Posted
on January 6, 2014
“I'm
going to excavate Troy when I grow up!”
As
an adult, Heinrich Schliemann says that he made this declaration (or
something like it, and in the German language) when he was just 8
years old. His father had given him an illustrated book called Ludwig
Jerrer's Illustrated
History of the World
for Christmas, and he had also filled his son's ears with Homer's
epics, the Iliad
and the Odyssey.
These
grand
tales were accepted as fiction by scholars during Schliemann's time,
so when he grew up it was going to be very hard to fulfill that
promise. After all, Troy was a myth, right?
Born
on this date in 1822, Schliemann's family was too poor to pay for a
university education. He left school at age 14 and did a variety of
jobs, including working as a grocer, cabin boy on a steamer ship,
messenger, office attendant, bookkeeper, and more.
One
thing that Schliemann was really good at was learning languages. He
worked in Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, and California just as
it was joining the United States. And he learned other languages as
he worked in the import/export business. He once said that it took him only six weeks to learn a language, and whatever country he was in, he
wrote his diary in that nation's language! He eventually could talk
to people in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish,
Polish, Italian, Greek, Latin, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, and of
course German.
 |
| Schliemann made his first million before he was 30. |
 |
| This is Schliemann's second wife wearing the jewels he claimed to be Priam's treasure. |
From
what I've read about him, it looks like Schliemann couldn't be
trusted—he sometimes lied and cheated. (I guess we cannot really
trust his statements about what he said when he was 8 years old, and how long it took him to learn a language!)
Despite
his flaws, Schliemann did do us a service by directing the general
public's interest to the possibility that ancient stories could have
some historical reality. As a pioneer in archeology, he did some
really bad things (such as using dynamite in his desire to quickly
get to the layer of dirt he was interested in, thereby destroying
some artifacts and walls), but he did win interest from both scholars
and the general public for the new field.
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on this date:
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