Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Heinrich Schliemann: The Archaeologist Who Destroyed Troy

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

Robert concludes the thrilling story of how Heinrich Schlieman destroyed a crucial piece of our shared human heritage after purchasing a child bride.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And this week we're talking about the very worst archaeologists in all of history, or at least, I mean, particularly a guy who's going to be on the short list for the most destructive archaeologists ever, Heinrich Schliemann. But before we talk more about old heinie, let's bring back our wonderful guest for this week, Kristen Conger, host of unladylike and conspiracy she wrote to great podcasts. Kristen, welcome back. How are you doing?

I'm great. Thank you so much for having me back. And excited to learn more about this wretched archaeologist. Yeah, he's about to get like really wretched. And he's about to basically purchase a wife, which is always a good time in old-timey stories. Don't like that phrasing. Well, yeah, it's not great, Sophie. It's not great.

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Search for IHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today. So Heinrich Schliemann is going to make his very first attempt. And we left him off. He'd visited Italy. He'd watched, spent a couple of weeks watching an excavation in Pond. And he'd been like, this is really cool. I want to do archaeology. Does it have to take so long?

Does it have to take a long time to dig things up? What if there were a faster, lazier way, right? So he's going to make his first attempt at a dig, really just a few months or weeks after that. And he has, again, very little understanding. He hasn't taken any classes. He just kind of watched a guy and decided he was too slow. So later on in that same 1868 vacation, he travels to Greece and he goes.

to the summit of Mount Athos, which is in like the main Greek peninsula. And he decides, for no real reason that this had been Odysseus's castle, right? Like he finds some like a ruins, like a buried wall. And he's like, this must have been Odysseus's home. There's no reason to believe this. But one thing, Odysseus came from what's scholars will refer to it as Homer's Ithaca, right? There is an island of Ithaca in the Greek area. And Homer was probably writing about that island, right? Odysseus was probably supposed to have been the king of that island of Ithaca. But we don't 100% know. You know, there's some debate about that. And a lot of that debate comes from Heinrich Schleeman, because Heinrich is going to say, no, he didn't come from

the island that's named the same as like the island in the story. He came from this mountain because I found some stuff there. That's really all it's based on. There's no reason for him to think Odysseus was here. Classic Hyner. There's no evidence. Odysseus was a real person. Yeah, just classic Heinrich. He's like, must have been Odysseus's house because I found some stuff in the ground. So he decides he's going to put together a dig to excavate like whatever is at this site. He has to leave to do this. And when he comes back, he can't find the walls.

And we don't know if he actually ever found walls. He had been pretty sure he had. But he winds up digging. And all he digs up is like some funeral urns, which is kind of fucked up to dig up. You should probably leave those where they are. Man, I don't know. What do you need those for? And he does eventually find the ruins.

of a small building that who knows might have dated back to ancient Greece. We don't know because Heinrich does no work to preserve like the age of anything he's working with. And whatever real value his find might have had was surely ruined by the fact that he insisted this, this like small shack must have been like Odysseus's palace. And it's like, no, that's just like a, like maybe have a small barn. I'm so like we have no idea. But there's no reason to think it was a palace.

It's not big. Now that he's found something wonderful, Heinrich begins. increasingly trying to insert himself into scientific conversations about ancient history. He's writing letters. He's reaching out to these other, to these real archaeologists and historians. He's trying to publish stuff. And he's not really taken seriously at this point, but he is trying to be. And in regards to Troy, he becomes what's known at the time as a realist, right?

The realists in regards to Troy are people who believe the Iliad is written about a real war that really happened, right? There's debate about how much of the poem is true, but there was some real war. that it's all based on, right? And this is still debated today. At the time, I think the realist position is more or less the dominant one, that, like, yeah, there was some kind of real conflict that it's all based on. But at the time, Heinrich's idea is not the dominant accepted one. There's a lot of people who would be like, no, it was just, it's a complete fable.

What's funny is that the ancient peoples, and remember, Homer composed his poem centuries after the Trojan War would have occurred, knew where Troy was. And in fact, it was a tourist attraction, right? Homer is super popular throughout the whole, like, later classical periods and during the Roman Empire. And for a large, a big chunk of, like, Greek, you know, classical history and all of Roman history, Troy is a tourist trap. Like, they know kind of, like, where the ruins are, and people will visit to see the sites of the Trojan War. Now, any real walls from that era of the war were largely buried, but there were these big burial mounds.

and there were burial amounts from like regular people who had lived in the area for a long time. But like Roman tourists would declare them, oh, this is the burial mound of Achilles. Doing the same thing that Shleiman did, there's no reason to believe that, right? Other than that you can make money like taking gollible tourists to see.

Do you want to see where Achilles is buried? Literally the first star tours. StarMap. It was so easy back then. Yes, StarMaps. Yeah, that's a, I don't know, Robert De Niro's house. Sure. So by the late 1800s, though, the site of Troy had fallen into disrepair.

