We know about a lot of famous people today. Some of them are so famous that just knowing their initials is enough to know all about them, FDR, JFK, J Lo. But there are a lot of people who were once famous, and very important, for what they contributed to the history of civilization. And I'd like for my students to know all about them, too. Our second story deals with the discovery of the ancient city of Troy. And we've asked graduate student Rob Bullard to investigate. There have been many movies, old and new, celebrating the saga of Troy and its rivalries with the Greeks of Mycenae. Some of these movies were pretty good [MUSIC] And some of them were not so good. [MUSIC] [NOISE] These old movies were fun, but they don't tell the real story of Troy, and that's why we need Rob Bullard. Rob is a classics major, which means he studies ancient Greek, and Latin. Rob is finishing a master's degree before pursuing a career as a prosecuting attorney back in North Carolina. Then here's Rob's unique assignment. Troy was really an ancient city-state in what is now northwestern Turkey. Troy came into contact, and then battle, with the city-states of ancient Greece. Troy was destroyed and forgotten by the Middle Ages, and no one if it ever existed. And yet, in these days of struggles and tension between the US and Iraq, Iran, Russia, North Korea and China. The Trojan War stands out as the first great conflict between east and west. And it was the first site where archaeology solved ancient puzzles and the first site to produce an archaeological superstar. But who discovered these long lost ruins? That's what we've asked Rob to investigate. >> I found out it is not an easy question to answer. The poet Homer told the story of two great empires, one was Troy, and the other was the land of the Mycenaeans in Greece. >> Mycenae had a warrior aristocracy and an alliance of independent city-states. In Greece, lived the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, ho was taken to Troy by Paris, the son of the Trojan king. Thus starting a great Trojan war. [MUSIC] The war, if it really happened, occurred around 1200 BC. Homer's tale was perhaps composed in the eighth century BC. And the story was finally written down later to become the great epic poems of Homer known as the Iliad and the Odyssey. [MUSIC] Troy flourished perhaps around 1300 BC, controlling the Dardanelles at the fringe of the Hittites Empire. It had a royal palace, and massive city walls, and was a center for international trade. The Mycenaean, Greeks under their King Agamemnon, sailed to Troy and besieged the city with their great warrior, Achilles. Eventually, the Greeks pretended to leave, an offered a parting gift, a huge Trojan horse. Hiding inside the Mycenean soldiers crept out, opened the gates and let in their troops, who burned and sacked the city. But was the Trojan War just poet Homer's adventures or was it actual history, or, a bit of both? Scholars searched for Troy for years, and the man who became famous for finding it was, Heinrich Schliemann, in 1868. He claimed he'd been obsessed since boyhood with discovering the lost city of Troy, and proving that it exists. But he had a shady past and a history of lying, swindling and stealing. How could our own Rob Bullard find out if Schliemann really had discovered historical Troy? >> I used my $1000 from Forgot and Lost to go to Chicago. My reason for visiting was not to go sight-seeing, which of course I spent some university money doing. [MUSIC] Chicago was where the greatest archeologists, from all over the world, were having their annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. There I tried to talk with experts of Troy, including Brian Rose, AIA President, and the latest excavator of Troy. When I arrived at the convention, I began asking people about Troy. >> I can tell you a little bit about the ancient city of Troy. >> Sure, fire away. >> [LAUGH] That it was the home of the Trojans, who fought the Greeks for Helen, and that it's located in Turkey. >> I'm a publisher, >> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] Don't ask me about Troy, you want a classicist. >> What do I know about Troy? >> That Brad Pitt was the worst Achilles, ever. >> The movie or the site? >> The site. >> The site, I don't know anything about the site. >> I've never been there. >> [LAUGH] >> Love to go someday. >> Wait, isn't there a team, a football team, called the Trojans? >> [LAUGH] I think there a million of them out there. >> Oh, yeah, okay. >> And a few soccer teams, and a few other- >> A baseball team. >> [LAUGH] >> Heinrich Schliemann went out with his copy of Homer, and basically dug a huge trench. And managed to find the city, but destroyed a lot in the process. >> In 1822 a Scottish newspaper writer, and topographer named Charles Maclaren, wrote a book, The Plain Of Troy Described:. Claiming Troy existed, and was located under a mound known as Hissarlik. But Maclaren was an armchair archaeologist and never really excavated. In 1847, young Frank Calvert, a British teenager whose family owned land in the Hissarlik area, dug in the mound. And became convinced that the Mound of Hissarlik was really ancient Troy. But the family had little money to dig on a large scale. Enter onto the scene, wealthy German embezzler, self-made business tycoon in the Russian indigo trade, and wheeler-dealer, Heinrich Schliemann. [MUSIC] After partaking in the California gold rush, he had to flee America under threat of being lynched for bank fraud. [MUSIC] Arriving in Turkey, he met Calvert. Forming a partnership in which Schliemann agreed to pay for and dig up the area that Calvert owned and thought was the side of Troy. There were numerous layers of occupations of the site, and Schliemann reasoned, irrationally, that the most important settlement, Homeric Troy, would be at the bottom. And so he dug away the hill, removing the more recent settlements, until he came to Troy II, deep in the mound, and pronounced this Homeric Troy. And there, he claimed he found great treasure, which his wife, Sophia, modeled. Unfortunately as Schliemann was to learn only years later, he had dug down too far. And in his haste, dug through the levels of the famous Troy and destroyed them forever. [MUSIC] But was Schliemann's discovery the result of an obsession he claimed to have since he was a boy? Or did he steal Calvert and McLaren's ideas and claim all the credit for himself? In Chicago, I was roaming about among the crowds of experts and interested visitors at the AIA. When all of a sudden I stumbled- Excuse me- Right onto the actual- Are you the- Current- Brian Rose? Excavator of Troy, Brian