(Or: I’m Still Mad About Heinrich Schliemann and You Should Be Too)
Editors: Elim Chan and Alloe Mak
How much do you know about the ancient city of Troy?
“Trojan War?” you say, probably. “Achilles? Big horse with people inside?”
Absolutely on all three counts. You are a genius of historical proportions.
The thing about studying ancient history is that you have to go into your research with the arduous and wickedly humbling knowledge that the subjects for which you search for so tirelessly might not exist; not now in the present and, not, well, ever. Though what you consider “real” might also hinge on the knife edge of where you classify your particular historical niche (Exhibit A: King Arthur of the Arthurian legends could have either been a real king called Arthur, been a fictional king based on the values of the time, or been several different kings who were at some point all called King Arthur for varying reasons. The idea of King Arthur is very real. The stories are real: I have seven books about the guy in my bedroom. But is King Arthur real? Or, rather, the question you likely intend when you ask this: did any of that happen? That depends on what—or who—you’re looking for).
In ancient mythological history, this line is pulled to an unflattering and too-taught fray (Exhibit B: King Philip, the father of Alexander the Great, was a very real human man. Whether or not he was the son of Zeus as he so claimed, however, is less . . . certain).
To find the definitive places where “real” (as in: this is a thing that happened) history bleeds to myth is like handing somebody a boxcutter, blindfolding them, and demanding they accurately carve a map of planet Earth into cardboard. I say “bleeds to myth,” and not “turns to myth,” because it is something so gradual and so leeching that you may not find where the spill began, and if you point to one part of the stained cloth of history and say, “Here is where the blood has landed!” somebody else is sure to spit at you and say, “No, that is not blood, that’s just the pattern of the cloth! It’s history!” and then a third person will say, “Well, it might have started off as a stain of blood but we actually prefer this cloth with this stain and so from now on we will fabricate all of our cloths to replicate this stain and so technically, I guess, it’s real! This is history!” and then all three of you will argue about this forever and then someday the Earth will explode in a fiery heat death and nobody will ever know what the hell Stonehenge was for or where that giant statue of Zeus ended up.
History is made by its teller. And the tellers of history are in turn made by heaps of jagged rock and stories written on brittle paper in unknown languages. To put together the truth of human history is a feat as tedious as completing a puzzle made of only middle pieces. Also, somebody two thousand years ago threw out the puzzle box lid with the photo of what we were trying to make on it because they thought it “wasn’t important” and “nobody would ever forget this so why should we keep it around?” (And then the Roman Empire fell and nobody could replicate their stupid concrete.) It is hard not to blame humans of the past for their historical treasons. Those Romans didn’t know we would not be able to replicate their concrete and the ancient Egyptian merchants didn’t know we’d never be able to locate that elusive trading kingdom called Punt, but it feels oh-so-good to think that they should have because that would make our jobs so much easier, wouldn’t it? It would have been so much easier if everybody had gone about their daily lives thinking, “Let’s keep all of these manuscripts safe with handy translation guides for languages we don’t know exist yet and let’s bubble-wrap all our temples for easy study just in case we are engaged in a kingdom shattering war in which all our monuments are destroyed.” Because masses of humans do not live believing they are part of eras and they certainly do not sit around waiting for their worlds to end and anticipating the ways they will be dissected in literary journals. Nobody woke up one day and said, “Oh look! It appears we have entered the Bronze Age! Time to begin behaving accordingly!” or “I was born in 254 BCE. I can’t wait for CE to start! Just waiting for that guy to be born. Who? I’m not so sure. But whatever we’re living now is before that.”