And it had been that way for like well over a thousand years. So even though during like it, during the classical period, the Roman Empire, it's a well-known tourist site. By the 1800s, there's doubt as to whether or not a Troy had ever even existed. Because all that's left of it is like a big mound on a chunk of the Turkish coast, right? So in between jaunts overseas and times studying at various universities, Heinrich kept up of a luminous. correspondence and was often a huge dick to his family. His elderly father asked for money, and Heinrich did give him the money, but in the letter before he gave it over, he asserted, I expect you to use the money in establishing yourself in a manner befitting the father of Heinrich

Schleiman. Whoa. He's not like famous. He's just, yeah, my father can't look poor. You reflect on me. Now, Schleeman is not a U.S. citizen at this point in his life, though he would soon become one. But biographer Leo Duel notes that he, quote, considered himself a citizen of the United States and broadcast his civis Americana sum to the world long before he ever assumed title to it. That book describes him as American to a fault, which is how I would describe myself as well, unfortunately.

Like, yeah, that's it. You got me. Yeah. He also note, that also notes, quote, his bigotries towards non-European races were staggering. And it gives several examples of Schliemann quotes from his letters. that include the laziness of Negroes is beyond description, and the physiognomy of the Californian Indian is the most stupid and ugly I have ever seen in my life.

So it doesn't have a big influence on his life, but super racist. Like, doesn't have a big influence on this story, but remember Heinrich, big, big old racist asshole, right? He's a German in the 1850s. When they whip out some physiognomy, you know, the head shakes. Yeah. Yeah, you're about to hear some racism you haven't even conceived of. Someone's about to tell you how fucking Dutch aren't really white. Okay.

Okay. Stand by. Stand by here, everybody. Look at this guy. Yeah. Put his guy when he's young. Look at the other. Man, they really spent money on top hats in those days.

What's he hiding under there? Look at that stash. And then there he is. There's how he's age. He looks so German here. He does. He does. He does.

He's very German. And by the number of top hat, pictures he has. We know this man had mercury poisoning like you would not believe. Anyone who's top hatting in this time is just basically raw dogging straight mercury into their skull. Look at this fit though. We need to return. That's an aspect of style I want to get back to. His top hats just drenched in mercury. God damn. That's when things were proper. So Heinrich gains his American citizenship in 1869. And he gets it for the most American of all to cheat his wife out of a bunch of his money. He buys a house in Indianapolis and he

establishes residence there for three months, which as long as you need to be living in Indiana to use Indiana state divorce laws, which are like really positive for his situation, right? So he decides Indiana divorce laws are going to be the best ones to live under in order to split from his wife, a Katarina, who'd become a real buzzkill on his plans to be a famous archaeologist by this point. She was complaining by the fact that he's never home and has abandoned his family. Yeah, wasn't she, is she still in St. Petersburg at this point? Yeah, she's in St. Petersburg, and he is trying to cut her off from his money, right? That's why he wants to divorce her in Indiana, and that's why he becomes an American, which, again, American to a fault.

There's nothing more American. It does make me patriotic to hear about Germans moving here to divorce their wives and cheat them out of half their money. To get his divorce, he had to lie and say he planned to build a life in Indiana. He's going to leave the country as soon as as he gets divorced from his wife. This is a total lie. However, before he leaves the United States, he has one last important question to figure out, who's going to have sex with him now? Right? That's obviously Heinrich's priority. He's gotten divorced. Time to find another wife, right? In his biography, Leo Duel wrote that Schleeman was least lucky with women most of his life, unlike his philandering father, who begot a child in old age. So he's probably got to piss the dad keeps showing

him up. He's like, oh, dad, fucks. This is upsetting. Yeah, dad fucks, this is a real issue for me. Heinrich Leo writes was hardly a favorite with the ladies before he got rich or after, but obviously having money is going to really help his ability in that department. Duel writes that, quote, his sparse physical frame, shrill, high-pitched voice, stinginess, petulance, and egomaniac did not mark even the young man for easy conquests.

Besides, he was too disciplined and jealous of his time and energy to lose him. himself in frivolous pursuits. He explained his lack of success with women in another way. I myself am blind, he wrote a sister. Passion clouds my vision. I see only the virtues and never the failings of the fair sex. Yeah, that sounds true from a guy who like moved to Indiana to fuck over his ex-wife. Yeah, so Manosphere. Just like, oh. Yeah. Oh. They always trick you. The Manosphere would have hit him like fucking smallpox hit the Americas. Like this guy would have been so on board for Manist That's hilarious. A lot of people died, Sophie.

That's awful. I know. So Heinrich was an old guy officially by 1869, but he is also rich as shit, and he decides to use that as a base to launch a new attempt to find love. Probably my favorite account of Schleiman's life comes from the book Digging for Troy by Jill Rubelgabah and Eric Klein. That book notes that the second time around, he figured he had learned exactly what qualities make the perfect wife.

