Archaeologist, born in Neubukow, N Germany. After a successful business career, he retired early to realize his ambition of finding the site of the Homeric poems by excavating the tell at Hisarlik in Asia Minor, the traditional site of Troy. From 1871 he discovered nine superimposed city sites, one containing a considerable treasure (found 1873) which he over-hastily identified as Priam's. He also excavated several other Greek sites, including Mycenae (1876) and Tiryns (1884).
Heinrich Schliemann (January 6, 1822 Neubukow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin - December 26, 1890 Naples) was a German treasure hunter, an advocate of the historical reality of places mentioned in the works of Homer, and an important excavator of Mycenaean sites, such as Troy, Mycenae and Tiryns.
Childhood
Heinrich was born in Germany, in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, to Ernst Schliemann, a poor Protestant minister, and Luise Therese Sophie.
Heinrich was sent not to live with his uncle.
He was at the grammar school for at least a year. Later he claimed that, as a boy, his interest in history was encouraged by his father, who, he said, had schooled him in the tales of The Iliad and The Odyssey and had given him a copy of Ludwig Jerrer's Illustrated History of the World for Christmas, 1829. Schliemann also later claimed that at the age of eight he declared he would one day excavate the city of Troy.
Interest in and connection with the classics continued during his time at the Gymnasium, so it is likely that he would have been further exposed to Homer. According to his diary, his interest in ancient Greece was conceived when he overheard a drunken university student citing the Odyssey of Homer in classical Greek and so Heinrich was taken by the language's beauty.
This established the fundamental character of his later life. In his archaeological career, there was always a dichotomy between the educated professionals and Schliemann.
After leaving Realschule, Heinrich became a grocer's apprentice at age fourteen, for Herr Holtz's grocery in Furstenburg. In 1841 Schliemann fled to Hamburg and became a cabin boy on the Dorothea, a steamer bound for Venezuela.
Career as a businessman
After his shipwreck, Schliemann seems to have undergone a brief period of being footloose in Amsterdam and Hamburg, at age 19.
On March 1, 1844, he changed jobs, going to work for B. He did learn Russian and Greek, employing a system that he used his entire life to learn languages -- Schliemann wrote his diary in the language of whatever country he happened to be in.
Schliemann had a gift for languages and by the end of his life he was conversant in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Italian, Greek, Latin, Russian, Arabic and Turkish as well as his native German. Schliemann's ability with languages was an important part of his career as a businessman in the importing trade.
In 1850 Heinrich learned of the death of his brother, Ludwig, who had become wealthy as a speculator in the California gold fields. Taking the cue, Schliemann went to California in early 1851 and started a bank in Sacramento. The prospectors could mine or pan for the gold, but they had no way to sell it except to middle men such as Schliemann, who made quick fortunes on it.
Later Heinrich claimed to have acquired United States citizenship when California was made a state.
He wasn't in the United States long.
Heinrich and Ekaterina were married on October 12, 1852. The canny Schliemann cornered the market in indigo and then went into the indigo business, turning a good round profit.
Having a family to support moved Schliemann to tend to business even though he still had his first fortune.
By 1858, Schliemann was as wealthy as ever a man could wish.
Some say he retired at 36, which would have been in 1858; In his memoirs he claimed that he wished to dedicate himself to the pursuit of Troy, but this claim, along with many others, is unlikely to be true.
Life as a Treasure Hunter/Pseudo-Archaeologist
It is not certain by what path Schliemann really did arrive at either archaeology or Troy.
His first interest of a classical nature seems to have been the location of Troy. On the other hand, he may have been inspired by Frank Calvert, whom he met on his first visit to the Hissarlik site in 1868.
Somewhere in his many travels and adventures he lost Ekaterina. Schliemann claimed to have utilised the divorce laws of Indiana in 1850, after becoming a citizen, in order to divorce Ekaterina in absentia.
Based on the work of a British archaeologist, Frank Calvert, who had been excavating the site in Turkey for over 20 years, Schliemann decided that Hissarlik was the site of Troy. In 1868 - a busy year for Schliemann - he visited sites in the Greek world, published Ithaka, der Peloponnesus und Troja in which he advocated for Hissarlik as the site of Troy, and submitted a dissertation in ancient Greek proposing the same thesis to the University of Rostock.
