Part One: Heinrich Schliemann: The Archaeologist Who Destroyed Troy

Welcome back, everybody, to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And we've all had a heavy year, both in the real world and in terms of subjects on this podcast. We got the year started with, God, a lot of child abuse, way more than I tend to stack at the start of a year in a normal content podcast. schedule. And then the last few weeks have been genocide after genocide.

I mean, I guess just two, but that's a lot of genocides. So I figured, let's have something fun this week. So we're going to talk about a piece of shit, but we're going to have a good time doing it. This is not going to be like heartbreakingly depressing, except for at a couple of points, but not in the mass murder way, just in the, oh, wow, that's a bummer kind of way. Anyway, I've teased the episodes enough.

Let me tease our guest, Kristen Conger, host of Unladylike and Conspiracy, she wrote. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming. How are you doing?

I'm so thrilled to be here, and I'm great.

I was emotionally prepared to be just pummeled, but I'm glad to hear we're going to be having some laughs, it sounds like. Yeah.

We're going to talk about two old-timey archaeologists who sucked and destroyed a shitload of historical artifacts by being greedy idiots, but are funny. It's old-timey, guys. 1800s Europeans rampaging around historical sites. It's going to be a good time. No kids are going to get mass murdered. I mean, some workers die of malaria, but when isn't that happening, right? Yeah.

No one's to blame for malaria other than mosquitoes.

Is the theme of this episode Men Stupid? We laugh at them?

No, I mean, our episodes are mostly about one specific guy, Heinrich Schliemann, who destroyed Troy, like the ruins of Troy he accidentally destroyed as he was trying to find them. But we're also going to talk about an Italian guy who destroyed some other stuff as like a little bit of an amuse-bouche. So I've got a fun one for you, Kristen.

Do you got anything else you want to plug or say about yourself before we go in?

No, I love to laugh at absurd archaeologists. This sounds fantastic.

Yeah. Yeah, I think I'm ready.

This will be heartbreaking for the archaeologists in the audience, but I think everyone else will have a good time. So, archaeology has not existed quite as long as civilization, but as soon as we've had civilization long enough for any of them to fall into ruin, there were people that we could rightly call precursors to modern archaeologists and historians.

The best evidence for this is the fact that in ancient Egypt, there were ancient Egyptian museums and Egyptologists who studied ancient Egypt because Egypt is that old that like 3000 years ago, there's guys in Egypt who are studying ancient Egypt because it just it just keeps going back. Right.

Got some ancient Egyptian docents.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Like the first docents would have been ancient Egyptians puzzling over artifacts from ancient Egyptians being like, how the fuck did they do that? They couldn't have built these ziggurats on their own. It must have been aliens. I don't think they were as stupid as we are, actually.

The most famous of these guys is probably Chaim Vizit, who was the fourth son of Pharaoh Ramses II. And he devoted a great deal of energy and public funding to restoring ancient monuments. And there's quite a lot we only know about ancient Egypt because Chaim Watzit was interested in it and preserved it, right? Stuff that would have happened centuries or even a thousand years or something like that before his time. So that's pretty cool, I think.

Modern archaeology, though, dates back to about the Renaissance, right? That's kind of when Western people started really thinking about like, oh, there's like a lot of old shit around us. Maybe we shouldn't just steal everything from it to build houses. Perhaps some of this should be preserved. You know, maybe we have enough stone that we can leave the Parthenon intact or whatever. And there's this kind of European revival of interest in classic antiquity, particularly ancient Rome. Michelangelo, the artist, not the Ninja Turtle, observed excavations of old Roman ruins, and so did a number of other notable men from that period of time. The ruins of Pompeii were discovered by the architect Domenico Fontana at the end of the

16th century, and Herculaneum followed it around 1709, and there were organized excavations in like the mid-1700s for both cities. So they were digging up before the U.S., declared its independence. They were digging up Pompeii, right? That's about how old, like, something we recognize as modern archaeology kind of goes back.

That is wild. That's not when I thought the modern period would begin.

Yeah, that's way, way earlier than I assumed.

And that's important... When we're talking about the vandals that we're going to be talking about, some people are like, well, everyone was that way back then. Nobody thought about preserving stuff. And no, there were guys who were like, you've got to be really careful. You don't want to just dig through and tear up a bunch of shit. You have to take careful notes about where everything was. People had already figured that out by the time the 1700s were well underway. And that's kind of the era... We wind up back here a lot because it's the era of a lot of bastards, but the time of gentleman scientists and adventurers. When it was like, if you're born with enough money that you don't have to work, then you're

a scientist or an adventurer if you want to, right? And some of those guys did great things, and some of them became Francis Galton and invented racism. So, you know, it's a real mixed bag. But it becomes really hip in the mid to late 1700s to like dig up old things, particularly ancient Egypt, again, comes into vogue. And through the 1800s, the Victorian era too, like ancient Egypt is like cool and sexy. So if you're like a rich person from like a prominent family, you might get into archaeology, you know, either doing it yourself or funding digs, both to get access to some sweet artifacts to show off.

And just because it's like the cool thing to be seen doing, supporting archaeology. And this could get, this was not always, there were people who were careful curators of the past, and there were people who were just tearing through shit to get as many mummies as they could, right? I mean, people were like grinding up mummies to take as medicine.

No.

So not everybody was nice about it, right? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of mummies wind up in people's stomachs.

I don't like that. I don't like that.

Yeah.

That made me queasy. I don't like that.

I would eat mummy. You guys wouldn't eat a mummy? No.

I think RFK has recommended mummy pills.

Yeah, every American needs at least four ounces of mummy per day.

It's a new flu vaccine, actually.

