But I could learn nothing further and returned to Chios. It is very likely that Tafur only saw the remains of Alexandria Troas.
Tafur's visit only just preceded one by the most remarkable of all early travellers and antiquarians, Cyriac of Ancona. Archetype of the peripatetic early Renaissance antiquary, and one of the most influential — perhaps more than anyone he deserves the title of the first archaeologist, though the word would not be coined for another years. In October , having walked the Trojan plain, Cyriac set sail for Imbros and saw Samothrace peeping over the top just as Homer says.
So the famous nineteenth-century travel writer Alexander Kinglake was not the first to note from personal observation in Eothen that Homer spoke truly: 'Aloft over Imbros — aloft in a far-away heaven — Samothrace, the watchtower of Neptune — so Homer had appointed it, and so it was.
Coming from the region of Troy, from where the towering outline of Samothrace can be seen hovering in the distance, Cyriac recalled the passage in the Iliad where Poseidon watches the battle between Greeks and Trojans from the 'top of the highest summit of timbered Samothrace'.
Homer had told the truth! A former shipping clerk, glorified commercial traveller and unofficial political consultant, Cyriac wandered the eastern Mediterranean for fifty years, clambering over ruins, sketching monuments, copying inscriptions, haranguing the citizens of sleepy Mediterranean towns to save their 'half buried glories'.
For Cyriac, the ruins of antiquity were living voices crying out for the torn fabric of that ancient world to be reknit, by both the 'sons of Greece' and the 'sons of Troy' - the Turks.
Cyriac's hopes for the 'sons of Greece and Troy' and the rebirth of the ancient world remind us how peculiarly the story of archaeology in Greece is bound up with the rebirth of Hellenism and the idea of Greek nationhood.
The Byzantines who ruled the Eastern Roman Empire until the fall of Constantinople did not call themselves Hellenes, the word Greeks use today to describe themselves as did Thucydides. They were 'Roman', and moreover throughout their history as a Christian empire they were generally hostile to what became known as Hellenism — the philosophical, moral and religious conceptions of ancient Greece. To them it was pagan and polytheistic: in the eleventh century, Michael Psellus relates, Greek monks habitually crossed themselves at Plato's name, that 'Hellenic Satan'.
The Hellenising movement came to a head in the first half of the fifteenth century in the years immediately preceding the fall of Constantinople. The idea now emerged that the inhabitants of the Peloponnese and the adjacent mainland and islands were the direct descendants of the ancient Greeks, and should re-establish the national state in the lands once occupied by the Hellenes of old.
This was the climate in which men like Cyriac of Ancona made their pioneering attempts to gather and record the archaeological evidence for Hellenistic civilisation, and in this the Trojan War had special significance for, as Thucydides had said, it was the first recorded action by a united Hellenic power.
The dream — for the moment — was dissipated. There is an ironic tailpiece to Cyriac's mystical mingling of ancient and modern, his desire somehow to make the Trojan tale serve contemporary political ends. Mehmet walked the circuit of the city, inspected its ruins, saw its topographical advantages, and its favourable position close to the sea and the opposite continent.
Then he asked to be shown the tombs of the heroes Achilles, Hector and Ajax, and like other great conquerors before him he made offerings at the tomb of Achilles, congratulated him on his fame and his great deeds, and on having found the poet Homer whom Cyriac had read to Mehmet to celebrate them. Then, it is said, he pronounced these words: 'It is to me that Allah has given to avenge this city and its people: I have overcome their enemies, ravaged their cities and made a Mysian prey of their riches.
Indeed it was the Greeks who before devastated this city, and it is their descendants who after so many years have paid me the debt which their boundless pride [hubris] had contracted - and often afterwards - towards us, the peoples of Asia.
It was a pilgrimage which re-enacted other pilgrimages by world conquerors at great moments of confrontation; it is clearly modelled on that of Alexander. The wheel had come full circle: even if Mehmet never said those words, one feels he ought to have! In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Turkish and Christian worlds were opposed, and travel was dangerous and difficult.
But from the late sixteenth century a change is noticeable, with new commercial relations developing between east and west. At this time the visits of a number of western visitors, starting with the naturalist Pierre Belon who mistook Alexandria Troas for Troy , rekindled interest in Troy, aided by the spread of printing which enabled the dissemination of Homer in translation for the first time, and also of the accounts of the travellers themselves.
