Priam's Treasure

In 1873, Heinrich Schliemann discovered a golden horde in the fabled city of Troy. Okay, it is debatable as to whether the site at Hisarlik was the setting of the historical battle between Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom, but all agree the city was important to the area for millenia.

Troy I-IX (the stages of the city's occupation are numbered based on archaeological evidence of a change in population or government) is interesting for a number of reasons. However, this post is going to focus on the story of its discovery, and the fate of artifacts found there. It spans over a century of Western history, and involved World War II, the Cold War, the rise and fall of the USSR, the Nazi party, and a little difference of opinion on the purpose of Archaeology.

Heinrich Schliemann and the Discovery of "Priam's Treasure"

Schliemann: Bad at record keeping, good at being dapper.
(via Wikimedia Commons)

The site we call Troy is in an area traditionally recognized as Anatolia. Today, it is a part of Turkey. When excavations on the mound near Hisarlik began, the region was under the control of the Ottoman Empire. Initial excavations took place in the late 1800s.

Heinrich Schliemann is the gentleman credited with discovering the site that he would go on to identify as the setting of Homer's Illiad. The tell was actually discovered by a field archaeologist named Frank Calvert. The Hisarlik tell was partially on land that belonged to Calvert's family, but without funding, he decided to pass off the dig to the independently wealthy Schliemann. The two were supposed to divide treasures found on Calvert's land. However, Calvert's American and British heirs claimed in 1995 that they still had rights to treasures Calvert was not made aware of during the dig.

A major element that will play into this story: Schliemann's poor bookkeeping. Schliemann had a knack for being scant on the details of the locations of artifacts, and fudging the numbers of finds he made on the site. Pretty amazing for someone that made their money as a merchant.

Aside from the ceremonial axes that Calvert's descendants claim (which can be seen today in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts), Schliemann also made off with a number of gold objects. These were the most famous elements of what the archaeologist named "Priam's Treasure." It is important to note that it is unlikely the treasure trove belonged to the Priam of Trojan War fame. Schleimann was so obsessed with proving Homeric legend true that he retired from a profitable mercantile career to pursue archaeology. (He also baptized his children with the Odyssey.) The trove itself spans several possible layers of archaeological history, and the place it was recorded as being found was later proved to predate the supposed fall of Troy by several centuries.

The gold objects included two diadems, 56 earrings, 9,000 small gold rings, and other decorations. Supposedly, Schliemann and the young wife he had sent away for, dismissed the excavation crew in order to retrieve the objects themselves. Once the gold was removed form the Anatolian earth, Schliemann was fond of bragging that he had his wife Sophia hide the jewelry in her shawl to get the cultural relics past the Ottoman Officials. The fact that he had to implicate his wife in a fictitious version of the theft of the Treasure of Priam is telling of several things, but let's focus on the fact that it was a theft.

Supposedly, the Ottoman government, who later imposed stricter rules on the removal of cultural objects, only found out when Schliemann's wife Sophia wore a piece of the jewelry in public. While I could not source this delectable morsel of archaeological society gossip, it is easy to find the famous portrait of Sophia Schliemann wearing what her husband dubbed the "Jewels of Helen," from the Anatolian collection.

Heinrich was looking for a new assistant, and
a woman that would remind him of Helen.

The Ottoman Perspective

According to loot-sympathizers, Schliemann thought he was doing the legacy of Homer's stories a service by removing them from the clutches of the Ottoman empire. Indeed, while archaeological interest in Ottoman territories was increasing in Europe, interest in cooperating with the people or government of these regions was very low. Instead, Europe sought to appropriate the literary heroes they had come to respect. Ben Marsh puts it perfectly in his review of Finding the Walls of Troy in the Geographical Review, saying:

[T]he nineteenth-century archaeology of Troy was less a search for ancient Western influences on the East than a reflection of an ongoing Western infatuation with the Orient. European culture long sought to improve its lineage by adopting some venerable Eastern cultural icons.

 The overall European attitude was that objects could not be properly reasearched, and, in Schliemann's fevered belief, prove the basis of the most classic of literature, without being studied in a European context. However, this is where the true purpose of the Treasure of Priam's removal from its native situation becomes muddled. While the objects were indeed placed in a museum after Schliemann's return to Berlin, their location and context have been entirely lost.

When Schliemann began digging near Hisarlik, he had major issues obtaining a permit. While Calvert's land was available to him, the mound area lay on the land of two farmers. When the government initially refused a permit, these farmers refused to sell the land to Schliemann, instead demanding a sum too exorbitant even for the well situated retiree. Apparently, he attempted to dig illegally.