And we're about to hear what those qualities are because he writes them down. All the biography, the book notes, is that he finds a friend who he trusts to go to Greece and woo women on his behalf. He's giving a friend a list of traits that he wants in a wife. And this friend is supposed to find a girl, emphasis on the girl in Greece who wants to, like, marry him, right? I have questions about this friend and who he is. But this whole story does make it really clear to me why,

it was so easy for Jeffrey Epstein to make rich old guy friends, there's always been a market for, like, fixer who can deliver to a rich old man, a teenage girl, right? That has always been a profitable business to be in. And that's what he's doing, right? From the book Digging for Troy, quote, he wrote to a friend asking for help with the search. The woman he had in mind should be well educated, but poor,

with black hair and, if possible, beautiful. But my main requirement is a good and loving heart. More important, she must read Homer. Shleiman assured his friend that he could tell everything he needed to know from a picture. His friend sent several. Schleiman dismissed one after another. Too bossy, too ill-tempered, too domineering. All this decided from pictures alone.

Finally, Shleiman settled on a student who was about to become a teacher. Her name was Sophia in Gastrominos. Schleiman wrote his friend, I swear, she is the only woman who shall be my wife. Schleiman left America to meet Sophia in Athens, Greece, where he told her, if you marry me, it must be so that we can excavate together and enjoy a common enthusiasm for Homer. She must have liked Homer and maybe even Shleiman as well because 19 days later they were

married. Schleiman was 47 and Sophia just 17. Yeah. Yes, that's an upsetting H-K. This guy sounds like the most insufferable date. I just keep thinking about the description of him with his shrill voice. Shrill and talking about antiquities and Homer. Too bossy.

Too dumb in earing. He probably sounds like Ben Shapiro. Oh, man. Yeah, yeah, a little Ben Shapiroy voice. Yeah. Oh, God. Homer. Homer.

Homer. He's got his Homer loving child bride now. Jesus, God. Although, I will say. Yeah, I don't agree with the biography that this suggests she had a shared enthusiasm for Homer or for Schleeman. All I think this really says is that, like, some Epstein shit went down and Heinrich bought a teenage girl. Although there is a plausible,

more optimistic way to look at it that like, hey, maybe this poor chick in Greece was like, there's this rich idiot who's willing to like marry me and he's not going to live that much longer, right? Like, especially if he wants to go digging in Turkey, very easily he could die doing that. And then I get his money, right? She may have been making a very smart decision. And if so, if she was just like, yeah, I think I'm willing to humor a rich old asshole until strokes out. If that was your move, hats off to you, Sophia. Good job. Top hats off to you.

Top hats off to you. His money is better with you than anyone else. As Rubel Kama and Klein describe it, once companionship was taken care of, Heinrich pivots to his much larger plan, which is making himself immortal through fame, right? He's gotten rich, but he's not famous. He wants to become a famous figure, and the way to do that is to make a great discovery, to find the buried ruins of Troy. Earlier on, during his first experimentations with archaeology, he'd met another real archaeologist, a guy named Frank Calvert, and this would have been when he was in Turkey during his grand tour in 1868. The two met by chance near a dig site that Calvert owned, a big mound called Hisarlic. Through judicious and careful study, Calvert had grown convinced that Hisarlic held the ruins of Troy, and he was right.

It absolutely does. Now, I should note here that Calvert did not originate the idea, for a long time realist who, believed in Troy, had traced its ruins to a location called Pinarbashi that was nearby. But in 1801, a kind of a tourist amateur archaeologist, I think, named Edward Clark, had visited Hisarlic and had picked it out as the site of the actual Troy by doing, like, real archaeology. He had done some light excavations. He'd found some coins and inscriptions.

And he argued based on the evidence that, like, this is very likely where Troy was, right? And so Calvert is convinced that Clark is right. and he buys a bunch of this property so that he can start digging. But he doesn't have like a lot of money to keep doing. Wait, Robert, this is not the first time this guy's come up on our show. When you did the episode with Chelsea back in many, many years of the behind the swastika, this guy came up. Oh, yeah, Edward Clark. Yeah, because he was like doing early excavations.

