One thing is crystal clear about the debate over Schliemann's qualities: now the efforts and scholarship of Frank Calvert, who did, in fact, know that Hisalik was Troy, who conducted scholarly investigations there five years before Schliemann, and who, perhaps foolishly, turned over his excavations to Schliemann, does today due credit for the first serious discovery of Troy.
Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights.
Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Kris Hirst. Archaeology Expert. Kris Hirst is an archaeologist with 30 years of field experience. Her work has appeared in scholarly publications such as Archaeology Online and Science.
Twitter Twitter. Over the faces of some of the men were masks of gold foil. The women had golden frontlets or diadems, and numerous discs of thin gold with relief patterns of spirals, rosettes, butterflies, or cuttle fish, seem to have adorned the robes they wore. The infants were wrapped in gold foil.
Besides personal ornaments - including bracelets, large pins with crystal knobs, signet rings of gold there was a profusion of other objects laid with the bodies: vases of pottery and of faience; large bowls and jugs of bronze; several sophisticated vases of alabaster; cups and stemmed goblets of gold and silver, some plain, some with relief ornament see the contents of Graves 1—VI. One gold goblet had figures of doves perched on the handles, which for Schliemann at once recalled Homer's description of a golden cup or bowl which the aged hero Nestor had with him at Troy.
Warfare was clearly a prime interest of the people buried in Grave Circle A. Beside the men lay a wealth of bronze weapons spearheads, swords, and daggers.
They're rooting through other people's garbage, and how much gold is there likely to be in someone's trash? More often, the original owners—or someone else if for some reason the owners had to leave their valuables behind—have gone through the site and taken for themselves whatever precious things there may have been. Gold, in particular, has been stolen and recycled so often that it's possible to say some bit of that ring on your finger, no doubt, saw Babylon once.
All in all, everything found in an archaeological site is mostly, by definition, "garbage. A good example of this comes from Mesopotamian archaeology. At the bottom of a well in Nimrud , one of the major cities of the Neo-Assyrian Empire ca.
Today, ivory is a highly valued commodity—there is an active black market in African ivory—so it might seem puzzling to modern people why such beautiful and intricately carved pieces were discovered so unceremoniously dumped at the bottom of a well.
But to historians, the answer is obvious. In the seventh century BCE, ivory per se was not considered a valuable commodity as it is today. It was, in fact, used back then much the way plastic is today, to mold figures which were later either dyed or overlaid with precious materials. In the case of the Nimrud ivories, a layer of gold foil originally covered them, as can be seen from the traces of gold still visible on one of these pieces.
Thus it seems safe to conclude that the Medes, who looted and sacked the city of Nimrud in the late seventh century BCE, stripped the gold off these ivories and threw what they considered its useless remains down the well. To them, the ivory was "garbage" and that's why we've found it today. So trash, it turns out, is a relative term.
From an archaeologist's perspective, much like a detective's, people speak volumes about themselves through what they throw away. No doubt, some day our dumpsites will define us, too, and future archaeologists will probably label our age as something like "Early Plastic IA. The same holds true of all archaeological work—it's a danger which comes with any form of "recovered history"—we risk defining a civilization by what we see in its dusty tracks, forgetting those remains were left in the equivalent of an ancient dustbin.
Despite the glamour of finding old things, we must remember that archaeology provides only certain avenues into understanding what-really-happened and thus works best in concert with other ways of approaching the past.
That is, when archaeological evidence is complemented by external sources such as documentary and other historical data, we can feel certain we have come closer to what-really-happened-in-the-past. Moreover, in over-reading one type of data and ignoring others, there is the danger of creating new "invented histories.
In other words, when gazing upon an ancient city like Nimrud or Troy and poring over their dazzling remains, we must not forget to ask why we find what we find, or else in piecing the data together we may construct a historical scenario which reflects our preconceptions, our hopes, our world more than that of the ancient peoples who lived there and left what they left behind.
Those are the ingredients of invented history. Such issues have swirled around modern archaeology ever since its inception in the nineteenth century.
Its founder himself provides an excellent example of the enormous rewards and pitfalls implicit in the discipline. A German businessman with romantic dreams of finding a lost civilization resplendent in gold and steeped in epic heroism, this man did the world a great service by bringing to the public's attention the value of exploring the material remains of the past. At the same time, however, he opened up questions which still devil historians today.
Certainly one of the most sensational news stories of the nineteenth century was the discovery by Heinrich Schliemann of what is now widely assumed to be the site of Troy , the city in and around which The Iliad of Homer takes place. Before Schliemann's excavations, the modern world had considered Troy for the most part a matter of myth, not reality. With his extraordinary find, Schliemann radically redirected scholarly thinking about the ancient past and, no less controversial himself, the man's own life and character measure up well to the notoriety of his discovery.