We could try it. I mean, if it was a smallpox mummy, it might work. Don't, that's probably not medically true, but it could be. So anyway, into this kind of world of both careful excavation and frenzied, possessive speculation and fascination with the past. In 1797, a man is born named Giuseppe Ferlini in Bologna, which is at the time, I mean, today it's part of Italy, right? At the time, Italy's like a peninsula, but it's not a country. There's a bunch of city-states who are always like up in each other's business, but it's not like anything like the modern nation today. And Giuseppe isn't, again, our main bastard for these episodes because there's just not enough about him on his own, but I love this old bastard too

much to not tell you about how he, the destruction he wrought on ancient Egyptian artifacts.

And frankly, you weren't going to pass up an Italian.

Not a Giuseppe. Not a Giuseppe.

No.

I can't, like, I have to do this as I say Giuseppe, right? It's just like happening off screen, you know, if you can't see it. So we don't know much about his early life. Born in 1797, right? He had a stepmother and the relationship was so bad it forced him to flee home as a young man. Every source about him says that and that it was intolerable. The situation couldn't continue.

Giuseppe, no.

No.

Yeah, Giuseppe, no, come home. I don't think she wanted him home. He would have been around 18 years old at most when he leaves. And he probably studies medicine. He becomes a doctor later. So he says he studies medicine during this period. It's the early 1800s. So who knows, right?

Like.

You're not having to pass an exam to get into medical school. Sometimes you can become a doctor just by convincing another doctor to let you follow him around. Sometimes you just start cutting off limbs and saying, yeah, I'm a doctor, right? We don't really know which kind Giuseppe is. It's more or less impossible. But he spends some years traveling around, looking for work. He goes to Venice. He goes to Corfu. And at some point, probably while he's in his early 20s, he starts calling himself a doctor.

And nobody really is asking questions at this time. So he gets to work as a doctor. So by 1817, aged 20, he's in Albania doing God knows what. Now, the country was occupied by the Ottoman Empire at that point, and Albanians were none too happy about that state of affairs. So a rebellion is launched, and then a rebel army is formed. And the nice thing about a rebel army, they do not ask for your CV. If they're like, hey, we need doctors for this army, and you just show up and say, yeah, that's me, Giuseppe, hey. You can just become the army doctor. Suddenly you have thousands of lives potentially in your hands. Wow. And that's what happens.

That's how Giuseppe gets his job. Unfortunately, the rebellions don't work very well. This is like a big Greek. kind of pan-Greek Balkan series of rebellions against the Ottomans. And it doesn't work. But Giuseppe gets a few years of being paid to probably he's mostly just sawing off limbs, right? Like that's a lot of military doctoring is like, oh, you got shot. I'm just going to cut off whatever got hit. Which, I mean, I feel like I could have been a doctor back then. I still feel like I could be that kind of doctor. I don't. I'm pretty good with it. I'm good at sawing off stuff, Sophie.

It's not that hard.

I've seen you cut meat.

I've deboned a chicken. I think I'm qualified.

People are a lot like chickens, you know, biologically.

I'd let Kristen be a doctor.

Robert, no.

Yeah.

You know what? We just, we need like two or three people who need limbs chopped off and whoever goes fastest gets to be the doctor.

I once saw you eat back to back, one, the largest fish I've ever seen.

Yeah.

And then the next day, a tomahawk steak. You cannot be my doctor.

You're not chopping me, buddy. So I've got it right here. Like we could, that'll remove a gunshot limb easy. Oh, sure. Yeah. It's a medical cleaver.

You don't even have to sanitize it.

Yeah, no. They didn't know about sanitizing back then. That fish was the size.

Of like my, that fish was giant.

It was delicious. It was great. It was delicious. It was a great fish. So the war does not go well for Giuseppe and his Greek rebels. And he decides to piece the fuck out of Greece and head to Egypt because he wants to get rich. And he knows that there's a lot of gold buried all over Egypt. Uh, people are stealing artifacts from ancient Egyptian sites and selling them at this point in time. And he wants to do that. Um, the new sultan, like the way he's, the kind of job that initially gets in there is the sultan that he had just been fighting against is modernizing the Ottoman army and wants European doctors for his military.

And Giuseppe's like, close enough, you know? Like, ah, that's basically a me. And yeah, he winds up working for the guys he'd just been fighting. As Kashuk Padaweri writes, quote, in 1829, the Italian landed in Alexandria and had once headed for Cairo. One of the things the governor wanted to improve was the army, and that included a more efficient military healthcare. So Ferlini enlisted as an assistant, and the following year he was already the head doctor of an infantry battalion. As such, he accompanied the 1st Regiment on its march to Sinar, the capital of the Sultanate of the same name, where the corps had been assigned.

Sinar was located in southeastern Sudan, on the banks of the Blue Nile, as Mehmed Ali's campaigns extended the borders to Ethiopia. And so he spends more than five months doing this. He visits Khartoum, he visits Wadi Halfa, Um, and he sees a bunch of different like archeological sites, right? There's all of these ruins of ancient civilizations. He's in like Khartoum isn't in ancient Egypt today, but at the time, I mean, it's part of, I think Sudan today. Uh, and I always has been, but it was like a polity within the Egyptian, like sphere of influence for a long time. And then obviously during the Ottoman era, it's part of the Ottoman empire, but there's all these ruins there and he keeps seeing them. And it just keeps

kind of like tweaking this part of his brain. That's like, there's a lot of money. buried in the sand here that someone i should just be able to take it from these people who who currently own it and bring it back to europe to get rich um giuseppe has what's referred to by as a dark period uh in pashawari's uh article uh he marries an ethiopian slave i don't i don't know if we'd really call that a marriage They have a child together and then the child dies.

He has a malaria epidemic that he has to treat like while helping to run a hospital and just a horrible situation. And by the time of this period, like number one, he is done doing medical stuff like he has helped like lead a hospital through a malaria epidemic, which I imagine is just mostly burying corpses and waiting to die yourself. Like it's just has to have been a hellish nightmare. So at the end of this, he's achieved some level of clout with the governor. And he's also like, I'm fucking done doing this doctor shit. And so he convinces the governor to go with him and on an expedition through Nubia to try to find gold, right?