Well, I mean, and Schleiman does too. They find swastikas as part of the, as like on some of these ruins, which is part of what, like, we do talk about that in the swastick episode. The fact that there's like that's a symbol that exists in some of these ruins is part of what ignites swastika fever in Europe. Because the discovery of these Trojan ruins is such a big deal, and because nationalism is all budding in this period too, like it all, it all unfortunately kind of comes together in a stew that's going to have some tragic outcomes much later on, right? But nobody's morally to blame for that stuff here, right? Heinrich meets this dude Calvert who's become convinced that Clark was right and Calvert convinces like converts Heinrich

to the view that his Sarlick is where the Trojan ruins are. So Heinrich basically heads back west long enough to divorce his wife and marry this child and then he's like it's time to go dig up the ruins of Troy because he had very little experience with any of this. Heinrich used Calvert as his own personal Google or I guess fucking chat GPT today and he bombards the man with questions about like

how do you do an archaeological dig? What do I buy to spend several years digging in Turkey, right? Calvert himself is broke and had no more money to fund the dig on his own land, so he was happy to help Heinrich in the hopes that this rich asshole would pay to fund the achievement of his dream. In 1870, Heinrich arrived at the dig site, Hisarlek, with a team of hired men armed with pickaxes. Now, it is important for me to note that Hisarlic was located within the heartland of the Ottoman Empire, as a real functioning government.

Sort of. They had a process for archaeologists to follow before digging shit up. But Heinrich is not a go-through-the-processes kind of guy. He knew that would take time, and it would inevitably just force him to keep the best stuff he found in the country where he'd found it. And that's not acceptable. Motherfucker's not asking shit. Well, debatably not. He definitely doesn't get a permit, and he's definitely digging illegally.

I did know, in my research, I found a 1999 article in the Journal of Archaeology that claimed Schliemann made an informal agreement with Ottoman authorities to split his findings in exchange for permission. So he didn't get a permit, but like whoever the local authorities were, he promised to split the treasure with if he found anything. He doesn't do this in any case, but he may have had some local approval. Whatever the case, he's breaking the law by doing this dig, right? You know who else is breaking the law? No, maybe. God willing, our sponsors. You know, we'll see.

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Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Lisa, we should tell them about our new show. Oh my God, Lexi. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Youan. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart.

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So if you like fun, if you like comedy, and you like learning and protecting yourself from criminals, start listening to Scam Goddess on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. So Heinrich had become convinced that a specific spot in this mound, his Sarlik, would yield up the ruins of Troy's walls. And again, they are in there. but a lot of stuff is in there.

Troy was a long time ago, and people had kept building over the same site over thousands of years. Because of this, Calvert urges him to gently test his hypothesis. If you think the walls are here, let's dig several small trenches in different places

to try and survey what might be there and get an idea of where we need to do deeper excavations without causing any unnecessary destruction. And Schleeman said to that, I'm not going to do things slow way. Well, we can do it the slowly, we can do it the fast way from the book Digging for Troy, quote, convinced that Troy was at the very bottom of the mound at his Sarlick.

He armed his workmen with pickaxes in order to huge trench dug into the center of the mound. So if he will show you how that looks. You can get an idea of how much is removed from this. Like, it's just, it's a V. He just tears through this fucking mound, which is layers and layers of artifacts. That's deep. Yeah. Yeah, it's deep and very destructive.

Now he's got another professional archaeologist that he's brought on, and this guy begs him to stop. And it's like, you have to take minute notes about what comes from what depth about where everything is, because each layer of ruins corresponds to a different period of time. And artifacts uncovered without knowledge of where they came from without their context are close to useless, right? Schleiman calls that guy a pussy and punches it up to 11. Quote, from digging for Troy. Schleeman's methods were savage and brutal. He plowed through layers of soil and everything in them without proper record keeping.

No mapping of finds. Few descriptions of discoveries. Single-mindedly, Schleeman chopped his way toward Troy. He pushed himself to exhaustion. The workday began at first light. They worked until the sunset and the light was too dimmed to continue. Schleiman oversaw it all, pacing the sight with his odd, gliding walk. Later, by lamplight, Schleeman wrote the events of the day in a plain, stiff-covered notebook. He recorded the number of workmen, the day's expenses, and the progress on the dig.

Sometimes he sketched the object. they had found that day. Today, archaeologists wouldn't wait until the evening to write out their notes. They wouldn't rely on their memory, which is unreliable. They take notes right in the trench. But Schleeman was never concerned with accuracy, particularly when the truth didn't fit the story he was spinning. Because he had decided the summit of the hill would be the logical place for the most important and impressive buildings to have stood, when he found walls elsewhere, he merely moved them to the summit in his official reports. So he's not only destroying stuff, he's lying about like what he finds where because he's like that doesn't work both where I think things should be.

So I'm just going to say it's in a different place. I cannot exaggerate how bad he is at being an archaeologist. Just imagine him shrilly yelling at his teams of deeper. Dig deeper. Yeah, they've got like artifacts. Throw those away. Those are too high up. They're not from ancient Troy.

Burn them. As his teams plunged down, they tore through pottery shards and bricks, which turned out to be part of a massive interlocking series of ancient walls. layers and layers of them from thousands of years of time. Heinrich was overjoyed. Surely these were the walls of Troy. They were walls, and they were in fact in the location of ancient Troy. So what did Heinrich do wrong here?

