As centuries and millennia went by, the real Trojan War faded so far into the past that these stories were all that was left — that is, until Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German enthusiast, decided to find Troy. With little to go on except his faith in Homer, he dug up not just one but a stack of nine Troys built one on top of another. Then he went to Greece and discovered the mighty civilization of Mycenae, which also figures in Homer’s saga.
Sure that The Iliad’s account of the Trojan War was true, Schliemann fixed on an ancient mound at a place called Hissarlik, on the southwest coast of modern Turkey.
Starting in 1870, Schliemann’s workers dug into a promising mound of dirt and rubble. What they couldn’t budge, they blasted with explosives. If you’ve seen documentaries about modern archaeologists painstakingly picking through an archaeological site with dental picks and soft brushes, put that image out of your head. These guys approached excavation with all the delicacy of a dog in a flower bed.
The crew hardly slowed down as they passed through what later archaeologists identified as the probable Troy of the Trojan War (about 1250 BC), only three levels down. Schliemann’s workers burrowed to an earlier layer of the ancient city, one from before 2000 BC — maybe 700 years earlier than the Troy in Homer’s stories. In 1874, Schliemann found gold artifacts that he erroneously thought had belonged to Priam, the Trojan king in The Iliad.
Not satisfied with his Trojan findings, Schliemann went back to Greece to look for the palace of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks in The Iliad. There, he not only made more finds (in the form of ancient tombs), but again came up with treasure, including a golden burial mask that he declared to be the Mask of Agamemnon. Later archaeologists dated it to about 1600 BC, too early for Agamemnon, and some modern archaeologists even think it’s a fake that Shliemann placed in the tomb so that he could “discover” it.
Inspiring archaeological finds
Schliemann’s enthusiastic work may not have been fraudulent, but it was clumsy and ill-informed. Yet he stumbled upon discoveries of real value, things found by archaeologists such as Arthur Evans (1851–1941), an Englishman who uncovered the remains of the great Minoan civilization. (The Minoans were a powerful people who thrived on Crete and other Aegean islands between 3000 and 1450 BC.) Such finds reminded both scientists and historians that ancient stories — even fantastical ones —can contain important clues to the foundations of history.
Raising Atlantis
Do Schliemann’s discoveries tell us every “lost” civilization was for real? No. I don’t think it means scientists or explorers will someday find the sunken nation of Atlantis. Oops. I shouldn’t have mentioned Atlantis. There isn’t room in this book to delve into even a small fraction of the theories and fantasies about where and what was Atlantis — if anything like it ever existed.
The story describes a land of peace and plenty, destroyed in an overnight cataclysm. It traces back to the writings of Greek philosopher Plato (about 428–347 BC), who used Atlantis to make a point about social order and good government. But Plato’s descriptions leave room for interpretation, and people have interpreted wildly for thousands of years.
Plato described Atlantis as in the Atlantic Ocean, just past Gibraltar on your way out of the Mediterranean Sea, but geology seems to dictate that it couldn’t have been there. Dueling historians, archaeologists, mystics, and self-appointed prophets have argued vociferously over an alternate site, putting the lost continent everywhere from Britain to Bermuda to Bolivia, from Colorado to the China Sea. One theory claims it was on another planet. Sci-fi movies, comics, and graphic novels depict Atlantis thriving in a giant plexiglass bubble on the ocean floor. Virtually every theory has to make allowances for Plato, who got the story of Atlantis indirectly from the Athenian statesman Solon, who supposedly got it from scholar–priests during a visit to Egypt in about 590 BC. Because Plato wrote his version almost two centuries later, in about 360 BC, details surely changed along the way.
Santorini (also known as Thera) lies about 45 miles north of the Greek island of Crete, which was the center of the Minoan culture. Minoan ruins are plentiful on what’s left of Santorini, but they’re only a small remnant of what was on the island until about 1600 BC, when the 5,000-foot volcano in its middle exploded and collapsed into the sea. Ever since, the island has been a crescent surrounding a volcanic-crater lagoon. The volcanic eruptions continued for 30 years, building up to a devastating climax: an enormous tidal wave that knocked down buildings on islands throughout the region.
The tsunami decimated the population, and the subsequent rain of volcanic ash probably finished off the Minoan civilization. Nobody knows for sure whether the sinking of Santorini had anything to do with launching a lasting legend of a capsized civilization, but news of such a catastrophic event surely spread around the Mediterranean and in time could have become legend.
Reading the Body Language of the Dead
Some people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago left more than just their images in sculpture and paintings on stone. Preserved bodies are in-the-flesh evidence of long-ago reality. The mere fact that a human body from thousands of years past is still more or less intact and recognizably like this year’s model can help open your mind to the connection between then and now. Something about a mummy helps your imagination bridge all the generations since that puckered flesh was taut, upright, and dancing.
In history books that cover big expanses of time, you have to adjust your perspective so that a century becomes a relatively small unit of history. In this book, you can breeze through a thousand years here and a thousand years there. Thinking of the Byzantine Empire as one civilization, a single station on the history train, is easy to do. Yet the empire grew and receded, changed governments, and restructured policies over centuries — more than five times longer than the United States has been a nation.
When you back up far enough to take that concept in, you may lose sight of individual lives, which flicker past quickly. I find that contemplating mummies is a helpful, if gruesome, tool for hooking into the perspective of a single life span, a single person, so long ago. Strangely, you may be able to identify with a mummy easily, if you don’t find the idea too macabre.
Mummies have turned up all over the world. Some were preserved naturally by something in the environment where the body came to rest. Others, as in the celebrated tombs of ancient Egypt, were artfully prepared for their voyage into death.
Frozen in the Alps
In the summer of 1991, German tourists hiking in the Ötzal Alps on the border between Austria and Italy spotted a human body lodged in high-altitude ice. A few days later, a rescue team cut free the corpse of a bearded man dressed in leather. Perhaps he had been a back-to-nature hippie whose 1960s wanderings went tragically awry? No. Other curious details made that scenario unlikely — including the man’s flint-bladed knife, flint-tipped arrows, and copper-bladed ax.
Researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria first estimated the freeze-dried body to be 4,000 years old. Further examination moved the date of death back by 1,300 years, meaning that Ötzi (as scientists nicknamed him) was journeying over the mountains around 3300 BC when he died and was covered by falling snow.
Ötzi, who resides in Italy’s Museo Archologico dell’Alto Adige in Bolzano, is a natural mummy in that his body was preserved by nature. Scientists find out all kinds of things about the ways people lived and died from mummies, especially those that were preserved whole. Ötzi was between age