This guy in office, he's like, hey, there's got to be gold in some of these ruins. Let's go fucking look for it. And they don't find any, right? I started this episode by making a point about the absolute antiquity of ancient Egypt, and that means that generations of treasure hunters had been combing through this stuff for thousands of years before Giuseppe and this governor start looking for it, right?

So they don't, there's not a whole lot that they're, that's just, it's not easy to find good stuff, even in like the early 1800s. Now, obviously, we know that there are still great finds to be made. King Tut's tomb is still buried at this point in time, but A dilettante like Giuseppe, with no relevant skill, isn't searching for anything like that. He wants the low-hanging fruit. And he starts hearing rumors about a smaller set of pyramids, right, located in a different part of, like, this area. Not, like, in Egypt proper, but in a place called Meroe. It's part of the Meroetic Kingdom, which is an ancient kingdom.

It's one of the latter kind of Egyptian successor civilizations. It's located to the south of Ptolemaic Egypt. And the pyramids of Moreau were mostly built from around 300 BC to 350 AD. These are very recent pyramids, right? Moreau outlasted Rome's invasion and conquest of Egypt and remained independent for quite some time after that. The Merodic Kingdom was ultimately brought down by Ethiopian invaders. And that whole mess gave us the Coptic language, which is a part of why we were able to translate the Rosetta Stone. But so you've got like 100 or so of these little pyramids.

They're like the biggest ones are maybe 90 to 100 feet tall. So they're not the size of the ones outside of Cairo. But there's a bunch of them. And they haven't been picked over quite as much as the sexier pyramids, right? Like, You don't want to go to the pyramids everybody knows because they've been they've been coming through that shit for a while. You want an off the beaten path pyramid. Right.

Kristen, are you ever like, wow, pyramid sexy?

Yeah.

Like, oh, the hipster pyramid.

OK, that's really undiscovered, kind of under the radar. I love, though, that this is his get rich quick.

Scheme oh yeah pyramid digging yeah there were not a lot of better options back in the day you couldn't just become an influencer and hope to get rich you know you had to you had to dig through the dirt and and risk malaria it was a harder era for that sort of thing um So Giuseppe gets it through his head that previous generations of grave robbers had probably been less thorough in Moreau than at the more famous sites. And he puts together an expedition with an Albanian businessman that he'd met during his doctor days, this guy Antonio Stefani. And Stefani has money. So he agrees, I'll pay for the equipment and the workers. And some of these workers are slaves. They are buying slaves and also just like hiring slaves other people own. That's a

pretty normal way to work in this period of time in the area. And Stefani and Giuseppe decide to split the profits of anything they find 50-50, right? So they leave for Moreau in August of 1834. Pataweri writes, quote, Then they also failed with some sand covered ruins where they found a large obelisk decorated with hieroglyphs, but which due to its enormous dimensions, they had to leave. Meanwhile, diseases began to take their toll on workers and animals and Giuseppe. He's not killing anybody, but people are dying for his dream pretty much every week. They're losing. Like that's just the way digging here. If you take a couple hundred men to dig with you, at least five or 10 are going to die of disease in the

process of like digging out there. Um, You just had to kind of know when you signed on to do a job away from home. Okay, might be the last time you see me. Like, bye, guys.

But I'm going with a doctor, so I'll be fine, right?

Yeah, he can cut off any limbs I need cut off, you know? That's basically universal healthcare in 18 fucking dot. So frustrated by the lack of progress, Giuseppe made an executive decision to switch their focus. they'd been digging kind of, you know, in places around here, the Pyramids of Moreau, like, and they decide to head to the most famous of them, right?

Because they'd kind of been fucking around some of the lesser sites. And the most famous of the Pyramids of Moreau had been discovered a decade or so earlier by a Frenchman. And it was called the Great Pyramid of Queen Amanishaketo. Amanishaketo? And that you can see if you're looking on the Netflix, you can see like an illustration of how it looked When Giuseppe arrived, and it's a, it's a tall kind of thin pyramid, again, probably would have been maybe 90 to 100 feet tall. And there's this like smaller squarish building out in front of it, but it looked like a fairly intact set of ruins, right?

Like that's a, that's a healthy looking pyramid.

Yeah.

And you should feel some foreboding at this point, because the reason I'm not showing you, I don't have like a modern day picture of the pyramid intact to show you, is what Giuseppe is going to do as soon as he shows up there.

Oh, fuck.

Okay.

Yeah. So he spends some time picking around the site and some other pyramids in the site. And, you know, I think that if you know anything about archaeology, and Giuseppe really doesn't, it would have been clear, if you wanted to get anything out of this, it's going to take years of careful research. You know, like painstaking digging and sorting to like gradually make progress at collecting and figuring out what's there. And Giuseppe doesn't have time for that.

So he decides, I'm just going to hire a small army and ransack this fucking pyramid. So he hires 500 or so impoverished workers and he has them start systematically fucking up like this pyramid.

Right.

There are speculation that he used gunpowder to blow the top off of this queen's pyramid. Giuseppe doesn't mention that in his own notes, but on his blog, Roger Pierce, who translated some of his writing, suspects that he may have left the gunpowder thing out of his notes out of shame. What matters is that by the time he and his workers are done, that lovely pyramid I just showed you an illustration of looks like like this. And again, if you can't see the video, it's just gone. That little square building is intact and 80% of the pyramid's gone.

They just ripped the top off of it. So in a Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt article, Yvonne Markowitz and Peter Lacovara speculate that one of three things happened when Giuseppe and his partner busted into this pyramid, starting at the top and going down, right? Because they're like, they're blowing through it, basically. And Giuseppe, he doesn't say they dynamited it. He says that they found a secret hidden burial chamber at the top of the pyramid, right?

