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Cover: In a royal shaft grave at Mvcenac,archaeologist Heinrich Schlicmann un-earthed this mask, hammered from ahca\T sheet of gold. Impressed bv itsstrong, Greek features, he erroneouslybelieved that it had been made for Ag-amemnon, leader of the siege of Trov.Here the majestic visage, created about1600 BC, appears against a view of theLion Gate, the main portal to Mvcenae'scitadel. About 10 feet square and almosta yard thick, the gate was named for re-liefs of t\\'o lions, now headless, carvedon a limestone slab above the lintel.

End paper: Painted by artist Paul Breedenon paper textured to resemble a frescosurface, the map highlights Aegean citiesand sites in the Bronze Age. Mvcenae ismarked by its Lion Gate, Knossos bv anearth-goddess statue, Troy bv a goldendrinking cup, and Thera by swallowsfrom a fresco. A gold charm from Crete,formed of two honeybees, points north.The inset locates the Aegean realms inthe wider context of the Mediterranean.

WONDROUSREALMS OF THE

AEGEAN

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LOST CIVILIZATIONS

WONDROUSREALMS OF THE

AEGEAN

Bv the Editors of Time-Life Books

TIME-LIFE BOOKS, ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

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A finger of the Aegean Sea pokes intoa cove on the island ofMelos, in theCyclades, brushing the sun-drenchedruins ofPhylokapi (foreground). Threesuccessive Bronze Age cities have beenfound in layers here, and below them,remnants ofthe Stone Age. The lastsettlementflourished in the middle ofthe second millennium BC. Melos wasa prime source ofobsidian, theglass-like volcanic stone usedfor makingsharp-edged blades and tools.

o N

IN SEARCHOF LEGENDARYKINGDOMS

Gleaming as on theday it was madenearly 3,600 yearsago, this hammeredgold rhyton, ordrinking vessel, inthe shape of a lion's

head emergedfrom agrave at Mycenae,home to some of theancient world's most

famous warriors.

>^hc h1 appearance. \

hill is sandy, rock-strewn,

entirely unprepossessing in appearance. Yet it happens to be one ofthe most exciting archaeological sites in the world, a 160-foot-highmound composed of the ruins of ancient cities layered one on top ofthe other. Beneath its rough contours lie no fewer than 10 Troys,spanning 3,500 years of histor\' from the Earlv Bronze Age toRoman times. In 1988, scores of scientists from Germany, Austria,Denmark, Britain, Mexico, the United States, and Turkey flocked tothis spot in northwestern Turkey, some three miles south of theDardanelles, the strait that separates Europe from Asia, to begin theirdigging. The task was enormous, and they would have to return yearafter year for additional summers of excavation.

Hissarlik, as the hiU is called, lies at the head of the AegeanSea, birthplace ofthe first European civilizations. To the west a chainof small jewel-like isles, resplendent in their vast turquoise settings,strings out toward mainland Greece, where talons of land, edgedwith natural harbors, stretch into the sun-streaked waters. From thetip of Attica, the southeastern region of Greece, a wreath of islands,the Cyclades, circles the southern Aegean. They lead farther southtoward the elongated, mountain-spined isle of Crete and the widerMediterranean beyond.

While most ofmainland Europe still lived in huts, the peoples

ofthese islands, like those ofTroy, were flourishing. They roamed farand wide in their ships, built great palaces, developed writing, en-joyed an unusually high standard of lixing, and created wall paintingsthat rivaled those of Eg\'pt, concurrently experiencing its golden age.Yet by the time of Jesus, these early inhabitants of the Aegean werelost to memor\ . Then, at Hissarlik, more than a centur\' ago, anentrepreneur-turned-archaeologist lifted the veil of oblivion.

T'odav, Hissarlik is carved into aconfusion of trenches and pitsthat slice down through time. Among its levels of settlement lie theruins of the fortress-cit\^ that was the setting for one of the greatestof all works of literature. Homer's Iliad, composed some 2,700 yearsago. This verse epic is an incomparably powerful tale, propeUed byemotions that range from implacable rage to every sort of lo\'e

sexual passion, the bonds of parent and child, the warrior's love ofglory in combat. The story recounts the climactic weeks of a 10-yearwar of revenge: King Agamemnon and a great force from what istoday the Greek mainland, and from Crete, seek to punish Troybecause one of its princes, hot-blooded Paris, has seduced and madeoff with the outstanding beaut}'^ of the dayHelen, queen of Spartaand wife of Agamemnon's brother, Menelaus.