We have Frankensteined time into digestible pieces but all those historical dead people didn’t get that memo. All of this is to say: historical preservation is an art. Archaeology is as good as necromancy. Every piece of human existence is still here, somewhere, inscribed onto caves and underneath cities and in the voices of those who have carried living stories onward from generations in the most convoluted game of broken telephone to ever be played. Keeping it intact is not only for the good of nerds who make careers out of arguing with corpses but for the everyday understanding of how and why did we get here the way that we got here? What battles were won to put you here? What stories inspired those battles? What battles inspired those stories? Where did anything happen? Did anything happen, or is Last Thursdayism the philosophy to trample them all? Why is it called Thursday? Why did we name an English day of the week after the Norse god of thunder, Thor? Where did Thor come from? Who built his temples? Where are his temples? Did he have temples, or were those just cool-looking Scandinavian buildings that we assumed were his temples? And how are we certain of any of that?
We’re certain because it’s there: because it was protected: because somebody somewhere in time decided “Remember this!” and we said, “We’re trying!” We have been trying since we have had histories to try for. Ancient Egypt had archaeologists. Ancient Egypt already had enough buried history to suffice a profession at digging it up. Every ounce of Greek mythology that you have likely heard in your one-time watching of the Percy Jackson movie was already considered mythology in 800 BCE. By the time of Alexander the Great, the hero Achilles was already considered a character of fiction. These are not only our mysteries—it’s theirs too! We are uncovering the truth of human history not only for ourselves but for the billions of people whose skeletons can still listen to our frantic flipping of library book pages and heedless typing of research essays. Can you feel the pulsing of the responsibility that comes with this sort of duty? To create a comprehensive Wayback Machine for all of time?
There is a reason that destroyed history is a tragedy. The burning of the Library of Alexandria would have been a topic of feverish Ancient Roman video essays as is the subject of unaired and lost episodes of Spongebob on YouTube. The protection of human existence is a fickle and fragile one. The greatest Mysteries of Human Evolvement can be lost at the random misplacing of bone fragments or cracked stone. There is so much—so much—you and I will never know because of the comically typical and painfully human error of carelessness.
It is naive to empathize with those who will not feel your sympathy, but can you imagine your existence being a topic for debate because somebody happened to burn the ruins that indict you? This is why archaeologists keep the “useless” bottoms of Mesopotamian bowls in isolated chamber boxes and this is why you cannot touch authentic Celtic manuscripts without gloves on. It is a testament to the lives of each craftsman and each bard who put something into the world with the intention of it staying there. This is the grueling need for precision and care in the uncovering of human history. And this is what amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann ignored when he took several boxes of dynamite to the newly discovered site of the ancient city of Troy, blowing it apart, and thereby losing it to humanity forever.
How much do you know about the ancient city of Troy?
Did you know it was blown to shreds?
In June of 1893, German businessman and Ancient Greek fanboy Heinrich Schliemann discovered what he believed to be “King Priam’s Treasure Trove” on a site of several layered city ruins in Hissarlik, Turkey. The Treasure Trove was amongst a total of nine cities that Schliemann uncovered in Turkey, his hypothesis being that the site of the Trojan War as described by the poet Homer in his epics the Iliad and the Odyssey was beneath two city layers on this site of ruins.
Schliemann made several dull mistakes on his excavation journey—from his lack of documentation of the undisturbed cities before he began his digging to the ignoring of workmen warning him against tearing the whole damn place apart because Schliemann was just positive he saw some gold in the dirt. The technicalities of this disastrous excuse for an archaeological dig are endless and painful, each with its own special breed of brash inexperience. However, the intricacies of the journey into Troy aside, here is an oversimplification of what you must note:
First, in order to reach the aforementioned hypothesized Troy beneath the layers of “not-Troy,” Schliemann used dynamite to blow up these top layers. Down fell a rain of ruined and charred historical rock.
Second: Schliemann was devastatingly wrong. It turned out that the top layers which Schliemann had dubbed “not-Troy” were, in fact, the likely site of the real city of Troy, and Schliemann’s hypothesized Troy was found by archaeologists to be anywhere from 2000 to 3000 years too early to be the real Troy.
Heinrich Schliemann found the ancient city of Troy and probable site of the most famous works of literature in human history, and he proceeded to burn it to a crisp.