And that they had to dig away and remove all of that to get to the treasures inside it, because they do find treasure. Now, none of these pyramids, and there's a hundred something Baroque pyramids, none of them have chambers like that at the top. This would have been the only one that had a chamber like that if it had a chamber like that, because as a spoiler, that's not true. Giuseppe finds all this stuff buried elsewhere after they've like blown the top off of this pyramid.

He just lies about having found it in the top to justify why he destroyed this thing, because otherwise he kind of seems like an asshole.

Right.

But wherever they find it, they do find the well-preserved mummy of Queen Amanisha Keto. And they find a bunch of gold and jewels and gems. They find the motherlode. It's searching for Egyptian treasure. Like, it's everything you could hope for. It's a huge find. In that article, Lacovara and Markowitz write, And he's not worried about bandits. He's worried about his own workers. He's worried they're going to want him to share the gold that they found. They've been dying in the desert. So they want some of that.

And he is not a sharing guy, right? That's not why Giuseppe blew up a pyramid. You don't blow up a pyramid to share.

But Robert, you know who didn't blow up a pyramid?

We cannot prove that. And I, Sophie, I gotta be honest with you. I have done something to a pyramid that I can't talk about on air. And that's all I'll say. Here's some ads. And we're back. That wasn't a joke. Anyway, I guess we'll return to the episode. So they start unearthing a bunch of relics around the base of this pyramid under the ruin of a masonry wall and worried that the locals are catching up. Giuseppe dismisses the bulk of the crew he's hired to ransack this ancient burial ground. And yet, per that article, quote, about a week later, the workmen, sensing an important find had been made, returned with weapons, determined to receive just payment for a share of the treasure. So they armed themselves.

It was never good when the workmen returned with weapons.

That's true today, too.

Support the workmen, yeah.

For the workmen.

Labor, labor.

That may not be true, because it would be really convenient for Giuseppe if an army of, like, armed, dangerous local Egyptians showed up and forced him to flee because that gives him a justification for just taking all of the booty and running and not preserving the mummy because he finds this queen's mummy and destroys it, ripping off all the jewelry, right?

That's fucking rude, bro.

Yeah, just a ruined mummy. And he doesn't document the site in any meaningful way. As any archaeologist knows, Even if it doesn't matter how shiny and cool looking it is, if you remove an artifact from its original context and don't document that in any way, then you've lost a huge portion of the historical value that it has.

Right.

Because you don't know where the fuck it came from. And Giuseppe, he finds most of the treasure that he finds in this one dig. But he's also like buying shit like artifacts while he's in Giuseppe. like the area. And he just is including them all in this hall. So he's throwing a bunch of shit from like ancient Rome and other parts of Egypt together and just saying it's all part of one big hall because he doesn't give a fuck. It's just on an archaeological level, it's a disaster, right? Like it's really fucked up. But claiming that these workers had showed up with weapons gives him an excuse, right? Well, they were going to steal and probably melt it all down. These savages, they would have ruined all of the gold. So I had to grab everything,

throw it into bags, and run like fuck back to Europe, right? And he does damage a bunch of these relics. He rips them off so hastily that something like the clasps are broken, gems fall off and stuff. And then he bounces back to Europe to auction all this shit off in 1837. Now, he's got a shitload of gold. This is undeniably the equivalent value of hundreds of millions of dollars today, honestly. Like, if you're thinking about What artifacts of this quality are really worth at least tens of millions of dollars? But he can't prove that they're real.

And they're so high quality, it's so rare to actually find original, intact gold and gem-like jewelry from this period of time, right? Because it usually just gets melted down. That everyone's like, well, these are clearly fakes. Because nothing this good exists. No one's seen shit that looks this nice in a very long time from this part of the world. So you must be faking it, Giuseppe. You bought some gold and had someone make this stuff. You know, part of why all of the experts doubt Giuseppe when he comes in is that he lies about where he'd found them. They can tell that that whole thing about the top chamber holding all this gold is bullshit because none of the other pyramids that have been excavated worked

that way. So they know he's lying about something, right? They just don't know exactly what. And they also know that he's thrown a bunch of, like, Roman artifacts he bought at a market in with the Egyptian stuff. So nobody really trusts him. And eventually he does manage to get this treasure purchased by the King of Bavaria. And a bunch winds up in the Berlin Museum, partly because they were some of the first people to realize the artifacts were real, if completely separated from their proper context.

All of the artifacts we talk about today, weirdly enough, are going to wind up in Germany pretty much, like at least for a while. World War II is going to change some of that. When the Soviets take over Nazi Germany, they're going to be like, I don't think you guys deserve all these artifacts.

Yes.

I think these are coming back to Moscow. meant that Giuseppe's example immediately inspires an army of copycats to descend on Moreau. As soon as it becomes known, hey, this Italian fucker got rich finding artifacts in these pyramids, armies of treasure hunters descend on Moreau, and they start doing exactly what Giuseppe had did to every other intact pyramid they can get their hands on. Per that article by Markovits and Lacovara- Although Ferlini never returned to Nubia to continue his hunting spree, others did. Spurred by his narrative, these zealous fortune-seekers destroyed the tops of nearly every pyramid in the Sudan. Needless to say, nothing was ever discovered during these decapitations. Moreover, if one uses Ferlini's dimensions of

the hidden chamber, it becomes apparent that a room of this size could not structurally fit within the purported place. And here is a picture of what the pyramids looked like after the, and it's just like a line of like seven pyramids that are all ripped in half. Like they just, between, a lot of it, they're not always blowing them up. A lot of it's like you're just having workmen hack through the tops with like axes, pickaxes.

But yeah, they're all ruined.

Yeah, it's like someone just ripped off the muffin top. Yeah.

And it's because he needed to lie about where he'd found the artifacts to hide the fact that he blew it up for nothing. So all of these other pyramids get destroyed because of that lie.