To explain, I'm going to have to jump forward to the present day for a second. We now know that Heinrich, by which I really mean Calvert, was correct. His sarlet contained the ruins of Troy, or rather the ruins of several Troyes. And by digging down to the very bottom of the mound, the stuff he found at the bottom of the Mount that he is convinced is Troy are the ruins of a sizable walled village that archaeologists today call Troy II. This coastal village would have prospered between 2550 and 2300 BC, which is centuries before the time most experts expect the Trojan War would have occurred. This means that in digging down to Troy II and tearing through or throwing away everything he found above it, Heinrich

Schleeman had in fact destroyed a large portions of the ruins of Troy he was. looking for. He dug down to an older thing and destroyed actual Troy. He said literally like dug too deep. Yeah. He dug too deep and just tossed out the shit he was actually looking for because it didn't seem cool enough and it wasn't in the area he thought it should be. Yeah. We will never have a comprehensive understanding of what we lost. And some passages from digging for Troy are heartbreaking if you are any kind of antiquities nerd or just someone who values an improved understanding of our shared human cultural heritage. Quote, their pickaxes and shovels obliterated history. In his diary, Schleeman wrote, Unfortunately, we are obliged to destroy the foundations of a building 59 feet long and 43 feet broad. If it wasn't Homer's Troy, he wasn't interested.

At 30 feet, they struck and shattered, more pottery, tools, and weapons. But it wasn't Homer's Troy. Schleiman kept digging. And it's entirely possible those ruin weapons he tossed out were dated to the Trojan War. It's possible that building he destroyed was from that era, right? some of the pottery and tools that he's running through certainly did. We'll never know. As Heinrich urged his diggers on, sickness and plague descended upon the camp.

They called it the marsh sickness, likely malaria, and it brought many of his workers low. There were also constant scorpion attacks and a major problem with venomous snakes. And digging for Troy, the author's right, Schleeman was sure the sight would have been unworkable if the storks hadn't eaten most of the snakes. Thank God the snorks ate the snakes. The storks ate the snakes. We'd have really been screwed otherwise. I didn't even know storks ate snakes.

I neither. I mean, I guess it makes sense. Sure. I just thought they brought babies, you know. Yeah, that's all I'd been taught. Well, maybe the babies are snakes, just like Frank Zappa was trying to tell us. So by June of 1872, they had reached a network of walls that we now know represent several cities built over each other over a long period of time. And he mistakes them for giant walls, right?

On June 18th, he writes in his diary, I am among the ruins of Homeric Troy, which he'd, of course, just annihilated. But by one of these walls, he finds a gate. And behind that gate, there's a building. And he declares this building, with no evidence, had been the legendary King Priam's palace. Right? There's no reason to think this. It's just the biggest building he's found. Further discoveries followed, as Rubel Kaba and Klein wrote.

Quote, Schleeman claimed to have unearthed parts of a soldier's helmet, which turned out to be the pieces of a smashed bronze vase. He had identified a shield, which turned out to be a pan with its handle broken off. For an idea of like how accurate he is, ah, this must have been Achilles shield. It's like a fucking cooking pan. Heinrich and his boys kept digging until finally at the very end of May 1873, they found honest to goodness bonafide treasure. He would write later of this legendary find, quote, I came across a large copper object of the most remarkable shape, which attracted my attention all the more as I thought I saw gold behind it. I cut out the treasure with a large knife. It was impossible to do this without the most strenuous exertions and the

most fearful risk to my life, for the large fortifications wall, which I had to undermine, threatened at every moment to fall down on me. But the sight of so many objects, each one of which is of inestimable value for science, may be foolhardy and had no thought of danger. The removal of the treasure, however, would have been impossible without the help of my dear wife, who stood always ready to pack in her shawl and carry away the objects. I cut out. And I love he's like, these are so valuable to science. As he's destroying the building they're located in, making it impossible for us to have a clear idea of like, where was this stuff from? Who, what was its context? Like, why, what does this relate to? He's ruining all of that because he just wants

the gold, right? It's cool looking. This find yields up a hall of gold and silver cups and dishes as well as some bronze weapons, gold beads, and a bunch of jewelry. Now, these had been made by people who lived centuries before the famous Trojans, but Heinrich declared the jewelry to have belonged to Helen of Troy. He declared the whole find Priam's treasure, which I'm sure would have been looted during the actual war, but I don't know, maybe Agamemnon missed some shit. I guess. Like Helen's jewels, didn't look for that.