I often struggle at relaying the sheer absurd magnitude of this being a Thing that Happened. I try to come up with allegories for my non-history friends. But I cannot find a single comparison that yields the same terror as Heinrich Schliemann blowing up the fucking city of Troy. He did that. Heinrich Schliemann blew up the city of Troy. How many times until it makes you feel physically sick? How many times until you feel the mountainous historical truths escaping you in a fiery and irreversible instant? How many times until it dawns on you how much we could have known if somebody different had got there first? Heinrich Schliemann blew up the city of Troy. And we aren’t ever getting it back.
We know Troy was real. We know there was a war in Troy. Was this the Trojan War? Or was it a Trojan War? And if it wasn’t the Trojan War, what Trojan War was it? Schliemann has doomed the Iliad and the Odyssey to a Schroedingers limbo of reality and unreality. It’s worse than history taken through the progression of nature: through paint fading and volcanoes erupting and storms sinking cities, because this was conscious. This was a robbery. (A literal robbery, given that Schliemann and his wife stole armloads of Ottoman jewelry from the site of Troy, which Schliemann’s wife proceeded to wear to public gatherings!)
The minutiae of the archaeological malpractice of Schliemann’s excavation of Troy is something I find does not take to the average person not enthused in the world of academic history. I can tell you about how Schliemann took credit for the better work of dozens of archaeologists on his team, or about the plethora of museums that Schliemann’s work donned without permission of the rightful owners of the land of Troy. It was not as simple as “this was definitely Troy without question and every ounce of it is gone without chance of recuperation,” because tragedy is rarely poetic enough to be finite.
And maybe, just maybe, there are forgivenesses due to Schliemann and his amateur work. Maybe, like the Romans unaware they should have written down their recipes for concrete, Schliemann could not have been expected to know proper mapping and logging techniques for the site of nine cities that he found. Archaeology was not so refined a field in 1893 that “let’s blow up this crumbling rock” was to be met with inherent skepticism by perhaps even professionals (which Schliemann was not). Maybe looking back on archaeological mishaps of two hundred years ago with presentist superiority is not a fair way to analyze the frustrating, yes, but perhaps not ill-intentioned work of Heinrich Schliemann.
Maybe.
Or, maybe, he should have just known better.
Maybe we should stop giving leniency to a grown man who took dynamite to a five thousand-year-old historical site that he so thoroughly believed was the real fucking Troy. I don’t care if archaeology was brand-new! (It wasn’t. Re: Ancient Egyptian archaeologists.) Naivete is not an excuse for negligence. If your passion and ego led you to believe you were the Best One to carry out any given unearthing of history’s frail ghosts, you assume the responsibility for the safekeeping of their legacies. Bar none.
The determination of the real and of the fake is not only for online listicles of cool history facts: it is the backbone of understanding human purpose in the cosmos. It is the dismantling of biases in the recounting of history. Heinrich Schliemann hoarded human discovery to his sullied chest and then snuffed it out with a pillow before anybody could give their say with the unmarred source material. Instead of striding forwards in the realm of codifying Homer’s epics into what we might understand, we have spent every moment since the destruction of Troy attempting to remedy what we could have already had access to. Congratulations, Schliemann! You have invented time travel by being a self-obsessed Demon of History, because now we have been effectively cornered in 1893 Hissarlik, Turkey, forever! If only your time machine of historical mutiny would start up again, then we might all forgive you for your impunity!
I find it difficult to think of things scarier than missing histories. Blocks of our past are forever unknown. Things were happening during all of that lost time: people were waking and eating and living during these splotches of vanished yesterdays. Archaeology is only a dying field because the world is not big enough to hold onto so much past and we are rushing to collect as much of it as possible before the sea erodes the stone and before the last knowers of ancient board game rules pass away.