From the s, indeed, there is a continuous record of western visitors to Troy, the bulk of them English. When William Shakespeare sat in London in writing Troilus and Cressida, and imagined the 'Dardan plains' and the 'strong immures' of Troy, 'Priam's six-gated city', he was not reflecting topographical knowledge about Troy and its environs; merely using the book on his desk, Caxton's Recuyell.
But it was in his lifetime that English travellers first made their mark in the search for Troy on the ground. From the sixteenth century English and French merchants replaced Venetians and Genoese in the courts of Ottoman Turkey, and the first commercial treaty and diplomatic exchanges between England and Turkey were established in Elizabeth's ambassador, John Sanderson, twice 'put into Troy', in and , and Richard Wragg, taking the queen's second present, saw the two big mounds on Cape Yenisehir in 'not unlikely the tombs of Achilles and Ajax,' he thought.
Others followed: Thomas Dallam, the organ-builder, taking an elaborate hydraulic organ to the Sultan, put into the same place and saw ruins which he took to be Troy probably the foundations of Constantine's abortive city on the Sigeum ridge ; and in the winter of —10 William Lithgow was shown round a ruined site in the Troad by a Greek guide. Some, like William Biddulph in and Thomas Coryate in , published their accounts, the latter being the first detailed modern description of the plain.
Most of these early visitors, however, were misled into thinking that Alexandria Troas, or the Sigeum ruins, were the site of Homeric Troy, though even in the early seventeenth century, as George Sandys said, the problem of the location of Ilium, the 'glory of Asia', had 'afforded to rarest wits so plentiful an argument'. Sandys, in , was the first to identify the rivers Scamander and Simois with the Menderes and Dumrek Su. By this time it is clear that little trace remained of the site of New Ilium, for it was ignored by all early travellers.
It was not until the eighteenth century that the first scholarly attempts were made to pin down the exact location of the city of Homer and the events of the Iliad. On two visits in and , at a time when travel in bandit-ridden Asia Minor was still a dangerous business, Robert Wood laid the foundations for the modern topographical study of the Trojan problem. Wood has claims to be considered the first 'pilgrim' to Greece. His book Essay Wood reckoned that 'a great part' of the plain had been formed of river silt since antiquity he compared it with the mouth of the river Maeander at Miletus, formerly a great port which is now high and dry , that there had been a wide bay in front of Troy at the time of the war, 'some miles' nearer the city than at present, and that the courses of the rivers had moved considerably over the intervening centuries.
These conclusions were abandoned by most other scholars right up to the present, but we now know they were correct see p. Wood's basic premise, that the location of Troy and the historicity of the Trojan War could be determined by patient field research, set the tone for future treatment of the theme, and his book marks the start of a famous controversy which shows no sign of abating: it went through five editions and was translated into four languages.
It was with Wood's book in his hand — along with the Iliad, of course — that the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Lechevalier went to the Troad in , and with him modern topographical exploration of the Troad began. Over three visits he walked the whole area from Ida to the Dardanelles and rapidly became convinced that the Troad exactly accorded with the description in Homer.
The city itself, Lechevalier thought, had lain not near the sea, but up the valley of the river Scamander Menderes at a place called Bunarbashi where there was a prominent, acropolis-like hill above a well-known local landmark, the 'Forty Eyes' springs, which Lechevalier identified with Homer's hot and cold springs at Troy.
Exiled by the French Revolution, Lechevalier first announced his theory in a lecture in French to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in February , and it was published there in English the same year with a preface testifying to the 'vivacity of his conversation and the agreeableness of his manners'. In the light of his researches, Lechevalier also gave his opinion on the vexed question of the historicity of the Trojan War: it was, he thought, not poetical fiction but historical fact. For the space of ten years the Greeks were employed in laying waste the coast of Asia, together with adjacent islands.
The capital of the Trojan territory was not always the immediate subject of their disputes. Whether it was really taken or Now the controversy really took off, with some, like Jacob Bryant, not only denying that the war had taken place but vehemently asserting that Troy itself had never existed. Armchair critics fired off scholarly brickbats, arguing hotly over the minutest problem of the disposition of the Greek ships or even the likely number of babies born to the camp whores over ten years!