At the center of the ston' is the inevitable confrontation oftwo might)' warriors: the near-in\'incible Achilles, in league withAgamemnon, and Hector the Trojan. Destiny, effected by the ever-manipulative gods, brings them together for the last time in theswirling dust on the Trojan plain. Hector is overmatched but valiantto the end: "So Hector swooped now, swinging his whetted swordand Achilles charged too, bursting with rage, barbaric, guarding hischest with the well-wrought blazoned shield." Against the rage andferocit}' ofAchilles, Hector has no chance; nor does any other Trojanwarrior. But Troy continues to resist successfully until the forces ofAgamemnon pretend to retreat and then insinuate men into thefortress by hiding them within a wooden horsea ploy related inHomer's other great work, the Odyssey.

With such a tale attached to this placeofclashing spears andshields, ofvalor, perfidy, and passionit is little wonder scholars aredrawn to Hissarlik. Their interest, however, is of comparatively re-cent vintage. The mound came to light in the latter part of the 19thcentury because a self-taught German excavator named Heinrich

-^ .. ^: V ~^V^IWBJ^MM

10

Durini the time ofHomeric Troy, mer-chant ships anchored at nearby BesikeBay, which was bigger then than now.While awaiting favorable sailing condi-tions, some mariners inevitably sickenedand died. Their remains were buried ina headland cemetery discovered in 1984.

Sll^lrf- '"J

Schlicmannbrilliant, driven, obsessed both with making moneyand with recovering the pastwas convinced that, in some form orother, the7//Whad actually happened, presumablv around 1250 BC,the date assigned by ancient Greek tradition.

Schliemann's fascination with Homer ultimatelv led him touncover another legendary' people, the Mycenaeans, who lived on thePeloponnesus, where eventually a Greek civilization would arise.Coalescing as a culture as early as 1600 BC and fading into oblivionaround 1050 BC, the Mycenaeans were indi\'idualists with strongappetites, especial])' for the excitements of war and the hunt. Theyconstructed massive, great-hailed fortresses, took to the sea in ever-larger numbers of ships, and projected their power at spearpointthroughout the Aegean.

But the Mycenaeans themselves proved to be heirs to anearlier, even more sophisticated culturethat of the Minoans ofCrete. On the heels of Schliemann's finds, another wealthv archae-ologist, Sir Arthur Exans of Britain, discovered this older Aegeanpeople, finding them to be less martial, more communal, marv^elouslygift:ed in crafts, art, and architecture. And soon other archaeologistspushed the stor\' of Aegean civilization even ftirther back in time, tothe fourth millennium BC, an era that ushered in the Bronze Age.During that period precocious societies developed on virtuallv all theislands ofthe Aegean, especially the central ring ofthem known as theCyclades, a necklace strung between the Peloponnesus and south-western Turke\'. Troy was thus merely the starting point for a greatmodern epic of archaeological disco\er\^ with legions of scholarspursuing studies of the Mycenaeans, the Minoans, and the Cycladicsocieties at sites around Homer's wine-dark sea.

The international team excaxating Hissarlik in the summer of1988 was led by the German prehistorian Manfred Korfmann, whoput a new spin on the greatest war stor)- ever told. It seemed apparentto Korfmann, on the basis of a discover)' he had made in the early1980s, that sea trade, not the beautiful and wayward Helen, was theprobable cause of the Trojan War. Korfmann had uncovered, aboutfive miles southwest of Hissarlik, a mariners' cemeter\' dating to the13th centur)' BC, the time of Homeric Troy. Unlike most ancientcemeteries, this one had accommodated strikingly diverse funeralpractices: Some of die dead had been cremated; others had beenburied, but in Narious t)'pes of graves. Since no settlement could befound, Korfmann assumed that these people had lived here tempo-

11

rarilv, in makeshift shelters. He reasoned that the cemetery was as-sociated with transient trading communities made up of merchantsftom different lands as well as the crews needed to navigate the ships

that held their merchandise.

Trading in cargoes of precious metal, potter\', wine, oil, and

other goods, the merchants were attempting to make it through the

Dardanelles out into the open sea, one of the more difficult passages

of Aegean traffic. Into that narrow strait drains the Black Sea,

fed bv the great rivers of eastern Europe and the Eurasian

Steppesthe Danube, Don, Dnieper, Bug, and Dnies

ter. The rush of waters into the strait produces acontrar\' current that averages three miles per hour

and sometimes reaches five. With a wind at herback, an ancient sailing ship could conquer the cur-

rent, but even in summer the winds were mostly

adverse, blowing from the north. And in thestormy winter months, when storms raged, therewas no venturing forth into the wind-whippedsea at all. (Seafarers would not learn how to saiagainst the wind until the early Christian era.