So because one man was shitty and a liar, a bunch of other men became shitty liars?

They didn't lie. They were just ruining pyramids to try to get rich. It was a very honest ransacking, Sophie. All right.

So one was a shitty liar and the others were just shitty. Got it.

Like running on misinformation.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's fair to say. Um, so Giuseppe did at least have something of an excuse for his behavior, which is that he never pretended to be anything but a treasure hunter, right? I mean, he did a little, he writes in an account of the journey that he wanted to accomplish something for science, but that like one sentence, everyone knows what Giuseppe's about, right? And he never goes down as anything but a treasure hunter. Our main subject for this week is someone who was just as destructive as Giuseppe, perhaps much more so than but someone who also attained respect and fame that exists in some circles to the present day because of his crimes against history.

His name is Heinrich Schliemann, and he destroyed the city of Troy. Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Schliemann. who was born on January 6th, 1822, just about a generation after Giuseppe was born. His childhood home was in Mecklenburg, a part of Western Pomerania, which was under the control of Prussia, and is itself a part of Northern Germany that people outside of Germany don't much discuss. You don't hear about Pomeranians all that much these days, because we just kind of, all the Germans get mashed together now. Nobody really talks about Prussians all that much anymore either, right? They're technically a bunch of different kinds of German, but Yeah, everything's a little flatter now. But this is 50 years before

Germany exists almost, right? So these are all still a bunch of independent kingdoms that are often at war with each other. In fact, Heinrich grows up in a Europe that had not that long ago put Napoleon down for the last time. So he's kind of coming up really like Europe is still recovering from the Napoleonic Wars in his childhood, right? Like that's when he's growing up. his father was a pastor and their financial situation was, I think, broadly comfortable initially, but they weren't rich, but they seemed to be doing okay. His parents valued education and he grew into an avid reader. At age seven, he came across a book, World History for Children, that featured an illustration of the ancient city of Troy on fire after

the Greeks sacked it. Now, as I said, historians were in the process of, like, making being a historian a career in the modern sense. And the more reputable ones generally agreed in this period of time that the Iliad was pure fiction, right? The Iliad and the Odyssey, totally fictional, not based on anything real that had happened. That's not a universal conclusion, but I think it's like the more mainstream one among like academics. Perhaps there'd been a real city of Troy, but that was seen as unlikely. And that's actually– we know that's wrong now, right? Like the folk view is definitely that the Iliad was true. There was a real Troy. And Heinrich as a kid believes that Troy is a real place. And we now know

that it was, right? There was a real Troy and there's– the Iliad– not to say that the Iliad is like an accurate history text, but there probably was some war– Against Troy that it was like kind of based off of, inspired by legends and rumors of, right? Because we do know like that the place existed and that it got sacked a few times. So Heinrich grows up, at least Heinrich will later claim in his autobiography and stuff that he was always obsessed with Troy as a kid, right?

We don't actually know if that's accurate. Because he was at the point at which he starts claiming that, oh, as a child, I dreamed of finding the walls of Troy. He was consciously trying to turn himself into a celebrity. And it's very possible that this is a complete lie. His more credible biographer.

I was going to say, do you think he would have been happy with the casting of Brad Pitt as Achilles?

I don't think he would have liked Brad Pitt as Achilles. I don't think any of us really liked Brad Pitt as Achilles. I, yeah, I, I, I'm frustrated at almost all of the, uh, of the casting in, in every Iliad and Odyssey, but I also, I, I maintain that the best casting for Odysseus possible would have been Gene Wilder, right?

Like that's the, the Odyssey I want is Gene Wilder's Odysseus. Uh, like that, that I, uh, I think we could have gotten a great film. It's a comedy. It should be a comedy. Um, So his more credible biographers throw a reasonable amount of cold water on this idea. Leo Duhl, author of Memoirs of Heinrich Schliemann, points out that while Schliemann would claim late in life to have been inspired to find Troy by vivid tales of the war spun into bedtime stories by his father, he never mentioned this in his earliest books where he wrote about his upbringing because he writes about his upbringing before he finds Troy and he doesn't talk about this yet. So I think this is myth-making, right? Post-facto or at least to some extent.

It's not weird. As a kid, he probably did encounter the Iliad and the Odyssey. They were pretty popular stories then as they are today. He would also claim in the second draft of his life story that he'd grown up raised on ghost stories, claims that their house was haunted by the pastor who'd lived there before his dad took up the job. There were also, he claims, constant stories of buried treasure in the local folklore of Mecklenburg.

There were these treasures that were supposed to be hidden in various points in the past around the city he grew up in. And Yeah, as a result, quote, this is something he would write later. My faith in the existence of those treasures was so great that whenever I heard my father complain of his poverty, I always expressed my astonishment that he did not dig up the silver bowl or the golden cradle and so become rich. Well, if there's all these riches in the woods, Dad, why are you poor?

Just imagine if that's what your kid said. Just like, will you go treasure hunt? I mean, my God.

Yeah, come on, Dad. We're eating fucking bread for the fourth time this week. Get us some fucking gold. Yeah, that would probably be pretty frustrating. Although, just his dad sucks.

So.

He claims, and again, this is almost certainly not true, but that I talked of nothing else but searching for treasure during his childhood. And as a result, I was continually laughed at by everyone except two young girls. These ladies. Oh, boy. So what I'm reading here is that the two nice ladies in town took pity on you because you were weird and wouldn't stop talking about Troy.

If a man came up to me or a boy came up to me and was like, hey.

Yeah.

I'm going to find the ruins of Troy.

Do you think there's buried treasure in the woods?

I would be like, I'm going to find the door and take my drink with me.

Yeah.

Honestly, I would be probably intrigued to be like, well, okay, let's check it out.

Buried treasure, you say?

Do your parents know where you are?

