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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > July/August 1999

Priam’s Treasure

The story behind the 4,000-year-old hoard of Trojan gold

By David A. Traill

Heinrich Schliemann’s second season of excavation in 1872 on the mound of Hisarlik, which he fervently believed to be the site of Homer’s Troy,1 had ended in triumph. He had discovered, so he thought, the “Great Tower of Ilium”—which Hector’s wife Andromache anxiously climbed upon learning that the Trojans were being pushed back by the advancing Greek armies (Iliad, Book VI). Shortly afterward, however, in February 1873, Frank Calvert, a British expatriate who had initially interested Schliemann in excavating Hisarlik, published an article in the Levant Herald in which he debunked Schliemann’s “Great Tower.”2 Calvert, who had spent most […]

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Endnotes

1.

See David A. Traill, Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).

2.

For more information on Frank Calvert, see Susan Heuck Allen’s Finding the Walls of Troy: Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

3.

Heinrich Schliemann, Troy and Its Remains (London: John Murray, 1875; New York: Dover, 1994), pp. 323–24. I have retranslated the passage to make it conform more closely with the German original.

4.

For more details on Schliemann’s life and the history of the treasure, see Traill, Schliemann of Troy; for the period after his death, see Caroline Moorehead, Lost and Found: The 9,000 Treasures of Troy (New York: Viking, 1996); and for a good summary of the entire issue, see Donald Easton, “Priam’s Treasure: the Full Story,” Anatolian Studies 44 (1994).

5.

Anthony Snodgrass, “Betrayer of the Truth” (review of David A. Traill, Schliemann of Troy), Nature 378 (Nov. 2, 1995), p. 113.

6.

K.R. Maxwell-Hyslop, Western Asiatic Jewelry c. 300–612 B.C. (London: Methuen, 1971), pp. 58–60.

7.

Manfred Korfmann, “The Value of the Finds to the Scientific Community,” in Elizabeth Simpson, ed., The Spoils of War (New York: Harry Abrams, 1997), p. 207.

8.

For a good introduction to the complex issues involved, see The Spoils of War, in particular the article by Donald Easton, “Excavation of the Trojan Treasures, and Their History up to the Death of Schliemann in 1890,” pp. 194–199.