GoKawiilIn 1873 a German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann announced he had found Troy. He had — sort of.
He had dug a seventeen-metre trench straight down through nine stacked cities, blasted past the Bronze Age levels that are Homer's likeliest setting, and stopped only when he hit a layer about a thousand years too early. The hoard of gold and copper he smuggled out of the Ottoman Empire as der Schatz des Priamos — the Treasure of Priam — is now thought to belong to a king who lived a millennium before any Trojan War. The Mask of Agamemnon, which he hammered out of a Mycenaean grave three years later, is also off by several centuries.
But he was right about the place. Troy was real, and the dirt under it has been telling its own story for forty centuries.
The hill nobody believed in
For most of European intellectual history, Troy was assumed to be a fiction. Aristotle had thought it was real; the post-classical world stopped thinking about it at all. By the early nineteenth century the educated consensus was that Homer was a poet, not a historian, and that whatever city he was describing — if any — was lost beyond recovery.
Then, in 1822, a Scottish journalist named Charles Maclaren — who had never been to Anatolia — published a quiet pamphlet, A Dissertation on the Topography of the Plain of Troy, suggesting that the hill of Hisarlık on the Turkish coast, a low mound about five kilometres inland from the Dardanelles, fit Homer's geography. The plain was the right size, the rivers were in the right places, the sea was the right distance away. Nobody listened. Maclaren was a journalist; the academy was elsewhere.
A man named Frank Calvert
The first person who did was an English diplomat. Frank Calvert was the British consular agent at the Dardanelles, the youngest son of a trading family that had settled there. He had grown up in the area. He owned the eastern half of the Hisarlık mound. From 1865 he had been digging in test pits — quietly, on his own land, with his own money — and finding pottery, walls, and ceramics that did not match the Roman period above them. He could not afford to dig the whole hill himself.
In 1868 a wealthy German businessman, in Anatolia for the first time in his life, knocked on his door. Calvert told the businessman everything. He showed him the test pits. He shared his theory. He pointed to the spot. He had found his patron.
The patron's name was Heinrich Schliemann.
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