Heinrich Schliemann: Gold Rush Banker Who Dug Through Homer's Troy

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Heinrich Schliemann was born in Germany in 1822, one of nine children of a poor Lutheran pastor who gave him an illustrated history book at seven and was later accused of embezzling church funds. Pulled from preparatory school after three months, he apprenticed to a grocer at 14, injured his chest lifting a barrel, and at 19 shipped out as a cabin boy for Venezuela, only to be wrecked in a gale and washed ashore in the Netherlands. In Amsterdam he taught himself languages by keeping diaries and hiring native speakers to hear him read aloud, eventually mastering more than a dozen. In 1850, after his brother died in the California Gold Rush, he opened a bank in Sacramento and traded over a million dollars in gold dust in six months, leaving after the Rothschild agent complained he was short-weighting shipments. A second fortune in indigo in Russia let him retire at 36.

In 1869 he obtained a divorce in Indianapolis by claiming Indiana residency, married 17-year-old Sophia, found through an archbishop, and received a PhD from the University of Rostock in absentia. Frank Calvert, whose family owned land at Hisarlik, steered him there, and from 1870 Schliemann drove trenches 40 to 50 feet deep through the mound's nine layered cities. In 1873 he found the hoard he called Priam's Treasure in Troy II, about a thousand years older than Homer's Troy, which lay in layers he cut through. He smuggled it to Greece. At Mycenae in 1876, supervised by Panagiotis Stamatakis, he found the shaft graves and the Mask of Agamemnon. He died in Naples on December 26, 1890, of an ear infection.

• He claimed he became a U.S. citizen the day California became a state, though records place him in St. Petersburg that day.
• His supposed eyewitness account of the 1851 San Francisco fire was lifted from the Sacramento Daily Journal.
• He said Sophia carried the treasure off in her shawl, but she was in Athens mourning her father.
• He funded the demolition of the Frankish Tower on the Acropolis over the objections of King George I.
• His Athens mausoleum is shaped like a Greek temple, with a frieze showing him excavating at Mycenae.