Rose- >> You're just saying that for the camera, right? >> No! The object of my visit. >> There is no the Brian Rose. >> [LAUGH] This guy is like >> It's a skinny kid from Ohio. >> It's like the American Idol of the whole field of archaeology. >> How is that? No one told me this. >> [LAUGH] >> Okay, well- >> Dr Rose very graciously agreed to sit down with me and tell me about the Troy excavations. By 1300 BCE, Troy VI had reached a high level of civilization, but it was struck by a massive earthquake. [NOISE] Giving rise to the famous Troy VIIA, the rebuilt city, which may have been the community that inspired Homer's poetry. [MUSIC] Was Troy VIIA Homeric Troy? >> When one asks if Schliemann found Homer's Troy in his excavations, one assumes that there's one settlement that could be linked to the Trojan war as told by Homer. And that's just not correct, There are elements of the Bronze Age settlements of Troy, Troy VI, and Troy VII that one can find reflections of in the Iliad. The Iliad was first written down in the late eighth century, and there are elements of iron age Troy. Troy in ninth and eighth centuries, that one can also find reflected in the Iliad. But there's no one settlement that one should link, that one can link, concretely with Homer's Trojan War. >> What had the new archeology revealed about Troy VI in 1300 BCE? The sixth city on the site of the mount of Hissarlik, that Brian Rose spoke about, had a lower and an upper city. The lower featuring a huge ditch to prevent any chariots from attacking. [MUSIC] It had huge stone defensive walls and houses with flat roofs for drying fruits and nuts. [MUSIC] There was a main street leading to a fabulous palace. Scholars believed a massive earthquake destroyed Troy VI, [MUSIC] And Troy VIIA was a quick rebuild with smaller houses. [MUSIC] But Troy VIIA had a few new wrinkles, too. [MUSIC] There were merlons, or mini-crenellations, built atop the massive walls, and stone fetish idols called baetles, to show the city had special divine protection. But who discovered Troy, Charles Maclaren, Frank Calvert, or Heinrich Schliemann? I was able to talk to Brian Rose’s protegee at Troy, Dr. William Aylward. >> Troy was beyond doubt, Calvert’s discovery. How do we know this? We know it because the documents, the diaries, the correspondence between Calvert and Schliemann and others tells us this was the case. And we know it in three ways. We know that Calvert had been working at Hissarlik, as many as five years. Prior to Schliemann's arrival on the site in August of 1868. We know that Calvert had unrivaled knowledge of the region, and Hissarlik and the secret of Hissarlik. And that he shared that knowledge openly, perhaps naively, with Heinrich Schliemann. And we know that Schliemann, in his publications, and in his diary, inflated his own insights about Hissarlik, and minimized Calvert's contribution. >> I met other experts at AIA who have written important books about Troy and who were eager to weigh in on the controversy. >> Frank Calvert, in his correspondence with Schliemann, mentioned the fact that he had been looking for Homeric Troy and he owned the land of Troy. He'd bought it with the intent of excavating it and proving that Homer's Troy lay on the spot of Hissarlik. >> Oh, I think Frank Calvert was very trustworthy, in fact, if anything, he was a very cautious person who didn't want to make claims that he couldn't absolutely document. So that made him drag his feet about proclaiming himself as the discoverer of Troy, he should have done it earlier, but he didn't. He held back, and that meant that Schliemann could kind of push him out on the side. So, he was very, very trustworthy, his defect was also his virtue. [LAUGH] >> Would anyone defend Schliemann? >> Schliemann was important because he the first archaeologist to popularize archaeology. And he's successful in popularizing it because Troy was known to every child who'd gone to school, because everybody read the classics. >> It's important not to condemn Heinrich Schliemann. As with everything in life, there were extenuating circumstances, on Frank Calvert's side and on Heinrich Schliemann's side. He was a businessman, he had made his fortune in cutthroat exchanges and interactions in the California Gold Rush, in the Russian fur trade. These were winner-take-all transactions, so for Hissarlik, and for the fame regarding the discovery of Hissarlik, were there going to be winners and losers? You bet there were! >> The excavations have continued after Schliemann and Calvert, but their legacy is a great one. >> Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann have made monumental contributions to the discipline of archaeology which was in its infancy in the 1870s, if that. Heinrich Schliemann's use test trenches for probing archaeological sites. The weight that he gave to pottery for dating archaeological sites and his multidisciplinary approach. His publications are replete with information about botany, geography, geology, ethnology. All of these surrounding the archaeological minutia and the finds themselves. Heinrich Schliemann was a foundational force in crafting this methodology for archeologists. >> People often ask me what I think of when I'm digging at Troy and do the events of the past ever intrude on the events of the present? If you can look at the wars that occurred at Troy and antiquity, so often its a war between east and west. So if you look at Troy on the west coast of Asia Minor in the Bronze Age, you find conflict between the Greeks in mainland Greece and the Hittites in central Turkey. If you will, a conflict between east and west. If you look at Troy during the late sixth and fifth centuries BC, you can find a war between the Greeks and the Persians. Again, a war between east and west. What do I think of when I’m digging at Troy? I think of the current warfare between east and west, the military intervention in Iraq. And I think about the extent to which the events of the present are really not so different from those of the past. [MUSIC] >> I learned a lot about the archaeology and the importance of Troy. But I'd have to say that Frank Calvert was the man who truly discovered Troy. >> Thanks Rob for finding answers to our question, but I have to tell you that I really don't care for Heinrich Schliemann. So often in our world, the visionaries who do the actual work, are pushed aside and people steal their work. In this case Schliemann, a treacherous but brilliant businessman, could have shared his discoveries and his fame with the shy Mr. Calvert. Instead, Schliemann stole Calvert's dream, and kept the power and glory for himself.