Look. Are you in therapy? If a weird kid comes up to you talking about buried treasure, it's always worth rolling those dice if you're, It's probably not. Don't go anywhere with a stranger who tells you he knows where there's buried treasure. That's actually a terrible idea.

Yes, I agree. Thank you.

Yeah. But he claims these two ladies, Louise and Mina Meineke, always listened to me with profound attention, especially Mina, who he had a huge crush on. They took dancing lessons together, but they weren't good at dancing, he says, because they're too obsessed planning to find Troy together one day. I don't think this girl existed. I think this is a lie he tells later about the like lost love of his early life. She liked Troy just as much as I did. And she didn't think I was a freak for wanting to find buried gold.

She wanted to dance with me, but she was so excited about Troy.

She couldn't even dance with me, but she had.

A huge crush.

Huge crush.

She had a huge crush. She loved me, but we were too in love with Troy. That was our real passion. He's like 10. In 1831, his mom dies and he describes her loss as an irreparable misfortune, which it must have been. He and his six siblings soon felt another piece of ill luck, quote, which resulted in all our acquaintances suddenly turning their backs on us, including the Meineke sisters.

They get shunned by the whole town. Now, Heinrich doesn't write what very bad thing caused this to happen in his own writings, but his biographer tells us that his dad had an affair with the maid Heinrich. Before mom died, I think mom gets sick. He's stopping the maid. Mom dies and he keeps stopping the maid and he buys her a bunch of a bunch of expensive jewelry and everyone in town finds out about it and they ostracize the whole family because the pastor is a piece of shit because he's the pastor. Like he's definitely not supposed to be doing this kind of shit.

Boy, howdy.

Yeah, not nice. So Heinrich's dad sends him to live with his uncle for a while and pays to enroll him in the gymnasium, which is like a– it's like there's a couple different high school equivalency things in the German states in this period of time. The gymnasium is the one that is meant to prepare you for college.

If you go to gymnasium, it's because you're studying to get a real education, right? But Heinrich only makes it three months away. He claims a disaster in the family, made his continued schooling untenable, and he had to leave and go to a different school. And this one is– the school he has to go to isn't preparing him for college. It's preparing him to, like, work a fucking bullshit job, right? Like, it's that kind of program, right?

And the disaster– That forced him to stop going to gymnasium was the fact that his father got caught embezzling from the church and lost his job. Or at least he got accused of having embezzled from the church, was forced to resign. There is a later investigation and he's declared innocent. So it may just be that after... After he got caught cheating, they were like, well, we got to get this pastor out of here. And they kind of fired him for a bullshit reason. I don't fully know, right?

I'm not going to bat for Heinrich's dad as having not done the embezzlement.

I think he embezzled because he needed the money to buy the gifts.

For the maid. That's what I'm calling, too. At age 14, he graduated and became an apprentice in a grocery shop in town. This is not a big shop. And Heinrich would later claim, I, of course, came into contact only with the lowest classes of society. So he's kind of working at like a quickie mart, right? Like this is the equivalent of like a little mini mart in a bad part of town is the job he's doing in like 1820s Germany as a 14 year old. So he does this for a couple of years. And this is another, we've got a couple, the first claim of how he first started to hear the legends of Troy is that he got that book as a kid. The second is that his dad would tell him stories about Troy. And the third thing that he would sometimes claim is that

a customer came in who would drink regularly at their little store, who had dropped out of the gymnasium after spending several more years in it than he had. and who knew Homer and the original Greek. And Heinrich would bribe this other boy with whiskey to get him to recite the Iliad to him, right? And he vowed one day to learn Greek so that he would be able to read, you know, the Iliad like this boy could.

And I don't know if that's true at all. Probably the only part of this that we can safely say is accurate is that Heinrich very likely worked a dead end grocery job as a young man, right? That's pretty plausible. He describes himself as having been relieved of the fate of remaining there as if by a miracle. And here's the miracle. Quote, by lifting too heavy a cask of chicory, a blood vessel sprung in my lungs and I got heavy blood spitting, which rendered me incapable for all sorts of hard work. My patron, seeing that in my broken health I could not be of any more use to him, took an apprentice in my place and turned me out.

He's like 17 or 18. I was about to say. He picks up a barrel of chicory so big it blows out his lungs.

Sorry.

That's fucked up. Like on the job injuries were another level back then.

No workman's comp for him.

No, no, no.

Actually, workman's comp kind of comes into existence not long after this, after the establishment of Germany out of on Bismarck. like the architect of the German state, puts into program some of the first social welfare programs like that, at least in Germany, because it's like a way to fight the socialists, right? It's like, well, these socialists are promising workers a lot. We got to give them something if they blow out their hearts lifting chicory barrels.

Right.

In terms of what actually went wrong with Heinrich here, Leo Duell, his biographer, suspects he had tuberculosis. And so he wound up coughing up blood, exerting himself, but it was the tuberculosis that caused it, not the chicory barrel. Probably more likely, I would guess. Like, I've lifted stuff that was too heavy for me, but it's never caused me to start spitting up blood. So I think maybe tuberculosis played a role one way or the other. Everyone has TB in the 1820s, by the way, right?

Yep.

Either way, whatever the actual truth here, at the end of his apprenticeship, Heinrich has a work-related injury that means he can't really do labor anymore. And he's got about 30 Prussian dollars to his name. From this humble beginning, he would eventually make a fortune. So his dream at this point of time is to get the fuck out of Pomerania and make it to America, a land where he already knows he can reinvent himself. Even in like the mid, like early 1800s, 1820s, 30s, people are like, yeah, if you can get over to the U.S., You know, anything's possible there. They'll take anybody, right? You can really make some things happen if you're an ambitious kid with no morals in the United States. So he wants to

do that. And he gets passage on a ship bound for Venezuela, working as a cabin boy. And his plan is to take it to Venezuela. And then once he hits Venezuela, start finding odd jobs and make his way to the United States, right? However, this dream is cut short because after less than two weeks at sea, His ship hits a horrible storm and wrecks and Heinrich is washed up ashore in the Netherlands. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Like literally flotsam in the sea.

