689: Digging Up the Bones
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Some people, they read these old stories from 3,000 years ago, the Iliad and the Odyssey. They read them in school and it just gets to them. One of the producers here at our show, Immanuel, was like that. I loved the like heroes, Hector. I thought Agamemnon was such a diva. I love the Nied. We had to translate it in my Latin class. And in addition to like translating passages, I decided to make like a nine by three foot mural out of magazine paper depicting Aeneas's like journey into hell. But when you say magazine paper, you mean you're cutting letters out of a magazine like a serial killer? No, I mean, I was meticulously ripping teeny pieces of different colors of magazine paper and making like a mosaic, basically. And I remember that Jayla was on the mural for some reason because she was wearing like a white dress that kind of look like a Grecian. So it was like a toga. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she got to be Dido in hell. When a teacher assigned a 20 page research paper on any subject in the world, like they could do anything at all. It was obvious to Immanuel what to do. The story of Troy, the place that the Trojan War happened, the walled city that they pulled the Trojan horse into. And in doing research for this project, I found out about this guy named Heinrich Schleiman. Heinrich Schleiman. A man who also read those old stories and got obsessed. He's born in Germany in the 1800s. He's like a businessman, a merchant in Russia. And then he like moved to California during the gold rush and opened a bank. It said that he would carry around like copies of Homer. And he taught himself ancient Greek like in two years, he taught himself ancient Greek, which is insane to me. Just so he could like read the books and like the language of origin. Anyway, but basically he like amasses this huge fortune. And once he has this fortune, he decides that he's going to find Troy. At the time, people weren't sure if it was a real place or just like a story like Atlantis. And I know this is kind of a dumb question, but in that period, did archaeologists even exist? Like, was that even a job yet? Not really a job. It's like a very new field, this whole idea of digging up the past. And so there are like sort of hobbyist dabbling in it. These hobbyists by the 1870s had figured out from various geographic clues that Homer gives in the text about Troy's proximity to the Dardanelles and to Mount Ida. They figured out where a likely location for the city might be. It was in the place that we now called Turkey. And at that spot was kind of a big mound of dirt. And Shleiman gets going. So he starts to dig. He hears dozens and dozens of workers. And when he's digging, he starts to find basically these layers of cities that are sort of built on top of each other. So there's bits of pottery and like foundations of buildings. When a city burned to the ground, they would just build another city rate on top of it. But none of them are what he's looking for. Like what he is looking for is he wants to find basically like gold, silver, and bronze. Like that's the thing he thinks is going to be like the signifier that this is Troy, because he's thinking of, you know, this treasure-rich city that Homer describes in the Iliad. And he's also thinking that like, well, it's got to be further down. Like it has to be at the bottom, right? Like Troy is going to be at the bottom of this pile. And so he keeps digging. And he keeps finding more and more layers with cities. Yes. And then he gets to the bottom of these piles of cities. And that's where he finds this treasure. He finds exactly what he's looking for. He finds this gold. He finds the silver. He finds bronze. He calls it primes, treasure, primes, being like the king of Troy in the Iliad. But there's nothing on it that says like primes. You've reached primes bank or something. No, okay. No, no, nothing like that. It doesn't have hard proof that it's Troy. It doesn't find writing, which would have really helped. Can I ask one question? Yeah. Did he find a huge wooden horse? Because that would have nailed it. I don't know. Huge wooden horse wouldn't have survived. Sorry. Fine. Today's show is about the inadvertent things that happen when you start digging up the past. And this is the point where Schleeman's story gets more complicated. Schleeman announces to the world that he's found the city that Homer was writing about. He's found Troy. He becomes internationally famous. But the truth of the situation is, is that the Troy at the bottom of the pile, with all this treasure and all this gold, that actually was not Troy. It was not Homer's Troy at least.
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