It was in the midst of this famous and heated dispute that Lord Byron spent seventeen days at anchor off the Troad in and walked the plain, which he found 'a fine field for conjecture and snipe hunting'. The romantic associations of the place, however, were too much even for Byron and he roundly dismissed the 'unbelievers' for their pedantry.
Canto IV, 77 'It is one thing to read the Iliad with Mount Ida above you,' he wrote with a touch of smugness - he actually spent more time on the plain than most scholars before or since! I've stood upon Achilles' tomb, And heard Troy doubted; time will doubt of Rome. Years after his visit to the Troad, and not long before he died fighting for that same romantic Hellenism, Byron returned to the great theme in , in his diary: 'We do care about the authenticity of the tale of Troy I venerate the grand original as the truth of history.
Frank Calvert: discoverer of Troy? It mattered to someone else: Frank Calvert, who has claims to be regarded as the discoverer of Troy. In fact the Troy mystery was something of a family fascination.
The Calvert family were English, but had been in the Troad since Byron's day and did not leave until the onset of the Second World War they are still remembered in those parts. The family wheeler-dealed in commerce and local business in a rather seigneurial way, but they were continually helpful to outsiders, giving advice, medicine and loans to travellers.
Frank's work as American consul has left only a handful of records, but he went out of his way to help people. All the brothers were interested in antiquities, and all were intrigued by the Trojan question.
Frederick who conceived the plan of forming a museum of the Troad thought Homer's Troy was about 5 miles up the Scamander valley from the site of New Ilium, at a place called Akfa Koy, where until the family had a farm, and later he discussed this with Schliemann. James Calvert, too, offered Schliemann his theories on Troy. But Frank was the moving force; he knew the Troad better than anyone, before or since; he identified many of the ancient sites there, reported on them laconically in learned journals, and formed a collection the [Trojan War The village name Kallifatli below Hisarlik means a place for tarring or repairing ships; presumably the river was once navigable up to that spot.
Frank had explored from an early age. Schliemann mentions that Frank pointed out a site to the British cartographer Spratt in , when young Calvert was in his teens; one wonders whether Schliemann, who turned his own life into an inextricable tangle of fantasy and truth, appropriated Frank's childhood fascination with the Troy story?
See p. In the s Frank had supported the theory that Troy had been at Bunarbashi, but a series of unpublished letters in the British Museum show that before he had turned to Hisarlik, the site of Ilion and the acropolis of New Ilium. Others had thought the same. Frank was aware, for example, of [Trojan War Maclaren deserves first credit for the identification, and it may be that he met the Calverts on his first visit there in Another of the visitors to the Calverts' farm was Charles Newton, who later became one of the British Museum's greatest keepers.
Newton was seconded to the consular service for the furtherance of the Museum's interests in Asia Minor, and came to the Troad in , where he consulted Calvert over local sites. At this time Calvert took him to Bunarbashi which they rejected as Troy on the grounds that there were no surface potsherds such as littered the surface at Mycenae and Tiryns.
At Hisarlik, however, Calvert showed Newton that extensive ruins lay hidden under the soil. Calvert and Newton corresponded fairly regularly after this 'I have been following up the ancient geography of the Troad and identified many sites,' Calvert wrote in The Museum committee, however, dithered and asked for more information.
Calvert was disappointed: 'I am anxiously waiting to learn the result,' he wrote to Newton. Thus I was prevented from having the pleasure of a talk with you on archaeological subjects and discuss my proposals to the British Museum for excavating at Ilium Novum. You would much oblige me by letting me know the decision of the British Museum on this subject of excavations so as to enable me to make my plans accordingly. Believe me dear Sir very truly yours Frank Calvert And so the chance passed.
Meanwhile German excavations at Bunarbashi in confirmed Calvert and Newton in their belief that Homer's Troy had not been there. Calvert now bought the northern part of Hisarlik, and in the following year, , conducted trial excavations in four places.
On the north his trenches located the remains of the classical temple of Athena and the Hellenistic city wall erected by Lysimachus, one of Alexander the Great's generals; he came within yards of the great north-eastern bastion of what we now call Troy VI, and on the south, part of the city wall, which he probably thought classical. It is also certain that he exposed Bronze-Age levels on the north, immediately below the Athena temple, though the classical builders had cut away the walls of the ancient cities below them except for the massive underpinnings of the prehistoric walls, which were not recognised for what they were until the s.