Yeah.

Low key, not a bad pace to wash up.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you're going to wash up somewhere, I would pick the Netherlands over a lot of places. You know where else I'd like to wash up? At the sponsors of this show.

Oh.

Mm-hmm.

And we're back. So this segment from a Deutsche Welle article by Sabine Uhls describes Heinrich's next chapter of life well enough after he comes ashore in the Netherlands. He finally reached Amsterdam after many detours. Well, he found a job as a messenger at a trading post. His ability to learn languages helped him. In only a year, he had learned Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Later, he added Russian to his repertoire and knew when to strategically deploy his language skills. After moving to Russia, he dealt in raw materials for munitions and made a lot of money, right?

So he's just kind of a generic old-timey businessman, right? He works at an import-export firm, and he's just buying things one place, selling them for a higher price at the next place, yeah? And that's how he gets sent to Russia. He settles in St. Petersburg, and he spends his time, like, yeah, doing import and export stuff, and he does very well at this, enough that a bunch of different companies hire him to move their goods, and he starts to make really good money. As he obtains, you know, the beginnings of a fortune, he commits to filling in what he saw as the holes in his education.

Learning new languages was of prime importance to Heinrich, and he develops a system he will later claim that allows him to learn any language in six weeks. And I don't know if that's, that'd be a very impressive system. I don't know if that's real.

Mr. Duolingo.

Yeah, it's got to be better than fucking Duolingo. But he gets really good. He's like a polyglot. He's one of these people that just takes to new languages incredibly easily. And one of his hobbies, he writes diary entries like his entire life, like thousands of pages. And when he's in a different country, he will write in the language of whatever country he happens to physically be in at the time.

That's kind of cool.

Right?

Like he's that kind of polyglot. It's a pretty good flex. Like I got to give it to Heinrich. That's pretty sick. Yeah. He would later explain his business success this way in a letter to a friend. In every situation of my life, I always proved how much of a person can accomplish with iron energy. I performed miracles during my four-year stay in Amsterdam from 1842 to 1846. I did what nobody else has ever done and could ever do. When I became a merchant in St. Petersburg, I was the most able and prudent businessman of the entire exchange. Later, as a traveler, I was a traveler par excellence. He's a narcissist, right?

Everything I did, I was the best at it. The best anyone's ever seen. He's very Trumpy. No one's ever seen a trader better than me in Amsterdam. No one's ever seen a better businessman in St. Petersburg. I was the top, you know? A very familiar kind of narcissistic rich guy writing style.

And how old was he at this point?

He's in his 20s. He gets rich fairly, or he starts to get comfortable fairly young. I don't know how rich he is, but he's doing all right. He's probably exaggerating his financial success somewhat, I have reason to believe, because in 1850, he receives word that his brother Ludwig, who'd moved to California and gotten rich in the gold rush, had just died. And kind of seeking to take Ludwig's money, because I don't think he has quite as much as he pretends he had at this point, and he really wanted Ludwig's money, he moves to the United States in order to get access to it. From the book Finding the Walls of Troy by Susan Allen. On hearing of his brother's death in California, Schliemann traveled to the United

States in order to recoup some of the fortune Louis Schliemann had made as a San Francisco innkeeper during the gold rush. He arrived in 1851, just three years after the gold was discovered, when the state's population was rising from 14,000 to 250,000. Within months of his arrival, Schliemann had set up a bank where he bought gold dust and sold it to an agent of a London firm.

In five and a half months, he had sold $ 1. 35 million in gold dust with a profit, according to today's values, of roughly 162,000 pounds or about $ 243, 000. When the Rothschild agent in San Francisco threatened to break off relations with Schliemann because of consistently short weight consignments, Schliemann sold the bank and, feigning fever, left in a hurry. He returned to St. Petersburg and quickly married a Katerina Lyshin in 1852.

And so basically, he moves to the U.S. to get his brother's money. He starts a bank. He starts moving gold dust, and he's shorting everybody. He's not sending as much, and he's fucking with the measurements. He's scamming them. And he has to flee the country to run back to Russia because he gets in trouble for doing it.

Wow.

And that's fun, right? We love a good little cod man, you know? And that's the thing about Heinrich. He's usually in legal businesses, but he always cheats. Whenever he can cheat to get ahead, he's going to do that. And then he's just going to run like fuck when he gets caught. In short, he's an American, right? He's one of the first Americans. Even though he's back in Europe, he's not going to be a citizen for years more at this point. This man is always an American in his heart, right? He never found a grift he didn't love. Yeah.

So he winds up back in Russia right as the Crimean War starts, and he decides, you know what I'm good at? Being a war profiteer. Might as well be a war profiteer again. Susan Allen writes that he capitalized on shortages during the British blockade of Russian ports and invested all his cash in a risky venture whereby supplies would be offloaded in Prussia and transported overland to St. Petersburg.

When it paid off, he repeatedly turned over his money and doubled his investment in a year. So he takes the fortune he already has and he doubles it by cashing in on the Crimean War, right? That people are starving, there's not enough stuff, and he invests in this overland. Yeah, he's a war profiteer, you know? By the war's end, he is a very wealthy man. Probably by the modern equivalent of like a decamillionaire, maybe even more, right? Maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in modern money.

He's just hitting all the grips. Yeah, well.

He's hitting all the grifts. He's knocking them, he does everything but genocide, really, in his time.

You know, and we appreciate that.

