In the heart of Moscow, the Russian capital, is the “Pushkin” Museum of Fine Arts, and it includes the largest and rarest art collections in Europe and the world, more than 6 thousand pieces of art that boast the largest museums in Russia, along with the “Hermitage” Museum.
In 1993, the museum held a press conference to announce the most important archaeological secrets of the twentieth century. It is the “Gold of Troy,” the myth that Homer sang about 3,000 years ago. Today, it appears as a fact that dazzles the eyes of the beholders.
Al-Jazeera Documentary presented this distinguished event in a movie titled “The Gold of Troy”.
"Heinrich Schliemann" .. the adventure of the merchant who proved the existence of the legend
This golden head ornament may have been adorned by Helen, or worn by Priam, the King of Troy.
Thus says the poem "The Iliad" by the Greek poet "Homer". This crown or the treasure of "Praiam", which was discovered by the German "Heinrich Schliemann", is part of the human heritage, and these unparalleled and priceless pieces are considered an exceptional cultural treasure belonging to the whole world.
Half a century after its disappearance during the reign of the German Reich, the Priam treasure appeared again in Russia, and its discovery caused a stir in the archaeological world. It was revealed by Irina Antonova, the director of the Pushkin Museum at the time, along with Vladimir Tolstikov, the curator of the collection. the main.
The treasure was discovered for the first time in the nineteenth century in the lands of the Ottoman Sultanate, and it was the great German merchant “Heinrich Schliemann” who dusted off the gold in 1873, and the treasure carries historical value and symbolic meaning as evidence of Troy, the legendary city of Homer.
But how did you discover the city?
Who owns Priam gold?
And where was he absent for half a century?
The following lines contain some answers.
The treasure hunt began in the eastern Mediterranean between Greece and Asia Minor. There, thousands of years ago, the Hittite Empire emerged that ruled more than half of today’s Turkey, i.e. the Anatolian plateau. It had several regional kingdoms, one of which was “Eleus”, which was mentioned by the Iliad. Mention “Troy” only twice, so it is a city with two names.
Heinrich Schliemann, who was able, guided by the Iliad, to discover the city of Troy
Troy the aggressor... an alliance against the richest kingdoms of the empire
Elios or Troy was a strong independent city within the Hittite Empire, and to the west was the kingdom of Messenia that ruled continental Greece. At the beginning of the Bronze Age, these kingdoms were constantly trying to conquer neighboring lands. The Messenia kings who ruled Crete were trying to expand into Anatolia.
There, the Hittites confronted them, and Troy was between these two empires.
During the reign of King “Priam”, Troy became the richest kingdom in the empire, and it had many resources because it was located at the crossroads of important trade routes, and it controlled access to the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea through the Dardanelles, which made it a center of conflict between East and West.
The Trojan War and Messenia was the main theme in the Iliad, this legendary epic written by Homer in verse in the eighth century BC, and mentions the conflict between Troy and Greece, which ended the people of Messenia.
Paris, the son of King Priam, had kidnapped Helen, the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta. Menelaus crossed the Aegean Sea with Agamemnon, King of Messenia, to retrieve his wife in Troy.
In this legendary battle in which humans participated with the gods, the Greeks turned the city into ashes.
“Schliemann” .. the obsession with searching for the legend of the lost city
People have been passing on the poem by word of mouth for centuries, which made it the most famous story in history, shedding light on Troy, but the city was forgotten after the first millennium, and tales of prehistory in Europe are known only through the literature of the Greeks and Romans.
To bridge this historical gap, scientists and archaeologists began searching for the lost city, including Heinrich Schliemann.
Schliemann was born in 1822 in the town of Mecklenburg, and his father was a Lutheran priest. He lived in a simple family, did not receive a good education, and worked from a young age as an assistant to a shopkeeper, but soon became a business owner, and he was fluent in 4 languages, starting in Amsterdam, then He was sent to St. Petersburg to establish a gold trading company, and there he married the daughter of a wealthy lawyer, entering the world of aristocrats.
Schliemann lived a lavish life and greed for more. He was obsessed with searching for the lost Troy. He read about it in his childhood and it remained stuck in his mind. He decided that Troy was a reality and not a myth. After he owned the money, he decided to pursue his dream of finding it, but like all his memoirs, it was lost. The fact of his research between realism and fabrication.
Descriptions of the city.. Excavations in the text of the Iliad and similar hills
When "Schliemann" reached the age of 45, he immersed himself in research and learning in order to enrich his academic and biography, and his research focused on proving that Troy existed, so he moved to Athens with his new Greek wife, "Sophie", and planned a trip on the Mediterranean coast.
He went to the island of Ithaca, the birthplace of "Odysseus", the hero of the epic "Odyssey", then went to Tirant and Mycenae, then went to the borders of the Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor (today's Turkey), and reached Troy through evidence and references in the Iliad, there are names such as " Lesbos”, and the types of herbs and animals, all of which correspond to what is mentioned in the Iliad.
The remains of the city of Troy, located in Turkey
The Iliad mentioned a city in which two rivers flow towards the strait, and it is on a plateau between them, but Homer did not give more details in his Iliad. It was said that the Greeks reached the Hellespons Strait by boat, and it was said that they established a camp at the mouth of the “Scamander” to impose a siege on Troy, but There are many hills at that river, and they contain monuments and tombs, some of which can be identified, such as the tombs of Achilles, Hercules, Ayas, and Patroclus.
"Schliemann" began excavations in the "Balidagh" hill, and found in it graves and the remains of a wall from the Roman era, but the hill seems too small to accommodate the huge "Braam" palace that contains 62 rooms, and the location is also far from the coast, which reduces the hypothesis that This is the Trojan site.
