Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [18]
Discoveries such as the Rosetta Stone were keys to opening up the past at a time when more of the world was being opened up to Europe. As the British Empire spread into the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific, geographers, astronomers, and naturalists, including Charles Darwin, were routinely sent aboard British ships to map and study the natural world. Obviously done in the name of the empire, this unprecedented but deliberate combination of exploration and colonization, discovery and scholarship was having a profound impact on the academic world. As ancient worlds and civilizations were revealed by Great Britain’s explorers and mapmakers, archaeologists, linguists, and the first generation of anthropologists followed suit. The academic world was beginning to view myth as an essential ingredient in understanding the past, not simply as the superstitious beliefs of barbarous “heathens” who needed to be Christianized. Once purely the domain of “classicists” who used the Greek myths to teach Greek, the world of mythology was now a fertile field for scholars who wanted to “prove” that these myths were based in the realities of the ancient world.
Who was the man who “found” Troy?
The most famous—and controversial—of this generation of archaeologists was Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890), a successful German businessman who converted a boyhood fascination with Homer’s Troy into a lifelong study of ancient Greece. Schliemann’s life was the stuff of a wild, Dickensian novel. Born the son of a poor Protestant minister in northern Germany, Schliemann had been a cabin boy and was shipwrecked as a teenager. After returning to Europe, he taught himself to speak English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian while working as an office boy. He translated his linguistic talents into building an import-export business that made him extremely wealthy. He came to California in the Gold Rush era, started a bank, and by the time he was in his thirties, Schliemann was a bank director and wealthy merchant who could afford to start a second life as an amateur archaeologist with a single, obsessive goal. Guided by his love of the Iliad, he set out to find the actual ruins of Homer’s Troy. With his second wife, Sophia, a Greek girl thirty years his junior, he focused his efforts on a mound at what is now Hissarlik, in northwestern Turkey. Underwriting the costs of the digs with his considerable personal fortune, Schliemann began to excavate in September 1871.
Ignored or ridiculed by skeptical professionals, Schliemann had the last laugh. His faith paid off when he discovered the buried city of Troy—actually, the Schliemanns had discovered the cities of Troy. At the site where he had predicted he would find Troy, nine cities were uncovered, each successive layer built on the ruins of the one before it. Carelessly digging through these many levels in his frenzied search for Homer’s Troy, Schliemann probably destroyed many relics in which he had no interest. But near the bottom level, the Schliemanns found objects of bronze, gold, and silver, in the city they believed was the Troy of the Iliad.
Schliemann was clearly a bit of a P. T. Barnum, or a carnival huckster. Using his showman’s instincts, he had his beautiful young wife photographed wearing jewels they had discovered, as though she were a modern incarnation of Helen of Troy, and the two became internationally famed. After the triumph of finding Troy, the Schliemanns returned to Greece, where they explored the fabled site of Mycenae, an ancient Greek city where, in 1876, they unearthed five royal graves full of jewels and other treasures. Although the Schliemanns incorrectly believed that they had discovered the burial site of Homer