Often a cargo-laden ship had to put in at

harbor close to the entrance ofthe strait and wait

davs, weeks, or even months until conditions pmitted passage. This situation was ver\' much toTroN^'s advantage, since it had the nearest harbor, Be-

sike Bay, a coastal indentation in the lee of a headland

that blocks the winds rushing down the straitThe sheltered bay was a perfect place for anancient mariner to pass the time until

the weather took a turn for the better.

And it was at the northern end of Be-sike Bay that Korfmann had uncov-ered the mariners' cemeter\'.

Besike Bay, Korfmann con-cluded, was a scene of lively com-

merce, largely because ships were

forced to stop and linger there. Thefortress of Troy nearby probablywould have demanded a share of theprofits from this traffic, perhaps by de

\ *lli

A sandstone frieze on a tomb in AsiaMinor illustrates scenesfrom Homer'sepics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. One partof the fourth-century BC bas-relief(above, top) may depict the Trojan Hectorand the Greek Achilles in hand-to-handcombat. The section below shows the Tro-jans defending their battlements by hurl-ing stones at the invading Greeks.

A Roman copy ofa Greek sculpture ofHomer portrays the poet as an a^ingman, with lifeless eyes. So little is knownofHomer that his supposed blindness maybe a myth. It is not even certain he com-posed the poems on which hisfame rests.

manding fees for allowing boats to be anchored in the harbor orbeached on the shore, and for food or other ser\'ices. Merchants, heldhostage by the winds, had little choice except to pav.

By virtue of its muscle and location, Troy grew rich. But at thesame time it also became a target, Korfmann reasons. Traders frommainland Greece and elsewhere who resented the tolls the inhabit-ants imposed, or who simply coveted Troy's gold, may well havereturned, well armed and in force, to besiege the cit\', burning andlooting itand perhaps more than once. By Homer's day, Korfmannspeculates, the passing centuries had blurred those events and ele-N'ated them from slashing raids, motivated by resentment or avarice,to the 10-year campaign celebrated by Homer, waged by huge armiesfor honor and martial glor\^

Homer's identity is wrapped in myster\% but the poet probablv com-posed the Iliad and the Odyssey sometime around 750-700 BC, whenearly Greece was struggling out of its so-called Dark Ages followingthe collapse ofMycenaean culture about 1050 BC. This bleak periodwas characterized by simple agricultural villages and illiterac\^ Untilearly in the first millennium BC, the whole corpus of tradition hadbeen transmitted orally, with successive generations of taletellerspresumably memorizing the words of their elders. Homer himselfwas an oral poet, a master of inherited lore. Manv other folk tales

transmitted from generation to generation by storv^tellersalso toldofthe deeds ofgods, heroes, and ordinary' mortals in the remote past.

To the Greeks of the classical era (700-200 BC), Homer'sepics were genuine historical accounts oftheir ancestors, descriptionsof real people and events. This was also the time of the plawrightsAeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. These intellectual titans recastthe ancient stories into powerful dramas that continue to move au-diences the world over.

Inevitably, Troy was raised to the status of a Greek shrine. In334 BC, the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great stopped atTroy after crossing into Asia on his wav to fight the king of Persia.He honored the spot by sacrificing to the gods, rubbing his bodywith oil, and running nakedthe customary procedure at ftmeralgames for Greek notablesaround the supposed tomb of Achilles,whose spirit, he felt, lived on in himself Throughout his campaigns,Alexander carried with him a tattered copy of the Iliad written on apapyrus scroll, and allegedly slept with it beneath his head.

13

MYTH OR REALITY? GETTING TO THEBOTTOM OF THE TROJAN HORSE STORYThe world's most famous pieceof military equipment, the Tro-

jan Horse, mayor may not

have existed. But if it did, in all

likelihood the horse looked

quite different from the tradi-tional descriptions and repre-sentations of it.

Mentioned in passing byHomer in the Iliad, it was fea-tured in Virgil's first-centur\'

AD epic poem, xheAeneid,which tells how the hero Aeneasescaped from besieged Troy tofound the Roman state. As timewent on, the Trojan Horse be-came more and more a creatureof fantasy. By the fift^i centuryAD, the Greek poet Trv^phio-dorus described it as white,

with a purple-and-gold mane,eyes of green ber\'l and red ame-thyst, and teeth of i\'or\'. Artistsfurther embellished its image.

