The importance of Schliemann's excavations at Troy, Mycenae and elsewhere is beyond dispute. Yet the aura of greatness which his remarkable achievements have rightly conferred on his name has tended to blur our perception of the man himself. Psychoanalytic studies by W. G. Niederland have offered fresh insight into his complex character, but it is the paper given by W. M. Calder III on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth that marks the beginning of the new sceptical attitude to Schliemann. Calder pointed out that Schliemann's autobiographical writings contain many false claims and purely fictitious episodes which biographers have uncritically accepted as fact. This new view of Schliemann as an unreliable witness, which, incidentally, was held by many of his contemporaries, has now been confirmed and expanded by subsequent research.It is principally in matters of his personal life that recent studies have exposed Schliemann's propensity for lies and fraud. However, G. Korres has shown that in his scholarly work too Schliemann did not shrink from seriously misrepresenting the truth. It is the purpose of the present article to demonstrate that even Schliemann's archaeological reports are vitiated by this kind of behaviour. We are not here concerned with Schliemann's interpretations of his discoveries.
In May 1864, J. G. von Hahn sought to prove by excavation that the summit of Balli Dağ behind Pinarbasi was the citadel of Homeric Troy. This was the first systematic attempt to identify the site of Troy by archaeological rather than merely topographical evidence. Assisted by J. F. Julius Schmidt and Ernst Ziller, von Hahn excavated stretches of walling, including parts of the perimeter wall. These appeared to range in date from very early (‘Cyclopian’) to the second century BC. But he found no evidence that the site had been occupied in the pre-classical period. He concluded, however, that since Balli Dağ matched so perfectly the indications given in the Iliad, Homer must have visited the site and chosen it as the location for his poem. Von Hahn reported on his excavations in two letters (in German) to George Finlay, later publishing them in that form. Finlay's careful English translation of these reports, published here for the first time, follows a brief introduction.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.