Because the valuable stuff had been in a small area, he declared. it had all been stored in a treasure chest that had rotted away with the ages. He found a random piece of metal nearby and said, this was the key! He wrote up his findings to present them to the archaeological world, and he wove this grand story about,

as the invaders are cutting through the city, the Trojan royal family is gathering their valuables, desperately throwing them into bags as they flee the invading Greeks. And his findings did land like a bomb in the European archaeological community. To buttress his claims that he'd found the jewels of Helen of Troy,

he had his thankfully no longer teenaged Greek bride dress up in them for publicity photos. And I got to say, she does look pretty good. Like that's solid jewelry, you know? Sheik. Yeah, yeah, very, very nice. Heinrich was instantly catapulted into the ranks of the very most famous archaeologists alive. He wrote articles and books about his findings, but the notoriety carried with it some problems. Notably, the Ottoman government was not happy when he publicized what he'd done to their ruins.

because they didn't really know he was there. And he's like, yeah, I just tore through a bunch of your shit. Found some gold. Took it out of the country. Took all these priceless antique artifacts with me, by the way. Per an article in Smithsonian Magazine by Malin Sully. When Turkish authorities realized that Schleeman had smuggled the so-called Priam's treasure out of the country, they mounted a legal case against him, demanding the return of the looted artifacts,

and temporarily barring him from returning to the dig site. In the interim, the amateur archaeologist turned his attention to another mythical ruler, Agamemnon, King of Mycenae and the brother of Minnelaeus. Conducting excavations at Miseni in 1876, Schleiman discovered a stunning gold funeral mask he believed was buried with Agamemnon. More recent research has refuted the connection, indicating that the mask was created around 300 years after Agamemnon's lifetime and might even be a modern forgery. And this is, I've seen this when I was in Athens at the museum there.

It's Agamemnon's death mask. We'll put up an image of it here. It's one of those famous artifacts, though, in like the history. of archaeology. It's this like gold mask of a dead guy's face, right? And it's like a really like pretty striking looking artifact. We don't know if it's legitimate or not, right? There's a lot of debate about that. We definitely know it was not Agamemnon's. Nobody's arguing that. Experts have pointed out that the mask looks very suspiciously different from every other Mycenaean mask we've ever found from like that period of time in that area. And that's brought up

an uncomfortable question. Did Schliemann forge or have someone else forge the mask? We know he talked about forging things at times. I found that article in the Journal of Archaeology, which is the Journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, which kind of collects a bunch of the different suspicions people have about some of Schleeman's findings, including some of the Helen of Troy treasure. It's possible he had a lot of the stuff he found at Troy forged too. We don't fully know. that article notes, when it appeared as though the Ottomans

might claim their fair share of the treasure, he explored the possibility of having forgeries manufactured in Paris to give to the Turks. Memoirs of informed contemporaries preserve

allegations that Shleiman planted fines with the intention of later discovering them. Among the skeptics were British scholars who discussing Schleiman's career declared

he who hideeth can find. Ernst Curtis, director of the excavations at Olympia and professor of ancient history in Berlin, called him

a swindler and fuchsher, a swindler and a con man. So a lot of reputable archaeologists think that he's lying. Now, they also don't think Troy. They generally think that there was no Troy, and we know they were wrong about that. But also, Schleiman talked about having stuff forged. And there's some suspicious aspects

about how and when certain things were found. It's notable that the Mycenae excavations, where he finds that mask, went on from August 7th to December 3rd of 1876, and the so-called mask was just covered on November 30th. So he finds the mask and three days later closes the dig entirely. And it's also noteworthy.

Heinrich ended his Trojan excavation as soon as he found the gold treasure. And that's not how, like, actual archaeology is supposed to work. He's like, oh, I found a cool thing. We're done. It's like when my dog hides their bone under the pillow and then they find it later and they're like, oh, my gosh. How did this get here? I'm so surprised, but he's immoral and a piece of crap.

Yeah. So people debate, did he maybe find different artifacts around the site and put them all in one place to make a better story? Did he have things forged? Or did he maybe buy antiquities from like a bazaar or something and pretend that he dug them up? So crazy. We'll never really know. Yeah. But there's a lot of like, there's a lot of sketchy stuff here.

And there was sketchy stuff too about his Trojan excavation, right? As the article continues, excavations were also closed on November 26th and 27 while Schleeman was. away. Where was he? A relative of his wife, Sophia, is alleged to have been an Athenian goldsmith. Did Schliemann obtain the mask from Sophia's relative in Athens, then returned to Mycenae and bury it to find it on the 30th? We'll never know. There's good reason to wonder, though, right? This is still an unsolved archaeological mystery. Most, and by the way, I should note, at this point in time, the overwhelming, or at least the majority view of reputable people is that it is an authentic relic. It was probably not a forgery. That's the most common view that

the mask is real, but that it has nothing to do with like the Trojan War or anyone involved with it, although again, there is still debates here. And there were extreme doubts about the mask's provenance in Heinrich's life, both from people who thought it of forgery and those who argued it couldn't have belonged to Agamemnon, in part because he did not exist, almost certainly. Near the end of his life, Heinrich did sort of accept this by saying, so this is not Agamemnon. These are not his ornaments. All right. Let's call him Schultz.

Right? I don't care whose it is. It's a great artifact. I'm famous. It's fine. Yeah. If maybe you've done a better job as an archaeologist, we might have found out who it was. Yeah.

