Schliemann found Troy by demolishing it – his 17-meter trench blasted past the actual Bronze Age levels and stopped at a gold hoard 1,000 years too early.
Key Takeaways
Frank Calvert, British consular agent who owned half of Hisarlık, did the foundational work and shared everything with Schliemann, who then sidelined him.
Schliemann violated his Ottoman firman, smuggled “Priam’s Treasure” in his wife Sophia’s luggage, lost the first international Ottoman antiquities lawsuit, and paid 5x the judgment to keep the gold.
The treasure is from Troy II (~2400 BC); the most plausible Trojan War candidates are Troy VI and VIIa (~1300-1180 BC), which Schliemann misidentified as late Greek intrusion and dug straight through.
Hittite cuneiform tablets from Hattusa reference a western Anatolian vassal kingdom “Wiluša” – almost certainly Greek Ilios – and a 13th-century BC letter mentions a war fought over it between Hittite and Mycenaean powers.
The gold moved from Athens to Berlin in 1881, survived WWII in a Nazi flak tower, flew to Moscow on a Soviet transport plane, and now sits in the Pushkin Museum basement under a 1998 Russian law blocking return.