Still, the dig had been a notable success. Calvert had seen enough to know that the mound was deeply stratified and that an excavation on the scale necessary to do it carefully would require the kind of money he did not possess. Nevertheless Calvert felt sure that Hisarlik was the site of the epic story and that an archaeological dig could 'settle the ground question "ubi Troja fuit"All the ancient authors subsequent to Homer place the site of Troy at Ilium Novum until Strabo's time,' he wrote in It was left to another to gain the glory: Heinrich Schliemann.
Dr Schliemann is, undoubtedly, an able man; but he must be credited with a vast amount of this sort of unbalanced imagination in order to explain the creations which he has produced out of the explorations of Hisarlik. William Borlase, Fraser's Review In the summer of , at five in the morning on 14 August, to be precise, an unlikely-looking visitor picked his way on horseback through the sandy riverbed and marshy thickets of the Menderes river in the north-west corner of Turkey, by the Dardanelles.
He was a little man with a round, bullet-like head as a friend described him , very little hair and a reddish face with spectacles; 'round-headed, round-faced, roundhatted, great-round-goggle eyes', as another said. At 10 a. Finally he ascended a smaller hill, called Hisarlik, 'place of the fort', in the north-western corner, about feet above the plain, 30 feet above the spur of the plateau; there he inspected an excavation made earlier by its owner, who had laid bare part of the podium of a temple.
The site, he later wrote, fully agrees with the description Homer gives of Ilium and I will add that, as soon as one sets foot on the Trojan plain, the view of the beautiful hill of Hisarlik grips one with astonishment. That hill seems destined by nature to carry a great city As the afternoon sun started to sink over the Dardanelles he headed for the coast to find lodgings for the night, trudging his way on foot through the marshy flats along the lower river.
When, with the Iliad in hand, I sat on the roof of a house and looked around me, I imagined seeing below me the fleet, camp and assemblies of the Greeks; Troy and its Pergamus fortress on the plateau of Hisarlik; troops marching to and fro and battling each other in the lowland between city and camp. For two hours the main events of the Iliad passed before my eyes until darkness and violent hunger forced me to leave the roof. This account, which we now know is largely a fiction, was written in Paris that autumn.
It marks the start of the most amazing story in archaeology. A biographical problem It is often said that we know so much about Troy today because of one man's obsession, indeed of his childhood dream which he made come true.
However, this is only so if we can believe his personal account of his early life. Schliemann's is the most romantic story in archaeology and should be read in his own words in his great books Ilios, Mycenae, Tiryns, but it should be read with a large pinch of salt, for with Schliemann, as with the story of Troy, it is not always possible to distinguish myth from reality. The material about his life is copious, for like many geniuses Schliemann was a compulsive hoarder of all the outpourings of his life.
There are eleven books, the so-called autobiography, eighteen travel diaries, 20, papers, 60, letters, business records, postcards, telegrams and all sorts of other ephemera; and there are also volumes' of excavation notebooks, though fortysix more are missing, including important ones from Troy, Orchomenos and Tiryns three lost albums of plans, drawings and photographs from Mycenae came into the hands of an Athens bookseller some years ago.
Add to all this the vast amount of parallel material in the work of scholars who knew him, collaborated with him or argued with him, the newspaper files, the inevitable new finds like the five letters found in in Belfast, of all places and you have an idea of the size of the task involved in trying to disentangle fact from fiction in Schliemann's life.
It is a task beyond the scope of one lifetime, for Schliemann was a man of colossal energy, addicted to words and ideas, a correspondent in a dozen languages. Many books have been written about him since he began his dig at Troy-Hisarlik, but as yet there is no reliable biography; it is the main gap in our imperfect knowledge of Troy, and clearly now it will take a prodigious effort to reconstitute his finds.
So the reader who is fascinated by the remarkable story of one of the most extraordinary people of the nineteenth century — a genius, let no one be in any doubt over that — needs to be wary of accepting the myth Schliemann put forward about himself, and which the world swallowed so willingly, for, as he himself admitted, 'my biggest fault, being a braggart and a bluffer We cannot, for instance, even be sure of the truth of his famous tale about his childhood, which is accepted unquestioningly even by his critics.