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Listen to artists on artists on artists on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. During the height of Heinrich's active time in the field as an archaeologist, he was known to react with fury and venom to anyone who questioned him. This is just his normal life. A lot of passages from Leo Duel's book make him sound kind of like Elon Musk, including this one.

Quote, his relations with even his closest friends and associates remained stormy. At one time or another, he fell out with all of them. Touchy to the verge of paranoia, he took offense on the slightest provocation, the mildest criticism of his books and excavation results incensed him. Any disagreement he would take as a personal affront. Now, I should also note that despite the fact that he partners with Frank Calvert and is digging on his land and Frank is the guy who told him where Troy was, Heinrich doesn't mention Frank at all in any of his accounts of the story. He cuts him out entirely in the story of the discovery of Troy.

He leaves his name out of letters and articles. He writes about their shared findings. and he will work with other archaeologists and any time he works with someone else. He cuts them out of the story. He constantly does this. As Leo Duol writes, Schleiman took from others liberally,

but in essentials claimed credit for himself. In the end, it was always he who would discover the site of Troy, the Magara longhouses of the second city or the relief ceiling of Orcominos. In order to magnify his accomplishments, he would play down the contributions of others and enlarge on what he considered their errors.

The decisive role of Frank Calvert, who had not only dug at his Sarlick Troy, but owned half of the tell in leading Schliemann to the site in the first place was never clearly acknowledged. Even his wife Sophia's active part in excavation discovery, he tended to sweep or leave entirely unmentioned. Even cutting his wife out of it for the most part. Wait, so did Calvert get anything? I mean, he didn't get the acknowledgement, but did he get like... He does.

Yeah, he gets some of the... He gets some money and stuff for it, I think, because he does own like half of the fine, technically. But I couldn't tell you exactly how things financially work out. But obviously, we know about Calvert now. It does come out. he continues digging and returns to Troy after working at an arrangement with the Ottomans to hand back a few of the less valuable artifacts that he'd found to them. And by the way, all these artifacts today are in Russia because, again, they wind up in Germany and then the Russians take them. And so there's both Germany keeps asking Russia for the artifacts back and Turkey keeps asking Russia for the artifacts back.

And I've got to say, Germany, these aren't yours. Guys, you have no claim to these fucking things. Like, I'll listen to Russia's claim because of the war a little bit. They should be in Turkey, right? Certainly not in Germany. We can all agree wherever they don't belong. It's fucking Germany. So Leo's book makes a really interesting point about the way in which Heinrich

conducted his digs and how he decided where to tear through and what to do, which is that he treated excavating relics like a venture capitalist treats investment, right? It's a very capitalist attitude towards archaeology. During his archaeological phase, he never ceased to look after his investments, and he remained active in real estate and securities transactions. Until his last days, he busied himself with building schemes in Athens. His excavating, at least in the beginning, was haphazard and reckless, reminiscent of speculations that rested on shrewd intuitions like trading and commodities. Right? He does everything that way, including, like, dig through priceless relics.

Well, and you mentioned, too, like, on the dig, what he was, yes, he was drawing some things from memory at night, but he was also just like in the books, you know, like paying attention to the money. Yeah, he was too upset. How much am I spending? What's the cost, right? As opposed to what am I digging up and where was it found? Yeah, we know more about what he spent to make this happen than we do about where certain artifacts really came from. He made his return trip to Troy on March 1, 1882. Heinrich was sensitive to the by now many complaints made by the archaeological community in his own day that he was a brute destroying actual history in his almost blind quest to declare random shit Trojan war relics. And that's important. You'll hear periodically people say like, well, everyone in Heinrich's day was kind of that reckless of an archaeologist, and they weren't. The mainstream opinion at the time is that he is a fucking destructive force, right? He does hire real archaeologists for this dig. Thankfully, he brings a guy named Wilhelm Dorpfeld, who's a very diligent scholar and expert archaeologist with him on this next dig to Troy. And Dorpfeld sets to work trying to figure out what's happening. in this disastrous dig site Heinrich left behind years earlier.

Because he immediately realizes, oh my God, you have torn through thousands of years of history and just tossed it in the trash. I have, like, if I can maybe undo some of this damage, but it's going to be the work of the rest of my life to unfuck what you fucked up here in the slightest amount. One thing Dorpfeld finds is that there were very large buildings in the layer that Heinrich had declared Troy. And as they uncovered them, Wilhelm warns Heinrich not to,

to draw conclusions about what they're finding until they have more information. And Heinrich ignores that and starts darting off letters being like, I found King Priam's bedchamber and the like. He leaves Dorpfeld out of the findings entirely. Does not mention this guy. By 1883, Schleiman is done digging and convinced he's done enough to prove his theories correct. He's such a dick. He's a huge prick.

