Schliemann’s Troy: History Beneath the Legends

Hitherto the latter half of the 19th century, the historical consensus around Troy – the mythic, legendary location from Homer’s notable work, the Iliad – was thought to be just that – a legend. However, due to the work of Heinrich Schliemann, a famous German businessman and amateur archaeologist, we now know that Troy was a real place and that the millennia old Illiad had some historical truth to it.

Schliemann was interested in the city of Troy from his boyhood, when he would read the Iliad and dream of himself in the situations and the vast lands Homer described. This, in turn, led him to a life of the pursuit of his childhood dream, Troy, which, of course, came to fruition.

During his controversial excavation, taking place in 1870 in modern-day Turkey, Schliemann notably destroyed the top layers of the city – ironically, the very thing he was looking for. Though he is considered to be the founder of modern archaeology, Schliemann’s practices during his excavations are now a textbook example of how not to conduct an archaeological study.

At the discovered site lay gold masks, various weapons, cutlery, cups, and treasure; most notably Priam’s Treasure, a collection of gold and valuable artifacts, was found with it and was later adorned by his wife, Sophia, in an otherwise infamous photograph. The artifacts later gave Schliemann legal trouble due to him smuggling them out of Turkey.

Sophia Schliemann Adorning Piram’s Treasure (Public Domain)

We should, however, note that this discovery is one of the most consequential in archaeological history, and lends credence to the ideas that past, historical sites, civilizations, and societies did, in fact, once exist, that were previously thought of as nothing more than myth.

There have been numerous individuals who have searched for and postulated about past, lost, ancient civilizations, such as Graham Handcock, Ignatius L. Donnelly, and Percy Faucett, among many others, who dedicated their lives to discovering once-alive ancient, buried truths.

This begs the question: does the discovery of Troy, a once-dismissed location thought to have been formed in Homer’s inquisitive imagination that was found out to be real, give the possibility of lost civilizations such as Plato’s Atlantis, the Lost City of Z, or any other past societies that have crumbled under the weight of history? 

Atlantis – Sunken, But Not Forgotten

Atlantis, for example, was a place where, as Plato, its supposed creator, described it as suffering:

But at a later time there occurred portentous earthquakes and floods, [25d] and one grievous day and night befell them, when the whole body of your warriors was swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner was swallowed up by the sea and vanished; wherefore also the ocean at that spot has now become impassable and unsearchable, being blocked up by the shoal mud which the island created as it settled down.”

It is an interesting precept to believe in such an esoteric thing: a place, a vast, prosperous place that, due to its eventual immorality, was sunk to the bottom of the ocean by the furious gods. This is not to say that the Atlantis that Plato is referring to is the real thing, as much of the story is hyperbole that is used to represent a greater message; rather, that there are similar places akin to Atlantis in our world, such as the Underwater City of Cuba, which boats many man-made like structures, and which Graham Hancock, the famous historian and pseudo-archeologist, theorizes, could have “been submerged by some colossal tectonic event rather than by rising sea levels,” with the sea levels rising being the common belief among academics.

Plato’s Illustration of Atlantis, the legendary city that was thrown under the ocean depths. (Athanasius Kircher/Public Domain)

The Lost City of Z – Lost But Can Be Found

Somewhere in South America, deep, deep, in that continent, lies a lost, advanced civilization, that collapsed due to unknown reasons, and has yet to be discovered. So, said Percy Fawcett, a British explorer and World War I veteran who, multiple times, searched for the “Lost City of Z,” where he hoped to discover a vast, ancient society, buried under the thick mass of the Amazon rainforest. These excursions into this dangerous territory would eventually cost Fawcett his and his crew’s lives.

Indeed, almost one hundred years after Fawcett’s disappearance, both a book and film, aptly titled, The Lost City of Z, took their versions of the life of Fawcett and his journey. Originally of British aristocratic descent, Fawcett took his life into his own hands and took to his passion: adventure. And adventure he took up, when in the early twentieth century he visited places such as Morocco, Bolivia, and Brazil, along with a multitude of other places. However, out of the numerous sites he ventured into, it was within the Amazon rainforest where he found the most enjoyment.

In 1908, on an expedition to find the source of the Rio Verde, where he was faced with mutiny, he inspired director Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous film, The Lost World. But, of course, he made history with his doomed expedition to find the Lost City of Z, a place that had been supplanted in the European mind since the early sixteenth century. Here, it was said, deep in the Amazon, laid a city filled with gold and riches, hidden from the rest of the civilized world.

After a failed 1920 expedition to “Z,” Fawcett, his son, and his son’s friend ventured yet again in 1924, never to be seen again. It is an unfortunate tale, but it is a tale of adventure and the lust for knowledge.

Indeed, there are lost South American civilizations waiting to be discovered, such as those who created the Nazca Lines, an extraordinary feat of human ingenuity. Fawcett represents humanity’s unrelenting drive to discover the unknown, and to uncover our past.

Percy Fawcett, Explorer of the Lost City of Z. (Public Domain)

Conclusion  

There can be – and is – so much of the world that we do not know, and Schliemann’s excavation, though flawed, showed us that there is so much more that we do not know, and it is literally under our feet to discover – we just have to be willing to find it in the first place. We know that lost civilizations exist – they just have yet to be found. Perhaps modern academia, historians, and archaeologists should not be afraid of tainting their or their universities’ credibility, but rather should be attempting to rediscover that which has been lost. Therefore, we should take a closer, more personal look at ancient maps, stories, and tales about these buried ancient societies to fully discover the true history of mankind in all its glory. 

Top image: Excavated site of ancient Troy.            Source: Jorge Láscar/CC BY 2.0

By Walker Ramspott

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