At the age of eight, he recounts in Ilios, published in , he received from his father a Christmas present of Jerrer's Universal History which contained the story of Troy with an engraving of Aeneas escaping from the burning towers of Troy. In the end we both agreed that I should one day excavate Troy.
This story first appears in a less developed form, and with differences of fact, in Ithaque, le Peloponnese et Troie, written in when Schliemann was forty-six: this is the first mention in any source of what Schliemann claimed had been a lifelong obsession, namely to uncover the ruins of Troy and prove the truth of Homer's story.
But is it true? In December he wrote a letter to his eighty-eight-year-old father regarding the new book: In the foreword I have given my biography, I have said that when I was ten I heard the talc of the Trojan War from you I have said that you were the cause of this [i.
The sceptic might infer that this was the first old Schliemann had heard of it, and indeed a cool look at his son's correspondence suggests that the story of Schliemann's obsession is indeed an invention. He was often involved in unscrupulous dealings — for instance he cornered the saltpetre market for gunpowder in the Crimean War, bought gold off prospectors in the California gold-rush, and dealt in cotton during the American Civil War — at least, that was his story.
In the late s he seems to have wanted to break away from his business career into more intellectual pursuits in order to gain respectability. His first hopes were to become a landed proprietor, devoting himself to agriculture. When this failed, he wanted to turn to some sort of activity in a scientific field, perhaps philology, but was soon discouraged: 'It is too late for me to turn to a scientific career,' he wrote. Like many European people in the nineteenth century he knew Homer and loved his tale, but it was probably only his visit to Greece and Troy in the summer of — and his meeting with Frank Calvert — which gave Schliemann the inspiration to turn to archaeology, and the idea of discovering Homer's Troy by excavation.
This kind of textual criticism has revealed other discrepancies about incidents in Schliemann's career; for instance his story of the San Francisco fire which he says he witnessed , his alleged meeting with President Fillmore, and now even the find of the so-called 'Jewels of Helen' at Troy, which Schliemann has been accused of forging or buying on the black market and planting on site.
These doubts have now reached such fever pitch that a request was submitted in to the National Museum in Athens to test the gold of one of the masks Schliemann found at Mycenae, implicitly suggesting that he faked part of the Mycenae treasures too. It must be said that such allegations are not new: in his own lifetime he was accused of 'fixing' his evidence, and some who met him were suspicious.
The poet Matthew Arnold thought him 'devious' and Gobineau, a French diplomat, called him a 'charlatan'. Ernst Curtius, the excavator of Olympia, thought him 'a swindler'. However, these criticisms do not tell the whole truth, as, for example, in the case of the 'Jewels of Helen', whose find circumstances can be plausibly established.
But there are still some serious discrepancies which make a proper biography all the more desirable. For instance, one question bearing on the archaeology is the disturbing revelation by his contemporary William Borlase that Sophie Schliemann was not present, as her husband alleged, at the discovery of the 'Treasure of Priam'.
She was not even in Turkey! If Schliemann could lie or fantasise about this he said he did it 'to encourage her interest in archaeology by including her' — could he have lied about the finds themselves? We know enough about him to say that he could indeed be unscrupulous; he cheated and lied to get his way; he was surreptitious and conniving; he sometimes dug in secret and purloined material; he smuggled his Trojan treasures abroad rather than give them to the Turks; he desperately craved acceptance by the academic world as a serious scholar and archaeologist, and yet, we now know, he lied about something as trivial as the provenance of some inscriptions he had bought in Athens.
All this is admitted — and may be thought damning enough. But set against this are the record of the finds in the books and journals and the brilliant letters to The Times, and of course the amazing finds themselves in the Mycenaean room in Athens Museum. Wayward, naive, enthusiastic, unashamedly romantic, easy to hurt and anxious to learn, Schliemann is a bundle of contradictions; but judgement on him should be made on the basis of his finds. It was his luck — or skill — to achieve the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made by one person.
But before we turn to the tale of Schliemann's incredible finds there is one more question we must ask: why did he turn to archaeology in particular, rather than, say, philology? The story of the search for Troy is inextricably bound up with the beginnings of archaeology as a science.
Archaeology: the beginnings of a new science In Schliemann's time the very word 'archaeology' had only recently, begun to be used in its present meaning.
