Heinrich Schliemann at Troy and the so-called ‘Treasure of Priam"

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Archaeology, grade: A, Indiana University, language: English, abstract: The discovery of Hisarlik as Troy by Heinrich Schliemann was certainly one of the most sensational news stories of the nineteenth century. Hisarlik is now commonly assumed to be the site of Troy, the city in and around which Homers Iliad took place. With his extraordinary find, Schliemann radically started to redirect scholarly thinking about the ancient past and, no less he started a controversy about himself, his life and his methods. That controversy, starting back in his own days and still continuing more than 100 years after his death, was in the beginning mainly fought by Schliemann‘s own fellow countryman, but it‘s nowadays a fully international debate. The paper not only covers bibliographical facts of Schliemann‘s life and work, but also the period of his excavation of Troy and the question whether the ‘Treasure of Priam‘ was forged by him or not.