Oddlet: Heinrich Schliemann · 1 min read
Jul 22, 2026
The Man Who Found Troy
What does a man who made three fortunes — in indigo, saltpeter, and Sacramento gold dust — do for an encore at forty-eight?
Heinrich Schliemann was the rare merchant who could brag in fifteen languages. He made his first fortune trading indigo in St. Petersburg, his second selling saltpeter and lead to the Russian army, and his third running a gold-dust bank in Sacramento. At forty-eight, he gave it all up to go and dig for Homer's Troy.
He was, in fairness, correct about where it was. He was wrong about almost everything else.
Convinced the city of Priam had to lie deep beneath the mound at Hissarlik, Schliemann attacked it with dynamite. He blasted a vast trench down through the hill, hauling up walls and pottery and bones as he went. In 1873 he announced he had found "Priam's Treasure" — a hoard of gold diadems and cups he draped over his young Greek wife for the photographs.
The trouble was the depth. The treasure belonged to a king who had lived a thousand years before Priam. The actual Homeric layer of Troy was higher up in the mound, in the rubble Schliemann had already blown through to get to it.
He had found Troy, and then dug straight past it.
Know someone who’d love this?
- Encyclopaedia Britannica - Heinrich Schliemann — Authoritative biographical overview covering birth/death, business career, marriages, excavation campaigns at Troy, Mycenae, Orchomenus and Tiryns, and late-20th-century scholarship on his self-mythologizing.
- Wikipedia - Heinrich Schliemann — Detailed timeline of campaigns (1870, 1871-73, 1878-79, 1882-83, 1889-90), marriage dates, US citizenship (March 29, 1869), Indianapolis divorce, and the fabricated story of Sophia carrying treasure in her shawl.
- Smithsonian Magazine - 'Amateur Archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann Discovered—and Nearly Destroyed—Troy' — Discusses his 'savage and brutal' methods, the 45-foot trench, the destruction of Homeric-era layers, and the dating mismatch between Priam's Treasure and the Trojan War.
- Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - 150 Years Since Schliemann Uncovered the Treasure of Priamos — Museum source on the May 31, 1873 discovery date, contents of Priam's Treasure, the 10,000-gold-franc settlement with the Ottoman government, and the post-1945 fate of the hoard.
- Archaeology Magazine - 'Behind the Mask of Agamemnon' (Calder/Traill debate)
Monsieur Le Blanc
What do you do when you're convinced Napoleon's army is about to kill your pen pal mid-proof?
The Beast of Netherwood
What does the wickedest man in the world order for breakfast when he's a sixty-nine-year-old pensioner in a Hastings boarding house?
The Soot and the Spit
What does a self-taught artist do when the family finally retires the wood stove and his only source of ink disappears?
Wonder, delivered.
A fresh Oddlet in your inbox every morning, a full day before everyone else. True, strange and under a minute.
Free forever. Unsubscribe anytime.