Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Schliemann (German: [ˈʃliːman]; 6 January 1822 – 26 December 1890) was a German businessman and an influential archeologist. He was an advocate of the historicity of places mentioned in the works of Homer and an archaeological excavator of Hisarlık, 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 layers of archaeological remains has been criticized as destructive of significant historical artefacts, including the layer that is believed to be the Homeric Troy.
Schliemann was born 6 January 1822, in Neubukow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin (part of the German Confederation) to Luise Therese Sophie Schliemann and Ernst Schliemann, a Lutheran minister. He was the fifth of nine children. The family moved to Ankershagen in summer 1823. Their second home houses the Heinrich Schliemann Museum today.
Heinrich's father was a poor pastor. His mother died in 1831, when Heinrich was nine years old, and his father sent Heinrich to live with his uncle Friedrich Schliemann, also a pastor. When he was eleven years old, his father paid for his enrollment in the Gymnasium (college preparatory secondary school) at Neustrelitz, but he had to leave it after three months. Heinrich's interest in history was initially encouraged by his father, who had schooled him in the tales of the Iliad and the Odyssey and had given him a copy of Ludwig Jerrer's Illustrated History of the World for Christmas in 1829. Schliemann claimed that at the age of 7 he had declared he would one day excavate the city of Troy.
Heinrich had to transfer to the Realschule (non-college preparatory secondary school) after his father was accused of embezzling church funds and took his exams in 1836. His family's poverty made a university education impossible. In his archaeological career, there was often a division between Schliemann and the educated professionals.
At age 14, after leaving Realschule, Heinrich became an apprentice at Herr Holtz's grocery in Fürstenberg. He later said that his passion for Homer was born when he heard a drunken miller reciting Homeric verses at the grocer's. He laboured for five years until he was forced to leave because he hurt his chest, lifting a heavy barrel and coughing up blood. In 1841, Schliemann moved to Hamburg and became a cabin boy on the Dorothea, a brig bound for Venezuela. After twelve days at sea, the ship foundered in a gale. The survivors washed up on the shores of the Netherlands. Schliemann became a messenger, office attendant, and later, a bookkeeper in Amsterdam.
On 1 March 1844, 22-year-old Schliemann took a position with B. H. Schröder & Co., an import/export firm. In 1846, the firm sent him as a General Agent to St. Petersburg.
In time, Schliemann represented a number of companies. He learned Russian and Greek, employing a system that he used his entire life to learn languages; Schliemann claimed that it took him six weeks to learn a language and wrote his diary in the language of whatever country he happened to be in. By the end of his life, he could converse in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Latin, and Arabic, besides his native German.
Schliemann's ability with languages was an important part of his career as a businessman in the importing trade. In 1850, he learned of the death of his brother, Ludwig, who had become wealthy as a speculator in the California gold fields.
Schliemann went to California in early 1851 and started a bank in Sacramento buying and reselling over a million dollars' worth of gold dust in just six months. When the local Rothschild agent complained about short-weight consignments, he left California, feigning illness. While he was there, California became the 31st state in September 1850, and Schliemann acquired United States citizenship. Schliemann propounded this story in his autobiography of 1881, though he clearly was in St Petersburg that day, and "in actual fact, ...obtained his American citizenship only in 1869."
According to his memoirs, before arriving in California he dined in Washington, D.C., with President Millard Fillmore and his family, but W. Calder III says that Schliemann didn't attend but simply read about a similar gathering in the papers.
Schliemann also published what he said was an eyewitness account of the San Francisco Fire of 1851, which he said was in June although it took place in May. At the time he was in Sacramento and used the report of the fire in the Sacramento Daily Journal to write his report.
On 7 April 1852, he sold his business and returned to Russia. There he attempted to live the life of a gentleman, which brought him into contact with Ekaterina Petrovna Lyschin (1826–1896), the niece of one of his wealthy friends, whom he married on 12 October 1852. Schliemann next made a good profit trading in indigo dye.
By 1858, Schliemann was 36 years old and wealthy enough to retire. In his memoirs, he claimed that he wished to dedicate himself to finding the site of the ancient Troy.
Heinrich Schliemann was an amateur archaeologist. He was obsessed with the stories of Homer and ancient Mediterranean civilizations. He dedicated the second part of his life to unveiling the actual physical remains of the cities of Homer's epic tales. Many refer to him as the "father of pre-Hellenistic archaeology".
In 1868, Schliemann visited sites in the Greek world, and published his second book Ithaka, der Peloponnesus und Troja in which he described ancient sites in Greece and the Ottoman Empire and asserted that Hissarlik was the site of Troy. He submitted this book as a dissertation to the University of Rostock. In 1869, he was awarded a PhD in absentia from the university for that submission. David Traill claims that the examiners gave him his PhD on the basis of his topographical analyses of Ithaca, which were in part simply translations of another author's work or drawn from poetic descriptions by the same author. Other researchers who worked with documents from the university archives clearly contradict Traill's statements.
Schliemann was an honorary member of the Society of Antiquaries of London and elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1880.
Schliemann's first interest of a classical nature seems to have been the location of Troy. At the time he began excavating in Turkey, the site commonly believed to be Troy was at Pınarbaşı, a hilltop at the south end of the Trojan Plain. The site had been previously excavated by English amateur archaeologist and local expert Frank Calvert. Schliemann performed soundings at Pınarbaşı but was disappointed by his findings. It was Calvert who identified Hissarlik as Troy and suggested Schliemann dig there on land owned by Calvert's family.