And we appreciate, like, leaving the genocide off the list, yeah. He's rich enough, I don't think he's quite 30, that he seriously considers retiring. I think he would have been around 30. He seriously considers retiring, right? But during one of his business trips, he'd visited the British Museum and been enthralled by a scale model of the Temple of Ramses II. And this seems to be what either ignited or reignited the fascination with Troy that he'd had as a kid. We know he writes his father in March of 1856 that he'd planned to visit the land of beloved Homer, aka Greece, and began to study for such a trip, learning ancient Greek and Latin and starting a book club for other nerds. Travel is a very serious

thing in the mid-1800s. Again, you might die any time you go more than like five minutes from home. So you're going to be really, if you're going to travel, you're going to learn the local languages and do all of this work, right? He puts a lot of effort into his trips. You've got to give him that. And he keeps this up for years, writing constantly of his ambition to visit Greece for purposes involved with my beloved sciences.

And he by this point, by the late 1850s, it seems fair to say that he planned to visit Greece. And he had maybe some ambitions to try and like find ruins of the stories that he'd read about there, whether he's not talking about excavating Troy at this point, but he's talking around the subject. His first trip to Greece isn't until the end of 1858, and he has to return early because a former business partner sues him in London. I think it might have been in St. Petersburg, but this is why he has to go back home, because he scammed somebody again, right? Although he does win his case, but I don't think that means he was probably in the right, just knowing Heinrich. Sure.

He probably paid off the judge or some kind of grift or something.

Yeah, he probably bribed the judge. Yeah. And then he starts work. He was planning to retire, but he goes back to work right after this court case ends because the Civil War, the U.S. Civil War starts in 1860. And you bet your ass Heinrich War Profiteer Schliemann is going to profiteer the shit out of the U.S. Civil War.

So he heads to the United States and he makes a bunch of money speculating in cotton, indigo, and other commodities. In 1864, as the war is winding down, he retires again. And departs this time for finally he's going to have his world tour. He's going to be traveling for like a year or two. And he's going to visit every place in like the classical European imagination. He starts in Carthage and he goes all throughout, you know, the Mediterranean basin and eventually on to Japan and through China. Like he goes all over the fucking world. He spends 50 days crossing the Pacific to get to the Americas. And in his letters home, Schliemann would write about his newfound appreciation for the importance of preserving ancient ruins and monuments.

As he sees all of these ancient monuments in different countries, he's like, I've been taken with the importance of preserving our shared cultural heritage. And as he writes about that, he also writes about breaking off and stealing a piece of the Great Wall of China. Dude. Not super consistent. And biographer Susan Allen tries to explain this by calling it hypocritical disrespect for governments that did not concern themselves with the preservation of monuments, right? That, well, the Chinese aren't taking good enough care of their Great Wall, so I need to bring a piece of it home with me to keep it safe, right? In January of 1866, Heinrich has returned home to his wife and multiple children

in St. Petersburg, but he doesn't really like doing that. And as... Susan Allen writes, quote, Schliemann again abandoned his family to go visit the British Museum like weeks after he returns. He's like, but you know what? I don't really want to raise my kids. Katarina, you've got that, right? You can handle having a family thing? All right, I'm going to head to the museum for like six months.

I'm shocked that Mr. Griff guy isn't a good wife guy.

Another Trump parallel. He has kids at this point. Yeah, another Trump. His children only know him through his letters, pretty much.

Cool.

So he spends weeks at the British Museum, and then he goes to France to study literature for a month at the Sorbonne. His family is based in St. Petersburg this whole time, and he just does not want to be anywhere near them. In his letters home, he makes a couple half-hearted attempts to convince his wife to like move.

Why don't you come to Paris? And he actually threatens to divorce her twice because she won't. What he never does at any point is make spending time with his family a priority. And his son only comes to know him through his letters, which are mostly about his passion for antiquities. He's like writing letters that are basically like, I love antiquities so much more than raising my own kids. Yeah.

Later in 1868, he visits Italy, and as a tourist, he gets to watch his first archaeological dig. This is in Pompeii, and it's being held by a different Giuseppe, who was an actual trailblazing archaeologist, from finding the walls of Troy. At Pompeii, with its marvelous preservation, urban city plan, and relation to the coastline, he was awakened to the possibilities of archaeology. On the 16th of June, he recorded Fiorelli's innovative method of reclaiming the incinerated bodies of Pompeians.

Schliemann was impressed by Fiorelli's use of a railway to dispose of unwanted debris and by the sheer history of archaeological exploration there. Yet the impatient Schliemann could not stomach the amount of time, two weeks, that Fiorelli took to clear one house. And that's fast in archaeology terms today.

So he loves the look of all this, but he's like, but all this time. What if there was a way to excavate ancient ruins really fucking fast, right? And he's going to keep thinking along these lines. And we'll talk about where that leads him and what it leads him to destroy in part two, which is going to involve the destruction of the ruins of the city of Troy.

But that's all we've got for today. Kristen, how are you feeling?

I feel like I don't know if I never want to watch Indiana Jones again or watch it right after this recording.

Yeah.

Yeah. I can imagine like Indiana Jones being the stories a guy like Giuseppe tells to explain like why he just has the artifact and no notes about where it came from and the place he got it from is destroyed. Yeah, these Nazis. Oh, man, they were they were so bad. I had to just grab that big golden crate and run with it, you know. It killed them all. Don't open it. Don't look inside too close. Just give me the money.

And then with this guy, he would have added like, and by the way, women loved me.

Oh yeah. With Heinrich.

Yeah.

It crushes.

Yeah. I'm big with the girlies.

Yeah.

So that's what we got for part one. You got any pluggables to plug, Kristen Conger, before we head out?

I do.

You can listen to my podcast, Unladylike, which is about women, culture, politics. And if you are more interested in more kind of women behind the bastards, honestly, listen to Conspiracy, she wrote, which is all about women's roles in conspiracism and disinformation and... You know, just spreading a lot of fascist bullshit.

Yeah. Yeah. Sounds great. We'll check all that out. And check us out Thursday when we're back with more of Heinrich Schliemann's bullshit.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

Part One: Heinrich Schliemann: The Archaeologist Who Destroyed Troy

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