...so long as the city of Priam remained untaken, the great wall of the Achaeans stood firm; but when the bravest of the Trojans were no more, and many also of the Argives, though some were yet left alive--when, moreover, the city was sacked in the tenth year, and the Argives had gone back with their ships to their own country--then Neptune and Apollo took counsel to destroy the wall, and they turned on to it the streams of all the rivers from Mount Ida into the sea....
Homer, The Illiad: Book XII (trans. Samuel Butler, 1898)
Numerous attempts were made in the late 19th century to prove and disprove the theories of Lyell, Thomsen, Darwin and others (see yesterday's post). Excavations cropped up all over the planet. Some of these excavations advanced the cause of archaeology. Others did not. Some, as we shall see below, proved to be a mixed blessing.
For many centuries, it was widely believed that the events recounted in Homer's The Illiad and The Odyssey did not reflect actual historical events. Of course, there also had always been others who believed otherwise. One of those who sought to prove that an historical Troy actually had existed was Frank Calvert:
Born in Malta in 1828, Calvert spent a large part of his adult life as a consular official in the Dardanelles. He lived in the Troad, where he spent some 15 years excavating in and around a site that had been proposed as the possible location of Troy (Homer's Priam) as early as 1822. Calvert and his family had bought several parcels of land in this area, known then (as now) as Hisarlik. This site, a tell located about 6.5 km from the Aegean Sea in modern day Turkey, would prove a thorn in the side of archaeology for well over a century.
Calvert first came into possession of some 2000 acres near the site in 1857. In 1864 he came into possession of part of the tell itself. Although Calvert excavated in and around these sites methodically and with some precision, he lacked the financial resources to excavate the sites fully.
In 1868, Calvert met a recently retired German businessman who had made very large fortunes as, successively, a stock market investor, a banker during the California Gold Rush, by cornering the market in indigo, and by cornering as well the markets in saltpeter, sulfur and lead. Fluent in over a dozen languages, Heinrich Schliemann was able to retire by age 41. Long interested in Troy himself, and with money to spare, Schliemann and Calvert seemed like a natural fit for each other. But appearances can be deceiving.
Schliemann basically took over the excavations. Where Calvert had been precise and methodical, Schliemann was anything but. Schliemann published finds. Calvert published rebuttals to Schliemann's finds, both in terms of methodology and interpretation.
Schliemann disparaged Calvert in print. He also exported several finds without license from the government to do so. The symbiotic relationship between Calvert and Schliemann became increasingly frayed.
In 1874, Schliemann published his famous claim that he had found the ruins of Troy (in 1873) and he had the treasure to prove it. This generated a firestorm of publicity, which backfired against Schliemann when the Ottoman government revoked his permission to dig and sued him for a share of the so-called Priam's Treasure.
Later scholarship rejected much of Schliemann's claim. In the late 1990s Calvert's heirs sought title to that part of the find recovered from Calvert's properties.
This story has been recounted in numerous titles over the century. The earliest such titles often bought into Schliemann's own accounts of what transpired, while later titles have sought to correct the historical record:
What is beyond dispute is that Schliemann would not have accomplished what he did without Calvert, and vice-versa. And what also is beyond dispute is that Schliemann's excavations damaged a lot of the historical record at Hisarlik.
As we shall see on Monday, this was but one of many burdens that archaeology would have to bear while it matured as a discipline...
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