It would need a whole book to sketch the intellectual background of mid-nineteenth-century prehistoric scholarship. Without a definitive biography of Schliemann we remain uncertain as to how much contemporary scholarship he had imbibed. For instance, what was he reading in Paris when he was a 'mature student' there in the late os?
Certainly in the following twenty years he shows an astonishing breadth of reading, especially in archaeological and antiquarian studies, but also ranging far and wide in linguistics and comparative ethnology.
He also made it his business to visit all the major museum collections for the purpose of comparison with the often perplexing finds at Troy. If his thought lacked true scholarly discipline 'industrious but not clear-thinking,' said his schoolmaster and if his theories were often far-fetched, he was usually thinking in the right direction.
Today it is customary to deride Schliemann's archaeological technique as well as his character, but it is worth remembering that, in terms of the general study of the past, the period of Schliemann's adult life, , was perhaps the most revolutionary in the history of science.
In , the year of Schliemann's first visit to Athens and the islands a brief account of his travels appears in The Times of 27 May that year , Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species and created an entirely new climate for the study of man, history and the development of civilisation. Interestingly enough, one of the first scholars to praise Darwin's work in public was the English antiquary John Evans, father of the excavator of Knossos — Schliemann, incidentally, would come to know them both.
At this stage the very idea of prehistory had barely entered into the language of science. The word itself only came into common currency in Europe with Daniel Wilson's Prehistoric Annals and John Lubbock's Prehistoric Times, published in it was Lubbock who coined the words Paleolithic and Neolithic to describe phases in prehistory. Lubbock visited Schliemann at Troy in and Schliemann used his book when writing Ilios, of Lubbock's crowning work, The Origin of Civilisation a title intended to echo Darwin , came out in , six years before Schliemann's dig at Mycenae would alter forever our perceptions about the origins of European, and especially Aegean, civilisation.
At the time of Schliemann's maturity, before he dug Troy, most western intellectuals viewed 'civilisation' as meaning their own culture: a Christian, western, capitalist, bourgeois, imperialist democracy.
Their texts were the classical writers and the Bible, and empires such as the British and German were seen as the logical culmination of ancient culture, whose traditional components were Rome for its government and law , Israel for religion and morals and Greece for intellectual, artistic and democratic ideals.
This was 'civilisation', and hence 'history' was simply a matter of the Greek, Roman and Hebrew ideas shaping the western tradition.
But from the middle of the century archaeology started to reveal the riches of civilisations far more ancient — Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Sumerian — which, when their languages were deciphered, turned out to have had an incalculable influence on the development of the 'younger' civilisations of the Mediterranean.
And so was born the science of archaeology, an old word which in the seventeenth century referred to the study of history in general, but which appears in the strict modern sense, as the scientific study of the material remains of prehistory, in Wilson's Prehistoric Annals in Only thirty years later, in , R.
Dawkins could write in Early Man: 'The archaeologists have raised the study of antiquities to the rank of a science. Not only did success decide in his favour but also his scientific method proved a success. Indeed if we read him right, it was his crucial emotional 'trigger' — it was romantic philhellenism, the love of things Greek.
This may seem hard to understand now, but Schliemann's birth and youth coincided with an event which had a decisive effect on many European artists and thinkers: the Greek War of Independence.
Between the day in when Cyriac of Ancona rode into Constantinople by the side of Mehmet II when the city was conquered by the Turks, and the day Lord Byron died in the malarial swamps of Missolonghi, an extraordinary development had taken place in western European culture, whose effects are still very much with us. Of course the liberation from the Turks was chiefly achieved by the Greeks themselves, inspired by western-educated Greeks who worked in European intellectual circles.
But it was not simply a matter of the way Greeks looked at themselves; the way the west looked at Greece was also important. Such was the incredible impact in the Renaissance of the rediscovery of classical Greek civilisation that, as we have seen, the idea of the rebirth of a Hellenic nation was first conceived in Greece in the fifteenth century.
But it was precisely then that Greece fell to the Ottoman Empire and became one of its most impoverished provinces, economically and culturally. From that time the idea of Hellas reborn was maintained outside Greece and it is fascinating to see how the War of Independence in the s was preceded by a great outpouring of books by western Hellenists on the history and culture of ancient Greece.
