subsequent return to Hisarlık in 1878 and 1882 with renewed firmans, is that the extra money bought him both Ottoman acquiescence to keep the gold in private hands and the right to dig the site again. He had lost the suit and bought himself a partnership.A small portion of the find — silver vessels, ceramic objects, items of secondary interest — was sent to the Imperial Museum as part of the settlement. Some of those pieces are still on display today in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, in the same building complex (the former Çinili Köşk) that the Ottoman government had founded in 1869 specifically to house finds like Schliemann's. The gold went with Schliemann.Nine cities, stackedWhat Schliemann had not understood is that Hisarlık is not one city. It is nine.The Bronze and Iron Age occupants of the site rebuilt directly on top of their predecessors, laying fresh foundations on the rubble of the previous fire. By the time the Roman emperor Augustus visited the place around 20 BC — Ilion was a tourist destination by then, drawing pilgrims who wanted to walk where Achilles had walked — the mound was already nine settlements tall. Modern archaeologists number them Troy I through Troy IX: Troy I (~3000–2550 BC) — the earliest village on the spot. Troy II (~2550–2300 BC) — a wealthy citadel, the source of Priam's Treasure. Burned in a sudden fire. Troy III–V (~2300–1750 BC) — quieter centuries, modest architecture. Troy VI (~1750–1300 BC) — a large fortified city with massive walls of dressed limestone, Mycenaean pottery, evidence of trade across the Aegean.

The size and wealth match Homer's description. Troy VIIa (~1300–1180 BC) — Troy VI rebuilt after an earthquake. Destroyed by fire around 1180 BC. The most likely candidate for Homer's Troy. Troy VIIb (~1180–950 BC) — a smaller, poorer settlement reusing the ruins. Troy VIII (~700–85 BC) — a Greek town, Ilion, founded by Aeolian colonists who knew the Iliad and chose the site for its associations. Troy IX (~85 BC–500 AD) — the Roman city, restored by Augustus and visited as a heritage site for half a millennium before the Christian shift made it irrelevant. Schliemann's trench cut through all nine. He had passed Homer's city — the most likely candidates, Troy VI and VIIa — on the way down, mistaken them for late Greek or Roman intrusion, and stopped at Troy II.What was actually thereThe Late Bronze Age city he overlooked is now believed, with reasonable archaeological confidence, to have been a real political and trading centre of the eastern Mediterranean. Troy VI and VIIa had walls five metres thick and gates flanked by towers. The pottery shows trade with Mycenaean Greece, with the Hittite Empire to the east, with Cyprus and Egypt to the south. There are imported swords. There is a destruction layer of burnt brick and a number of human skeletons across the floors of Troy VIIa, dated by ceramics to roughly 1180 BC — consistent with a violent end and consistent, in date, with the traditional Greek dating of the Trojan War (1184 BC, by the calculation Eratosthenes worked out in the third century BC).There is also Hittite evidence. Cuneiform tablets from Hattusa, the Hittite capital eight hundred kilometres east of Troy, refer to a vassal kingdom called Wiluša on the western coast of Anatolia — almost certainly the same name as Greek Ilios, with the older Greek form being Wilios, beginning with the digamma ϝ (the lost w). One thirteenth-century-BC letter, the so-called Tawagalawa letter from a Hittite king to a Greek (Akhiyawan) ruler, mentions a war fought over Wiluša between the two powers.