He missed the boat and found Troy... the beauties of coincidence
"Schliemann" was frustrated, and he went to the port of Çanakkale, and there he met a person who changed the course of his thinking, and it was fortunate for him that he missed the boat that was going to carry him to Istanbul, so he met "Frank Calvert" the English consul, and told him that he had discovered the location of Troy in a place called "Hisalric", And it also matches Homer's descriptions.
In order to understand the site, three main factors must be taken into account: Homeric philology, archaeological resources, and Hittite written texts.
There is no doubt that geography has changed a lot from what it was in the days of Homer, as the sea was adjacent to Hisalric Hill, according to the Iliad.
The consul "Calvert" bought half of the hill to fulfill his prophecy, but he did not have the capabilities to excavate, so he offered the partnership to "Schliemann", and he agreed immediately.
And that was in 1870.
The Ottoman government allowed Schliemann to excavate, on the condition that half of the finds be placed in the museums of Istanbul. Schliemann and his men began digging like crazy children. They began at the foot of the hill, wanting to reach the deepest possible point. He had 70-100 workers working daily, and they dug many side trenches. But Schliemann decided to penetrate the hill with a long trench from north to south.
The golden head ornament that “Helen” may have adorned, or that “Priam”, the king of Troy, wore
"Schliemann" was not organized in the excavations, so he went deep into the layers to reach his goal, without regard to the chronology of these layers, and indeed he began to find collectibles, pottery and jewelry.
During the first three years he found all the Bronze Age walls and burnt layers, which assured him that he had found Troy.
But on the other hand, he caused damage to the place that Achilles and Odysseus did not when they burned the city. He found an outer wall buried at a depth of meters, and he found a cathedral.
Smuggling treasure... a struggle in the judiciary and a deal for sale in the West
On May 31, 1873, "Schliemann" found Troy, and made an unprecedented discovery. He found a treasure of gold, and let all the workers leave, and he was left alone. When he began to see the luster of gold in the dirt, he brought out a beautiful necklace, a crown, and a number of earrings and small ornaments. He discovered twenty A cache containing various treasures amounting to 10,000 pieces. He found the treasure “Brayam”.
It was a major global event, and Schliemann became the most famous archaeologist in the world, publishing his research in several languages, and leaving a clear imprint in setting up a “database” for archeology, documenting his discoveries with pictures, developing a clear plan for the place, and publishing his pictures and writings under the title “Atlas of the Origin of Troy.” .
While the name “Calvert” that led “Schliemann” to the beginning of the road was folded.
In the meantime, the Ottoman government was constantly present to remind him of the agreement, and there was a Turkish delegate always accompanying “Schliemann” and his workers in all stages of the excavation, and indeed all the assets were divided equally, but without the treasure, as “Schliemann” retained it for himself and cunningly planned to escape with it, and headed To a place on the coast called Cranle Clement, and thence to Syros Island, and then on to Athens.
Schliemann hid the gold in the basement of the French School in Athens, and Turkey prosecuted him for two years. He paid 50,000 francs for a court ruling, which is a very ridiculous amount compared to the treasure. He offered the treasure for sale to two of the largest European museums at the time.
They are the French Louvre and the British Museum, displaying the entire collection for one million francs.
The two exhibitors refused to buy and did not trust the assumptions of archeology that Schliemann followed, and his research that he presented contained contradictions and tales of his imagination. Rather, many archaeologists went to doubt that he had found a treasure, or that the area in which he was excavating was Troy.
Ten generations on the way to Troy... Schliemann destroys his dream with his own hands
In the excavations in Messenia, Schliemann admitted that he had made a mistake, as the existing pottery was different from that found in Troy, meaning that it was from a different time period. Returning to the excavations of Troy, he discovered that ten generations had passed, over 3000 years. By digging into the mound to the lower layers.
And that the Troy he searched for was between the sixth and seventh layers.
It also became clear to him later that he had destroyed antiquities and temples during the excavation, and that he had gone far beyond the Trojan era, and that the holdings he found dated back to different eras, and it was not a condition that they were the treasures of King “Priam”, which reinforced the scholars’ doubts about Schliemann’s treatises, and they accused him Love of appearance, pursuit of gold, and arrogance in dealing with antiquities, which are the greatest human treasures.
For his part, Schliemann was very upset when he learned that he had destroyed many parts of the city that he dreamed of finding.
He died in 1890, leaving behind a treasure displayed in the Berlin Museum.
Treasures of Nazism... Smuggled spoils of war to Soviet countries
In 1945, the Soviet forces invaded Berlin during World War II, and destruction and chaos prevailed in the city. During the war, the Nazis were trying to preserve the collections of Germany's museums, so they hid them in different places, and the "Braam" treasure was transferred to an anti-aircraft tower in Berlin Park, but the "Flick" tower The invincible fell in the face of 7,500 aircraft, 6,000 tanks, and two and a half million Allied soldiers, and the treasure disappeared.
When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1989, an article about stolen treasures during the war opened the doors of a resounding scandal. Two Russian journalists, Konstantin Akinsha and Georgy Kozlov, found a set of documents stating that the treasure and other valuable artifacts had been sent during the war to the Union. The Soviet Union considered it compensation for the war losses they had suffered.
The treasure and a group of precious stones were transported on a plane to Moscow, and there they disappeared from view for a period of 45 years, until it was decided to display them to the public in 1993, and during all that period the management of the Pushkin Museum was addressing the Soviet leadership about what should be done with these treasures, and it was The answer is that it is too early to talk about that, until that journalistic investigation appeared.
The treasure is still on display in Russia, but the Germans, Greeks and Turks are still arguing about its ownership, while scholars see that this treasure does not belong to a specific country, but rather to humanity in general, and what is important is that it remains available, not only for the public to see it, but also for scientists and researchers to apply it. results of their recent studies.