Heinrich Schliemann
German businessman and archaeologist (1822–1890)
Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Schliemann (6 January 1822 – 26 December 1890) was a German businessman and an influential amateur archaeologist. He was an advocate of the historicity of places mentioned in the works of Homer and an archaeological excavator of Hisarlik, now presumed to be the site of Troy, along with the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns. His work lent weight to the idea that Homer's Iliad reflects historical events. Schliemann's excavation of nine levels of archaeological remains has been criticized as destructive of significant historical artifacts, including the level that is believed to be the historical Troy.
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Quotes
edit- From that moment, I did not cease to pray to God that by his grace it might one day be permitted to me to learn Greek.
- Quoted in Robert Payne, The Gold of Troy (1958), p. 21
- Minna showed me the greatest sympathy and entered into all my vast plans for the future. ... It was agreed between us that as soon as we were grown up we would marry, and then at once set to work to explore all the mysteries of Ankershagen; excavating ... the vast treasures hidden by Henning, then Henning’s sepulchre, and lastly Troy; nay we could imagine nothing pleasanter than to spend all our lives in digging for relics of the past.
- Quoted in Leonard Cottrell, The Bull of Minos (1955) [1953], p. 39
- The Trojans were, therefore, an Aryan race, as is clear from the evidence of symbols engraved on terracotta discs. The nation which succeeded the Trojans was also long-lived as it occurs in every soil layer between a depth of 10 and 7 m. It was of Aryan origin for it featured numerous Aryan symbols; and I believe that I have demonstrated that several of these also belonged to our ancestors at a time when the Germans, Pelasgians, Hindus, Celts and Greeks all belonged to one nation and spoke a single language.
- Report on Trojan antiquities (April 24, 1872), quoted in Jean-Paul Demoule, The Indo-Europeans: Archaeology, Language, Race, and the Search for the Origins of the West (1992), p. 76