Yeah. Once he returns to Europe, though, his claims are met with a wall of professional skepticism. People are like, yeah, man. nothing you've done has proved that it's Troy. Yeah, this guy again. Yeah. Like, it certainly hasn't proved these relics belong to Kim Brigham or anything. And there's a lot of people who think he hasn't done anything of significance.

Like, he uncovered like a crematoria for an old royal family at some point as kind of, what a lot of folks assume. Over the next years, he tried to enjoy his money and pretend he wasn't bothered by any of this. But by March 1st of 1890, Heinrich had grown so frustrated with what he considered a character assassination, campaign that he returned to Troy, and his goal is to find the royal cemetery, because his doubters were claiming the palace he'd found was just a crematoria for the dead, and he was like, well, if I find the real royal graveyard, that will prove there was no crematoria, and then they'll have to believe I was right. He has a railroad constructed to the site this time, so that he can more quickly throw away dirt dug up in this quest. He pays Dorpfeld to return, per the book digging for Troy,

quote, Dortfeld saw the newly exposed work site as an opportunity to reassess his Sarlik. He began a meticulous study of all the layers of occupation, not just those levels surrounding what Schleiman believed to be Homer's Troy. Schleiman found it difficult to be patient with Dorpfeld's systematic approach. The man was far too slow for him, but his life's achievement, his legacy was on the line. So he left Dorpfeld to his finicky procedures. He's kind of, he's resigned to the fact that I have to let an actual archaeologist do actual archaeology here, and it will surely prove that I've been right. all along, you know? And Dorffield does puzzle out the different layers of Troy. He's the first

guy to start doing this. And he comes to understand that Troy I, the earliest settlement, had been founded at the very start of the Bronze Age. The last layer, the top layer, Troy 9, had been constructed some 3,500 years later. So there's almost 4,000 years of history in this mound. At long last, someone competent had begun the still, the Turkish archaeologist, Retech, today still undoing the damage that Schliemann does. And they can never undo it all the way, right? But he, Dorpfeld starts the process. And for this last, vanishingly brief part of his life, we can truly say that Heinrich

contributed to real meaningful archaeology and that he paid Dorpfeld to do some real meaningful archaeology. During Christmas of that year, 1890, Schleiman left Dorpfeld to sort through their findings and went on vacation to Naples. He came down with an ear-infected. action that wore at him throughout his trip, and then one day, on his way back to his hotel, he had a stroke. Heinrich was taken to a hospital where he died the following day, December 26th, 1890 in Naples.

And he's fucking dead now. Thank goodness. Merry Christmas. Yeah, Merry Christmas, everybody. Heinrich Schliemann did eventually die. What of. All right. And that's our story.

That's all I got. Yeah. It's worth there again, there's some good articles you can find about the Turkish archaeologists kind of undoing his damage and all of the work that has. has been done to actually figure out what was really going on at these sites he declared, you know, Troy, where Troy was. But yeah, you know, that's the Heinrich Schliemann story. Do we know if his, the young child bride, Sophia, if she continued in archaeology as well

after he died? I don't think she did. I think she continued to be a rich lady for the rest of her life, though. So good for Sophia. Wow. Yeah. I had nothing but sympathy for her. And she did look great in those jewels that had nothing to do with the Trojan War or Helen of Troy.

Absolutely nothing. Well, Kristen, you want to plug anything before we go out here? Sure. You can listen to my podcast on Ladylike and conspiracy she wrote. Just search both of them and, you know, find your flavor. Listen to both. Hell yeah. That's all.

Yeah. Check that out. Check out conspiracy she wrote. And check out Kristen. I'm sure we'll have you back on the show before too much longer, Kristen Conger. But thank you for talking about some archaeology bastards with us. And I hope everyone listening enjoyed getting a break from horrific nightmarish crimes against humanity. And enjoy just some all pretty upsetting crimes against archaeology.

But nobody was murdered. Yay. So that's good. Kind of. Well, he was a war profite here. And a bunch of people did die at the digs probably. Yeah. What was that the marsh disease, the marsh sickness?

The marsh disease? Yeah. Pretty low body count for a Behind the Bastards episode. Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough. You're welcome, people. You're welcome, everybody.

Yeah, yeah. Come back next week. We'll probably have something heartbreaking. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia. Or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping

every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking. Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Wano. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions,

and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian, creator, and host of Scam Goddess Podcast. The True Crime Comedy Podcasts, all about Robert,

fraud and those who practice it. Each week I bring out an amazing guest. Ooh, I scammed them. What? I can talk to you for an hour. You're a generational yapper like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job. And now you can catch full episodes of my show on YouTube.

Start listening to Scam Goddess on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, this is Kylie Breakman. Angel Geratana. Jeremy Colhane, Patrick McDonald. And we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists Podcast. The Improvised Character Comedy. podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants.

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I'm Melissa Jeltson, host of the What Happened to Her Podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police rode off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing in disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an I-Heart True Crime Plus subscription.

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