On the Ottoman side, reticence towards foreign excavations was well founded. European institutions had been building an impressive habit of appropriating foreign finds into their collections as a sort of rewritten European history. They sought to set themselves up as the heirs to the classical legacies of the East. At the time of Schliemann's initial foray into Troy, the Ottoman Empire had been setting up programs and law to protect cultural relics and keep them for the Imperial Museum. While Schliemann instigated the purchase of the remainder of the tell for excavation, it was made explicitly clear that all objects found were to remain within the Empire.

In the end, Schliemann proved the caution of the government correct, by stealing its gold.

World War II, the Cold War, and Beyond

After absconding with his booty to the relative safety of Athens, Schliemann attempted to start a bidding war between those most sacrosanct of European institutions, the British Museum and Louvre. An agent for the Empire was sent to level legal action against the the archaeologist with the goal of retrieving the artifacts. The empire instead had to settle for a monetary settlement, which was used to expand the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul.

After returning to Berlin, Schliemann donated the unique collection to the Berlin Museum. It remained a national treasure until 1945.

In the chaos that ensued after the fall of the Nazi party and the end of World War II, the Treasure of Priam went missing. Most assumed it had been stolen by looters and either sold on the black market, or melted down and repurposed to be sold for the value of the raw gold.

46 years later, the same year of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, two Russian reporters claimed in ARTnews that the Red army had taken various art objects from Berlin as "trophy art" at the end of WWII. There had been some suspicion before this, but the U.S.S.R. refused to comment on it. In 1995, the claim of German art collections in Russia were confirmed with two exhibitions. Priam's Treasure finally made its reappearance in 1996 at the Pushkin Museum in Russia's capital.

Priam's Treasure is probably the most renowned collection of artifacts from Troy. Yet Russia has insisted on keeping it. There were talks initially of a trade with Germany for the lost Amber Room, but these rumors never came to fruition. Even as a blatantly looted collection, Russia has little fear of losing it. With so many claims to the objects, sorting out the logistics of legal proceedings would take decades. On top of this, Russia has taken the stance that keeping art looted from Berlin replaces their claim to reparations post WWII, in spite of a 1990 treaty that looted items must be returned to Germany.

The Kicker

The Treasure of Priam has been claimed by the descendants of Calvert, modern day Turkey, Germany, and Russia. It has become one of the most sought-after collections in the world... and there is a good chance it's a fake. While all the objects are definitely ancient, it is thought that Schliemann collected them from several layers and graves around the site. This means the style, types of objects, and age of the pieces is extremely varied: an unlikely occurrence in a historical collection.

Schliemann went on to dig at Troy again, and another inestimably important site to Classical antiquity: Mycenae. Today, he is sometimes viewed as a bad boy of archaeology, and somewhat admired as such. Other times he is looked up to as an important pioneer in field archaeology, his quirky book keeping and lack of documentation marked down to a vague sense of the practices of the times.

There is no clear answer as to the rightful fate of Priam's Treasure. While it is my belief that the objects should be returned to Turkey, there is an argument that Schliemann provided the funding and work that led to their discovery. It would be shocking for anyone to defend Schliemann's theft and falsification of the origin of the objects, but at this point, the objects have been a part of European history for over a century, which is perhaps longer than they were used by their original owners.

One thing is certain: as long as Priam's Treasure remains a coherent, sought after collection, no research will be done to break up that collection. In this case, the many possible lessons to be learned from discovering the original contexts of the objects is lost to us.

"Priam's Treasure" before it was divided in 1880.

Sources

Allen, Susan Heuck. Finding the Walls of Troy: Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.

Damen, Mark. "Archaeology: Troy and Heinrich Schliemann." A Guide to Writing in History and Classics.  last modified: August 27th, 2013. http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320Hist&Civ/index.htm

Greenfield, Jeanette. The Return of Cultural Treasures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. p. 197

Hirst, K. Krist. "Hisarlik (Turkey)." About.com: Archaeology. accessed February 27th, 2014. http://archaeology.about.com/od/hterms/g/troy.htm

Marsh, Ben. Review of Finding the Walls of Troy Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik by Susan Heuck Allen. Geographical Review 90, no. 1 (2000), 131-133.

Merryman, John Henry, Albert Edward Isen, and Stephen K. Urice. Law, Ethics, and the Visual Arts. London: Kluwer Law International, 2007. p. 63

Pool, Lynn, and Gray Pool. One Passion, Two Loves. New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1966.

Uslu, Gunay. "Ottoman appreciation of Trojan heritage 1870-1875." TMA 41 (2009): 4-10.