Part Two: Heinrich Schliemann: The Archaeologist Who Destroyed Troy

Sophie (0:01)

Call zone media.

Robert Evans (0:05)

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And this week, we're talking about the very worst archeologists in all of history, or at least, I mean, particularly a guy who's gonna be on the short list for the most destructive archeologist ever, Heinrich Schliemann. But before we talk more about old Heinie, let's bring back our wonderful guest for this week, Kristin Conger, host of Unladylike and Conspiracy. She wrote two great podcasts. Kristin, welcome back. How are you doing?

Kristin Conger (0:33)

I'm great. Thank you so much for having me back, and excited to learn more about this wretched archeologist.

Robert Evans (0:41)

Yeah. He's about to get really wretched, and he's about to basically purchase a wife, which is always a good time in old timey stories.

Sophie (0:50)

Don't like that phrasing.

Robert Evans (0:54)

Well, yeah, it's not great, Sophie. It's not great. We'll hear about that very soon.

Sophie (0:59)

Okay.

Robert Evans (1:06)

So Heinrich Schliemann is going to make his very first attempt. When we left him off, he'd visited Italy. He'd watched, spent a couple of weeks watching an excavation in Pompeii, and he'd been like, this is really cool. I want to do archeology. Does it have to take so long? Does it have to take a long time to dig things up? What if there were a faster, lazier way?

So he's going to make his first attempt at a dig, really just a few months or weeks after that. And he has, again, very little understanding. He hasn't taken any classes. He just kind of watched a guy and decided he was too slow. So later on in that same 1868 vacation, he travels to Greece and he goes to the summit of Mount Athos, which is in like the main Greek peninsula. And he decides for no real reason that this had been Odysseus' castle, right? Like he sees, finds some ruins, like a buried wall, and he's like, this must have been Odysseus' home. There's no reason to believe this. But one thing, Odysseus came from what scholars would refer to it as Homer's Ithaca, right? There is an island of Ithaca in the Greek area, and Homer was probably writing about that island, right? Odysseus was probably supposed to have been the king of that island of Ithaca, but we don't 100% know. There's some debate about that, and a lot of that debate comes from Heinrich Schlieman, because Heinrich is going to say, no, he didn't come from the island that's named the same as the island in the story. He came from this mountain because I found some stuff there. That's really all it's based on. There's no reason for him to think Odysseus was here. Classic Heinrich. There's no evidence Odysseus was a real person. Yeah, just classic Heinrich. He's like, must have been Odysseus' house because I found some stuff in the ground.

So he decides he's going to put together a dig to excavate whatever is at this site. He has to leave to do this. When he comes back, he can't find the walls. We don't know if he actually ever found walls. He had been pretty sure he had, but he winds up digging and all he digs up is some funeral urns, which is fucked up to dig up. He should probably leave those where they are. Man, I don't know. What do you need those for?

He does eventually find the ruins of a small building that who knows, might have dated back to ancient Greece. I don't know, because Heinrich does no work to preserve the age of anything he's working with.

Whatever real value his find might have had was surely ruined by the fact that he insisted this small shack must have been Odysseus' palace. It's like, no, that's just like a baby of a small barn. So we have no idea. There's no reason to think it was a palace. It's not big.

Now that he's found something wonderful, Heinrich begins increasingly trying to insert himself into scientific conversations about ancient history. He's writing letters. He's reaching out to these real archaeologists and historians. He's trying to publish stuff. He's not really taken seriously at this point, but he is trying to be. In regards to Troy, he becomes what's known at the time as a realist. The realists in regards to Troy are people who believe the Iliad is written about a real war that really happened. There's debate about how much of the poem is true, but there was some real war that it's all based on, right? And this is still debated today. At the time, I think the realist position is more or less the dominant one. That like, yeah, there was some kind of real conflict that it's all based on. But at the time, Heinrich's idea is not the dominant accepted one. There's a lot of people who'd be like, no, it's a complete fable. What's funny is that the ancient peoples, and remember Homer composed his poem centuries after the Trojan War would have occurred, knew where Troy was, and in fact, it was a tourist attraction. Homer is super popular throughout the whole later classical periods and during the Roman Empire, and for a big chunk of Greek classical history and all of Roman history, Troy is a tourist trap. They know where the ruins are, and people will visit to see the sites of the Trojan War.