Part One: Heinrich Schliemann: The Archaeologist Who Destroyed Troy

Sophie (0:01)

Causer Media.

Robert Evans (0:06)

Welcome back, everybody, to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And we've all had a heavy year, both in the real world and in terms of subjects on this podcast. We got the year started with, God, a lot of child abuse, way more than I tend to stack at the start of a year in a normal content schedule. And then the last few weeks have been genocide after genocide, I mean, I guess just two, but that's a lot of genocides.

So I figured, let's have something fun this week. So we're gonna talk about a piece of shit, but we're gonna have a good time doing it. This is not gonna be like heartbreakingly depressing, except for at a couple of points, but not in the mass murder way, just in the, oh, wow, that's a bummer kind of way. Anyway, I've teased the episodes enough. Let me tease our guest, Kristen Conger, host of Unladylike and Conspiracy. She wrote, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming. How are you doing?

Kristen Conger (1:01)

I'm so thrilled to be here and I'm great. I was emotionally prepared to be just pummeled, but I'm glad to hear we're gonna be having some laughs. Yeah.

Robert Evans (1:14)

We're gonna talk about two old-timey archaeologists who sucked and destroyed a shitload of historical artifacts by being greedy idiots, but are funny. It's old-timey, guys, 1800s Europeans rampaging around historical sites. It's gonna be a good time.

No kids are gonna get mass-murdered. I mean, some workers die of malaria, but when isn't that happening, right? Yeah. No one's to blame for malaria other than mosquitoes.

Sophie (1:42)

Is the theme of this episode Men Stupid, We Laugh at Them?

Robert Evans (1:45)

No.

Our episodes are mostly about one specific guy, Heinrich Schliemann, who destroyed Troy, like the ruins of Troy he accidentally destroyed as he was trying to find them. But we're also going to talk about an Italian guy who destroyed some other stuff as like a little bit of an amuse-bouche. So I've got a fun one for you, Kristin. Do you got anything else you want to plug or say about yourself before we go in?

Kristen Conger (2:07)

No.

I love to laugh at absurd archaeologists. This sounds fantastic.

Robert Evans (2:16)

Yeah.

Kristen Conger (2:16)

Yeah. I think I'm ready.

Robert Evans (2:19)

This will be heartbreaking for the archaeologists in the audience, but I think everyone else will have a good time.

So archaeology has not existed quite as long as civilization, but as soon as we've had civilization long enough for any of them to fall into ruin, there were people that we could rightly call precursors to modern archaeologists and historians. The best evidence for this is the fact that in ancient Egypt, there were ancient Egyptian museums and Egyptologists who studied ancient Egypt, because Egypt is that old, that like 3,000 years ago, there's guys in Egypt who are studying ancient Egypt, because it just keeps going back.

Kristen Conger (3:04)

Got some ancient Egyptian docents.

Robert Evans (3:06)

Yeah, absolutely. The first docents would have been ancient Egyptians puzzling over artifacts from ancienter Egyptians being like, how the fuck did they do that? They couldn't have built these ziggurats on their own. It must have been aliens. I don't think they were as stupid as we are, actually.

The most famous of these guys is probably Khaym Visit, who was the fourth son of Pharaoh Ramses II. He devoted a great deal of energy and public funding to restoring ancient monuments. There's quite a lot we only know about ancient Egypt because Khaym Watzit was interested in it and preserved it. Stuff that would have happened centuries or even a thousand years or something like that before his time.

That's pretty cool, I think. Modern archaeology, though, dates back to about the Renaissance, right? That's kind of when Western people started really thinking about like, oh, there's like a lot of old shit around us. Maybe we shouldn't just steal everything from it to build houses. Perhaps some of this should be preserved. Maybe we have enough stone that we can leave the Parthenon intact or whatever. There's this kind of European revival of interest in classic antiquity, particularly ancient Rome. Michelangelo, the artist, not the Ninja Turtle, observed excavations of old Roman ruins, and so did a number of other notable men from that period of time. The ruins of Pompeii were discovered by the architect Domenico Fontana at the end of the 16th century, and Herculaneum followed it around 1709, and there were organized excavations in the mid 1700s for both cities. They were digging up before the US declared its independence, they were digging up Pompeii. That's about how old, something we recognize as modern archaeology goes back.