The Treasure of Priam

Heinrich Schliemann makes an unusual find in Troy

After making his fortune as a merchant, Heinrich Schliemann decided to devote himself to his hobby: the archaeology of ancient Greece. Taking an unorthodox approach, Schliemann used Homer’s Iliad as a guide book and set about finding and excavating the ancient city of Troy. After three years of fruitless digging, he discovered a hoard of treasure under a wall and secreted it back to Germany without informing the Ottoman authorities. After breaking the news of his find – which he named the “Treasure of Priam”, after the ancient Trojan king – he was forced to pay a large sum of money to the Ottoman authorities as compensation for the theft.

Schliemann donated the “Treasure of Priam” to the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, which put it on public display. The collection was looted by the Soviet Union in 1945 and hidden in Moscow until the 1990s, when it was put on display in the Pushkin Museum. Today, archaeologists agree that Schliemann’s find has nothing to do either with King Priam or the Trojan War but is some 1000 years older.