History is as good as any organism: history dies all on its own. But sometimes history is murdered by people like Schliemann. Put him on trial! Watch how he rots beneath the charges of the first-degree killings of the maybe-mythical Trojan heroes. The first-degree killings of the absolutely-real Trojan citizens who might have taught us their languages if we’d been kind enough to dust off their bones and clean up the rust over the walls of their houses. The worst of it is we cannot even begin to fathom what we might have learned from Troy. Hell, it might have been entirely useless! (though I doubt this.) But we had the right to know. What made Schliemann more deserving of the sight of an unwrecked Troy than me or you? Why do we let murderers of history publish their grisly autopsies and call it academia?
Kenneth W. Harl, a Yale Classics Ph.D. and Professor of History, once claimed with wry and exhausted sarcasm typical of historians speaking on the subject of destroyed archaeological sites, that “Schliemann’s excavations were carried out with such rough methods that he did to Troy what the Greeks could not do in their times, destroying and levelling down the entire city walls to the ground.”
And, really, sincerely, I hope this is true. I hope that in some needlessly roundabout way, Schliemann’s annihilation of Troy was some long-founded continuation and conclusion to the war which said annihilation of Troy has prevented us from ever knowing the truth of. Because if it isn’t, then what are we left with? We’re left with a hopelessly incomplete almanac of time. We’re left wandering in historical purgatory. We’re left with echoing dynamite explosions.
What do you know about the ancient city of Troy?
Nothing. Everything there was to know was lost in the blast.
Heinrich Schliemann blew up the city of Troy. Do you get it now?
I don’t know how else to say this in a way that will cut: this is a city that had been standing since 3600 BCE (3000 BCE if you’d like to be technical). This is a city that had been standing for five thousand years and it’s just gone. Can you fathom? Can you imagine all of what we don’t know? All of what we could have known? The truths and weapons and proofs of myth? The timelines we could have outlined? The events of this mythical war that has plagued history for years, that has become a staple of all of human civilization?
This was a city: this was the city: and it’s just gone. We cannot know what was real and we won’t ever know what was real because this pompous man who could not have been more interested in Troy than me has taken it away from us. Please tell me you understand what he took from us.
History is an endless stream of categorizing: we categorize the real from the fake and we categorize the fake into its own niches of fiction and we categorize the real onto a timeline that tells us who we are and what we are doing on this planet and tells us about our resilience and tells us about everything we did to stay here because we always deserved to be here and to have our kingdoms and this isn’t just about fucking Troy anymore. This is about selfishness. History does not belong to the individual who decides to go gallivanting around Turkey with explosives. History is so deeply ours, history is what we share, and now this history is gone and it was never in his right to take that away from us—away from you. Do you get it now? Do you understand what was taken from you? That was ours; that was yours. It was taken from you and you should be mad about it. That was a piece of your puzzle. All of that history was built out of the same exploding stardust that you were made of.
Do you get it? Those are your limbs. Those are your eyes and your ankles burning in the ruins of Troy. That’s your heart. Your people built that city and they wanted you to know it: they wanted you to remember the wars they may or may not have fought. Please feel patriotic for your history, please feel patriotic for your planet, please feel patriotic for your galaxy. Please look at me and understand that this is your birthright: that those stairs were your birthright, that those walls that have been lodged into the sand are your birthright. It was taken away from you, it was taken away from all of us.
Never stop being angry at stolen history. Never stop being angry at the mutilation of your past. Never stop yelling because you were made to yell because it was never up to any one person to decide when it was time to take away morsels of you. It’s never up to anybody to decide when stories are over. Histories do not exist in isolation. We are one timeline, we are one series of consecutive events, and just because the linearity of how we experience time means you were not there when Troy was teeming does not mean you did not live in that city. We made up these borders, we made up these names for places, we made up these names for eras, and we made up these names for times, but it has always been one simultaneous story and the story is yours. Don’t let anybody tell you that the story is not yours just because it happened behind you. You are a product of everything and everything is a product of you. The city of Troy was yours and I want you to believe that with everything you have. Please believe it with everything you have.