As perceived by Pletho and Cyriac in the fifteenth century, the development of nationalism and that of archaeology went hand in hand. So to read what travellers and artists of the time wrote — a poet like Byron, or, slightly later, a musician like Berlioz, composer of The Trojans — is to sense some of the romantic philhellenism which evidently inspired the self-educated Schliemann, even if he actually acquired it late in life in the classroom in Paris; 'making my beloved Greece live again', as he put it, was a common goal for nineteenth-century intellectuals and artists, and inevitably the new science of archaeology did not escape such feelings — how could it?
At one level it is the most romantic of all sciences since it involves the actual physical reconstitution of the lost past. In a sense, then, the physical recovery of ancient Greece, which began with the digs at the classical sites of Olympia and Samothrace in the s and was followed by Troy, Mycenae and the rest under Schliemann in the , was the logical culmination of nineteenthcentury philhellenism; only this can explain Schliemann's seemingly genuine desire to 'prove the truth' of the ancient stories, even more than to find treasure.
His time, after all, was deeply troubled, plagued by revolutions and war, by colonialism and imperialism, culminating in the terrible Franco-Prussian War of of which Schliemann had a firsthand glimpse — neighbouring houses in his street in Paris were blasted by gunfire. The great practical achievements of nineteenth-century 'civilisation' were in the eyes of many tainted by the prospect of future horrors.
What more enticing idea than to discover an almost limitless prospect: a recoverable history stretching back deep into lost time?
Progress - that great goal of nineteenth-century thinkers - progress to a culture of noble aspirations, simple moral grandeur, could indeed be made, but by journeying backwards. Though outside the scope of this book, this aspect of Schliemann and his contemporaries should not be overlooked: 'I have lived my life with this race of demigods; I know them so well that I feel they must have known me,' wrote Berlioz of the Homeric heroes; many passages in Schliemann's books show that he felt exactly the same.
Where was Homer's Troy? No stone there is without a name. The Greek and Roman city was quite extensive - its walls enclosed an area of about by yards - but at its north-west extremity there is a mound about feet square which falls away sharply to the plain on the west and north; this mound rose about 30 feet above the adjacent plateau and about feet above the plain before Schliemann began his dig, though it may have been higher and steeper in the Bronze Age before classical builders levelled it off.
This mound, known as Hisarlik, the 'place of [Trojan War Charles Maclaren thought Troy had extended over the whole plateau with the acropolis on the south-west ridge under the word Ilium. No one had paid it much attention in the debate over the lost site of Homer's Troy; it was first noticed by travellers in the s, when part of the circuit wall built in Alexander the Great's day was still visible amid the undergrowth and olive trees.
By , when Edward Clarke went to the spot, the foundation blocks were being plundered by local Turks; they had gone by the s and now even the line of the circuit is difficult to trace. From these signs, and from the coins he found there, Clarke rightly concluded that this 'ancient citadel on its elevated spot of ground, surrounded on all sides by a level plain', was 'evidently the remains of New Ilium'.
But although some scholars accepted the proposition made by the armchair topographer Maclaren in , that this must also be the site of Homeric Troy, no attempt was made to test the hypothesis by the spade until Frank Calvert and Schliemann. Such was the meagre archaeological background to this famous place when Frank Calvert turned to it.
At this stage the Troy-Bunarbashi theory still held the field, but after excavations there in had drawn a blank, Frank Calvert was finally able to dig on Hisarlik.
It was a site he must have known since childhood, and he acquired from a local farmer a field which contained the northern part of the mound. Libraries near you: WorldCat. In search of the Trojan War , Penguin Books. In search of the Trojan War , Broadcasting Corporation. In search of the Trojan war , Guild Publishing. In search of the Trojan War , Facts on File. In search of the Trojan War Publisher unknown. Times To B. Edition Notes "A Plume book. Bibliography: p. T8 W66 The Physical Object Pagination p.
Number of pages Community Reviews 0 Feedback? Loading Related Books. Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! A study of the archaeological, literary, and historical records which describe the siege of Troy Includes bibliographical references pages and index The search for Troy -- Heinrich Schliemann -- The coming of the Greeks -- Homer: the singer of tales -- Agamemnon's empire -- A forgotten empire: the Hittites and the Greeks -- The peoples of the sea -- Conclusions: the end of the Bronze Age.
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