2023-05-19 18:12:01
One digs, digs, scrapes, shovels and digs not only to find objects, but also to preserve memories – or to make a wish come true like Heinrich Schliemann, who found the “Treasure of Priam” 150 years ago.
For my tenth birthday, my parents gave me an illustrated translation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. On one of the first pages, I remember clearly, I discovered an illustration of the treasure map of Captain J. Flint, the notorious pirate who once anchored his ship and a small crew in Skeleton Bay to bury a legendary treasure there . I spent nights in bed with a flashlight studying this fairly detailed map. With my fingers I traced the red colored line that led across the sea and further between mountains and forests, past skeletons pointing the way to the treasure. There was no question for me that this island and this treasure really exist. For weeks I prepared myself to one day emulate the protagonist Jim Hawkins and recover the treasure. I don’t know why I haven’t succeeded to this day. I had really prepared myself, memorized all the shanties, got new batteries for the flashlight and even made copies of the map. I probably just lost my imagination.
The archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann from Neubukow in north-eastern Germany had a completely different experience. His important but also controversial excavations of Troy and Mycenae go back to a copper engraving that the cosmopolitan, born in 1822, discovered at the age of seven in a Christmas present from his parents. It was Georg Ludwig Jerrer’s “World History for Children” and the illustration showed burning Troy. While his father, a well-to-do pastor, read to him from the book, young Heinrich looked at this picture and the thought of visiting the burning walls one day solidified in his mind. Whether this Troy was a real city or a purely fictional product of Homer’s inventive spirit and his “Iliad” never played a role for Schliemann.
Not even later, when he dug up a vessel on the island of Ithaca during his archaeological travels and was immediately sure that he was holding the urn of Odysseus in his hands. What else could it have been? What Homer wrote was true for him. For him, what Schliemann found corresponded to the words of Homer. He noted that he believed in the accuracy of Homer as he believed in the gospel.
From Schliemann’s exuberant diary entries, which should be treated with caution, it can be concluded that he was initially less interested in historical places than in mythological figures. I would argue that he suffered from a kind of Don Quixote syndrome, differing from the bibliophile, self-proclaimed knight in that his income situation was far better. Because before Schliemann devoted himself completely to research and obsessive excavations, he had pursued an extremely successful career as a merchant; the trade in indigo in particular had made him wealthy. This difference is crucial, since history teaches us that the fantasies of the poor are dismissed as pipe dreams, while those of the rich end up in history books.
1684554827
#beautiful #Helena