That is, Schliemann has turned out to be almost as worthy a subject of history as the subjects he studied: Troy and Homer. A genius at learning languages, Schliemann spoke several fluently by an early age, and using those skills along with abundant charisma and a strong drive to succeed, he quickly made a fortune as a merchant. By middle age he could retire in considerable comfort and at that point decided to pursue a dream he later claimed he'd had since childhood, the quest to find Homer's Troy.
Because the world portrayed in Homeric myth seemed so real to Schliemann, he believed it must have actually existed once. Nor did this dream lack historical credibility. In later classical antiquity, there was a site known as "Troy.
So some ancients, at least, believed Troy had once been a real city. Still, critics could counter—and not without some credibility of their own—that the bureau of tourism in ancient Asia Minor might have had something to do with advancing that opinion.
Armed, then, with not much more than a little ancient evidence, loads of money and his copy of The Iliad , Schliemann went to Greece. There he married a woman who could recite Homer from memory, and together they set about searching for the Troy of Homeric legend. Schliemann also had a good idea of where to begin looking. Because, according to Greek myth, the general Agamemnon who led the Greeks against the Trojans had collected his mighty force in Aulis, a site on the eastern shores of Greece, Troy must have lain to the east of Greece.
If it had been west, Agamemnon would surely have mustered his forces in western Greece. So, Schliemann looked to the rising sun. History held other clues, too. According to Homer, Troy was a very wealthy city, which meant it almost certainly occupied a strategically important location. Not only did sources in later antiquity assert that this was the general locale of Homer's Troy, but the Hellespont is also a likely site for a powerful and prosperous city in prehistory.
Control of a strait allows a city to tax the trade ships that pass through it—many cities in antiquity grew rich off tariffs of that sort—and knowing from Homer that Troy lay near a coast, Schliemann started looking at the area around the Hellespont for a likely place to dig. It is made of bone that was then covered with gold foil. The spiral ornamentation is typical of the art of the early Mycenaean period. Homeric heroes also took personal hygiene seriously. Along with the ceramics, jewelry and weapons, the graves also contained razors and bronze mirrors from the early 12th century BC.
This razor displayed at the exhibition demonstrates that men also shaved at the time. A mysterious smile and a determined gaze: This fresco fragment depicts the so-called "White Goddess" from the Pylos palace and dates back to the 13th century BC.
Mycenaean tile paintings reveal impressive details, and this piece is one of the highlights of the exhibition. A larnax is a chest made of wood or clay, which also served for the burial of the dead.
Idols, miniatures and glass jewelry were often added to the tomb. This larnax from the 13th century BC is made of clay and comes from Tanagra in Boeotia, north of Athens. It shows a procession of four mourning women holding their hair, a funeral ritual at the time.
Precious possessions accompanied the wealthy deceased on their journey to eternity. This gold cup was found by Heinrich Schliemann in one of the shaft graves of Mycenae. It shows dolphins swimming in an underwater landscape.
Luxurious jewelry made of gold and glass beads has always fascinated humanity. Such noble pieces were however reserved to the elite. This necklace from the 14th century BC is made of rosettes covered in gold leaf. Bull figurines such as the ones shown above were not uncommon in Mycenaean settlements. However, it remains unclear to this day whether they were an expression of popular piety and served as sacrificial offerings to the gods or if children used them as toys.
After then moving to Russia, Schliemann became rich dealing with raw materials for the production of ammunition. He used his fortune to study Ancient Greek and Latin in Paris. In , he went on a trip to the Greek island of Ithaka, where he decided to look for the palace of Ulysses. From there, he traveled to the Marmaris Sea to make his way inland and start the quest for Troy.
During his entire journey, Homer's Iliad was Schliemann's one and only true companion — the one book he considered his indispensable guide to discovering Troy.
The search for the ancient city of Troy had never ceased over thousands of years. But in all that time, no one had ever been able to prove that the city described in Homer's saga had really existed — until , when Heinrich Schliemann, then 49 years old, discovered the ruins of what is now presumed to be the city under the Hisarlik hill in the Troas region in the northwest of present-day Turkey.
Schlieman was, however, by no means been the first person to believe that the city was hidden under this particular location. Before Schliemann, the British archaeologist Frank Calvert had already begun excavations in the very same region. The two Troy-obsessed researchers ran into each other by sheer coincidence.
Calvert had actually acquired the land around Hisarlik so he could continue with his work, but he lacked the funds to continue with his excavation attempts, which, at that point, had come to a dead end. Calvert persuaded Schliemann to continue where he himself had stopped working. After running into a number of initial impasses, Schliemann stubbornly went on with the excavations until in he hit meter-high just over 3-foot-high ruins belonging to a prehistoric city.
Schliemann came to the conclusion that these walls had once formed part of the fortifications of Troy. It had been a difficult journey for both men, as the precise identification of the findings was rendered all the more difficult by the long history of the city, which had first surfaced in records in BC.
0コメント