Ironically, it may be art thatoffers a clue to what the horsemav reallv have been. In the

eighth-centur\' BC relief seenbelow, warring Assyrians makeuse of a battering ram to get at

their enemies. This siege ma-

chine was a wheeled woodencontraption operated fromwithin bv a handful of men.Whether a similar but muchearlier device was employed tobatter down Tro/s gate andadmit the Greeks to the walledcit\^ can of course never be es-tablished as a certaint\% but it

remains a possibilit}'.Whatexer the realit\' behind

the oft-repeated legend, the visi-

tor to Tro\' today is greeted by afake, three-stor\'-tall TrojanHorse (background), assembledfrom lumber by local Turks as atourist attraction.

Above, in an Assyrian relief, awooden sie^e machine of a type

that may have been the inspira-tion for the Trojan Horse story

rams a fortress in the Near East-em city of Upa. Right, an eighth-untury BC amphora discoveredon the island ofMykonos bears

the earliest knaum representationof the mythical Trojan Horse.

The unsuspecting people of Troy struckto pull the horse filled with Greeks into

their city in an 18th-century painting byGiovanni Domenico Tiepolo. The Vene-tian artistgave the horse and scene the

rococo flourishes common in his era.

\

A first-centuryAD Pompeian fresco showsKing Priam's daughter, Cassandra (left),warning the Trojans to refuse the horse,an offeringfrom the Greek besiegers of

the town. Cassandra had received thegiftcfprophecyfrom thegod Apollo, who pun-

ished herfor resisting his advances bypreventing anyonefrom believing her.

By the early sixth century AD, habitation at Troy had winkedout altogether. Throughout succeeding centuries, the name ofTroyIlium to the last occupiers, the Romanswas bandied aboutthe Aegean region, but its exact whereabouts had faded from West-ern memory. When, in the 15th century, a great Renaissance literaryrevival was wrought by the invention of movable type, and the firstprinted edition of Homer was published in Florence in 1488, Ag-amemnon, Achilles, Hector, and Helen once again became fixed inthe educated mind. But the Iliad and the Odyssey were no longer readas testimony to real events. Scholars were unable to trace Greekhistory further back than the eighth century BC, when the firstOlympic Games were staged. Prior centuries were almost impene-trably dim; the meager surviving evidence of that era suggested thatthe Aegean realm had been backward, mired in poverty and igno-rance, fractured by endless warfare. The Homeric vision of palaces,treasure, and heroic ideals was a mirage, scholars agreed. It wouldtake a singularly imaginative man to overthrow this view.

Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, was not onlyimaginative but showed himself to be possessed of a swift intelli--

-^ gence, a prodigious memory, and boundless energy.Some said he was also selfish, boastftil, and men-

dacious. Born in a small German village in1822, one of six children of a pastor, Schlie-mann knew little happiness as a child. Hisfather drank heavily, conducted an openaffair with a housemaid, and treated hiswife with contempt. Decades later, theson would paint a wistftil and romanticpicture of these years in his autobio-graphical writings, telling of a girl hehad loved, boyhood adventures amongthe local ruins, and an early fascinationwith the legend of Troy. He claimedthat at the age of seven, he becameconvinced of the historical veracity ofthe Trojan War and vowed he wouldsomeday fmd and excavate the Ho-meric citadel. Recendy some schol-ars have come to believe that hedisplayed no interest in Troy until

surprisingly late in life. Thev base this conclu-sion on the fact that in his peripatetic early \'ears,

he chose to tour many countries but did not yisitGreece until he was in his forties. And Schlie-mann took liberties with the truth throughouthis life. Still, he was an a\id reader in his boy-

hood, and it seems plausible that, haying de-youred Homer, he gaye full rein to his imagina-tion and came up vyith extravagant fantasies.

In his 14th year, nevy miseries closed in

on Schliemann. The family fell into penur\' afterhis father was suspended from the ministn' forphilandering and possible embezzlement. Hein-rich, a promising student, was withdrawn fromschool and sent to work as a servant in a grocer\'shop in another village. There he spent almostfive years, performing menial duties. Finally,desperately unhappy, he left the shop for theport ofHamburg, determined to go to America.When he was unable to borrow the money forhis passage, he signed on as a ship's boy aboarda vessel bound for South America. The voyagewas brief and catastrophic. The ship was over-taken by a great storm in the North Sea and sankoff"the coast ofHolland. Schliemann survived byclinging to a cask for hours until he was picked up by a lifeboat.