In 1868, regardless of his previous interests and adventures, or the paths by which he arrived at that year, Schliemann's course was set. He would take over Calvert's excavations on the eastern half of the Hissarlik site, which was on Calvert's property. Calvert became Schliemann's collaborator and partner.
Schliemann brought dedication, enthusiasm, conviction and a not inconsiderable fortune to the work. Schliemann was able to provide both.
Schliemann knew he would need an "insider" collaborator versed in Greek culture of the times. They later had two children, Andromache and Agamemnon Schliemann;
By 1871 Schliemann was ready to go to work at Troy. Thinking that Homeric Troy must be in the lowest level, he dug hastily through the upper levels, reaching fortifications that he took to be his target. Schliemann flew into a fury when Calvert published an article stating that the Trojan War period was missing from the record, probably meaning that Schliemann had destroyed it.
As if to exonerate his views, a cache of gold suddenly appeared in 1873, which Heinrich dubbed "Priam's Treasure."
This publicity stunt backfired when the Turkish government revoked his permission to dig and sued him for a share of the gold. This was not the first time Calvert and Schliemann had smuggled antiquities. (Priam's Treasure is still today the object of an international tug-of-war.)
Meanwhile Heinrich published Troja und seine Ruinen in 1875 and excavated the Treasury of Minyas at Orchomenos.
Although he had received permission to excavate in 1876, Schliemann did not reopen the dig at Troy until 1878-1879, after another excavation in Ithaca designed to locate the actual sites of the Odysseus story. This was his second excavation at Troy. There was a third excavation, 1882-1883, an excavation of Tiryns in 1884 with Wilhelm Dörpfeld, and a fourth at Troy, 1888-1890, with Dörpfeld, who taught him to stratigraphize.
Decline and death
On August 1, 1890, Schliemann returned reluctantly to Athens, and in November traveled to Halle for an operation on his chronically infected ears. From Paris, he planned to return to Athens in time for Christmas, but his ears became even worse. Too sick to make the boat ride from Naples to Greece, Schliemann remained in Naples, but managed to make a journey to the ruins of Pompeii.
The dark side of Schliemann
Schliemann's career began before archaeology developed as a professional field, and so, by present standards, the field technique of Schliemann's work leaves a lot to be desired. Indeed, further excavation of the Troy site by others has indicated that the level he named the Troy of the Iliad was not that; in fact, all of the materials given Homeric names by Schliemann are considered of a pseudo- nature, although they retain the names. His excavations were even condemned by the archaeologists of his time as having destroyed the main layers of the real Troy. They were forgetting that, before Schliemann, not many people even believed in a real Troy.
One of the main problems of his work is that King Priam's Treasure was putatively found in the Troy II level, of the primitive Early Bronze Age, long before Priam's city of Troy VI or Troy VIIa in the prosperous and elaborate Mycenaean Age.
In the 1960s Dr. William Niederland, a psychoanalyst, conducted a psychobiography of Schliemann to account for his unconscious motives. Niederland read thousands of Schliemann's letters and found that he hated his father and blamed him for his mother's death, as evidenced by vituperative letters to his sisters. Nothing in the early letters to indicate that he was even interested in Troy or classical archaeology.
Niederland concluded that Schliemann's preoccupation (as he saw it) with graves and the dead reflected grief over the loss of his mother, for which he blamed his father, and his efforts at resurrecting the Homeric dead represent a restoration of his mother.
In 1972 Professor William Calder of the University of Colorado, speaking at a commemoration of Schliemann's birthday, revealed that he had uncovered several untruths.
Schliemann claimed in his memoirs to have dined with President Millard Fillmore in the White House in 1850. Schliemann left California hastily in order to escape from his business partner, whom he had cheated.
Nor did Schliemann become a U.S. citizen in 1850 as he claimed. He did divorce Ekaterina from Indiana, in 1868, an obvious hasty move to clear the way for Sophia.
He never received any degree from the University of Rostock, which rejected his application and thesis.
Schliemann's worst offense, by academic standards, is that he may have fabricated Priam's Treasure, or at least combined several disparate finds. Though Sophia was in Athens visiting her family at the time, it is possible she colluded with him on the secret, as he claimed she helped him and she didn't deny it.
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