After facing a water\' death, he lost, temporarily, his desire tocross the Atlantic. Instead, he joined a firm of merchants in Amster-dam, as a clerk. His employers soon realized that this was no ordinary'lad. He was quick with figures, observing and remembering thesmallest details of the business. Above all, he had drivea fierce,single-minded, all-consuming desire to succeed.

Success in trade meant learning other languages, and Schlie-mann, who spent nothing on pleasure or comfort, had few friends,and went nowhere, committed every spare minute to the task, stayingawake far into the night by drinking quantities of sugared tea. Mem-orizing long lists of words, he taught himself English in six monthsand French after another half year. Still, he found the process tooslow, so he devised a system of reading and writing exercises that hesaid gave him mastery of any language in just six weeks. Within two

Outside the cabin in which the archaeolo-gist and his Greek wife, Sophia, livedwhile excavating Troy, Schliemann, seat-ed, poses with his assistant WilhelmDorpfeld, seen immediately behind him,and visitors. Nearby, Schliemann hadunearthed severalgiant storage jars (en-graving), oru of which was moved to thesite of the lixnng quarters and served aworkman as a nighttime shelter.

An 1880 photo shows Sophia, with thecouple's children, Andromache and Ag-

amemnon. At their first meeting, Sophiawon Heinrich's heart by reciting from the

Iliad. So much a Grecophile was Schlie-mann that he claimed to have regularlymassaged Agamemnon's nose in an at-

tempt to give him a classic Greek profile.

16

years or so of his first job in Amsterdam, he was corresponding withother merchants in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, andPortuguese. Eventually he would be fluent in a dozen tongues.

The most valuable language for his burgeoning career wasRussian, which he mastered in 1844. Two years later, he was sent toSt. Petersburg to manage the firm's affairs there. He was hardly acommanding figureonly 24 years old, short, homely, with a shrillvoice and a high-strung manner. But such were his talents that hesoon amassed a fortune trading in raw materials. Part ofhis genius layin his insatiable thirst for information, some ofwhich came from localcontacts or from the ceaseless stream of letters he wrote standing athis upright desk. His energy^ was matched by an ability to take hugerisks, and the tensions produced by his business life were vented involcanic rages and wild boasting to anyone who would listen.

In 1850, he received word that his younger brother Ludwighad died oftyphus in California, where he had reportedly gotten richon the gold recendy discovered in streambeds. Schliemann decidedto claim the money. On the trip, he kept a detailed diar\^a lifelonghabit of self-reporting that was supplemented by the tens of thou-sands of letters he wrote and the 18 journals and 12 books he wouldeventually publish about his life and work. Perhaps he already sensedthat biographers would be interested in his career; in any event, hebegan to embellish it. Among the fabrications in his diary was a taleof attending a large reception in Washington and having a longconversation with President Millard Fillmore and his wife; the eventapparendy never took place.

Brother Ludwig's fortune proved as illusory as the president'sfete. In Sacramento, Schliemann began buying and selling gold dust,and within nine months he had made $400,000, a stupendous sumat the time. He returned to Russia, feeling secure enough to settledown and raise a family. His choice of a mate was the daughter of aRussian merchanta handsome, somewhat haughty woman, whobore him three children. But Schliemann continued working at a ratethat left little time for family life. He gained control of the market inindigo, a dyestuff. He invested in real estate. With the outbreak oftheCrimean War in 1854, he became the most adroit of profiteers,dealing in the saltpeter and sulfur used to make gunpowder and thelead needed for bullets. But no matter how high his riches piled, heremained dissatisfied, unhappy in his marriage, and gnawed by aneed to prove his worth.

17

He left Russia, moving first to Dresden, then to Paris in 1866,where he studied languages at the Sorbonne and invested in prop-erties. His wife stayed in St. Petersburg, hardh' bothering to replv tohis letters. In the early summer of 1868, he visited the Greek islandof Ithaca, the Peloponnesus, and the portion of Asia Minor said tohave been the scene of the Trojan War. The tour changed his life.

Among Schliemann's manv interests was the literature of an-cient Greece. Now the Aegean and its environs, \'ibrant with literan'and historical associations, awoke in him a deep attraction to Greektraditions and a sense that, with his resources and abilities, he couldbe a true investigator rather than a mere visitor. Indeed, the secret tosuccess seemed quite clear to him: One simplv had to have faith in theessential accurac\' of Homer.

This premise was first put to the test on Ithaca, the islandhome ofthe legendar\' hero Odysseus, who had fought in the TrojanWar and then, as recounted in the Odyssey, spent 10 years wending hisway back to his wife, Penelope. When Schliemann arrived in Ithaca,he wrote, "Ever\' hill, e\'en' stone, ever\' stream, ever\' olive grovereminded me of Homer, and so I found mvself with a single leaphurled across a hundred generations into the glittering age of Greekknighthood." Determined to make contact with that age, Schlie-mann hired four laborers and went to MountAetos, where, according to legend, Odvs-seus' palace once stood. The workmen, dig-ging at the corner of a stone wall, came upontwo urns containing ashes. Thrilled, Schlie-mann wrote in his diar\', "It is quite possible

that they contain the ashes of Odysseus andPenelope, or their descendants."

Such flights of fancv marked Schlie-mann's entire archaeological career. Overand over again in the years ahead, he wouldjump to conclusions that were, at best, un-warranted and that led man\' professional ar-chaeologists to brand him a headline seeker.Yet Schliemann's renegade speculationswould yield genuine miracles of discover;'.

His first great find occurred at Trov.In 1868, he set out to reconnoiter the reput-ed locale ofthe Trojan War andwith an eye

A marble reliefsculpturefound bySchliemann at Hissarlikand once dis-played in his Athensgardendepicts thesun god Phoebus Apollo. The relief, dat-ingfrom the fourth to the middle of thesecond century BC, shows Apollo with hisfour horses at the start ofa daily jour-ney to bring light to the world.

A modeled clay pitcherfrom one of theearly settlements of Troy (ca. 2600-1800 BC) is unusual because of itsunique treatment of the human form.The filling hole for the vessel was in thehead, now missing, while the small bowlon the figure's belly served as the spout.

to fijturc digspick the likeliest spot for the Homeric citadel. Therewere two candidates. One was the site of a village called Bunarbashi,about five miles inland from the Aegean; the other was the hill ofHissarlik, almost three miles from the sea. Of the scholars willing tocontemplate the possible reality ofTroy, most favored Bunarbashi, inpart because it was backed by a high ridge that would have offeredimportant defensive advantages in ancient times. Some preferredHissarlik because it was near the shore, and because the Romans hadbelieved Homeric Troy was located there; they had built a towncalled New Troy (Ilium Novum) upon the mound.

With his copy of Homer in hand, Schliemann examined thetwo sites. The poet had written ofAchilles chasing Hectoraround the walls ofTroy three times, and so he tried to runaround Bunarbashi, finding the hill impossible to circle.He also did some cursor)^ and unproductive probing ofthe

ground at Bunarbashi. After this disappointment, his attentionwas focused on Hissarlik by an Englishman named Frank Cal-vert, who lived in the area, owned part of this mound, and wasconvinced it contained the Homeric cm. His German visitor,

striding about the site and seeing a good fit with the Ilicui, vowedto carry on the search as soon as he could get 2ifirman, or digging

permit, from the Turkish government.For almost two years, however, Schliemann was sidetracked

by personal matters. The 46-year-old financier divorced his Russianwife, then asked an Athenian acquaintance to find him a suitableyoung Greek spouse. "She must be enthusiatic about Homer," hewrote in his letter of requisition. "She should be of the Greek type,widi black hair and, if possible, beautiftil. But the main requirementis a good and loving heart." He prompdy married one of the sug-gested candidates, 17-year-old Sophia Engastromenos, whoto theperpetual amazement of her husband-

THE UNSOLVED CASE OF THEMISSING GOLD OF TROYTo the outrage of the TurkishgoN'ernment, Heinrich Schlie-mann bequeathed to Germanythe fabulous cache of gold, theso-called Treasure of Priam, thathe had unearthed at Trov andproudly put on display in hisAthens home. For 55 years fol-lowing his death the array of ves-sels, weapons, and jeweln' re-mained a prize possession ofBerlin's State Museum for Pre-and Early Histor\'.

During World War II thegold rested in a concrete bunkerfor safekeeping, but disappearedtoward the end of hostilitieswhen Soviet troops seized thesector of the cirs' where the muse-um was located. The Soviet gov-

Sophia Schliemann (above, left), the ar-chaeologisfs Greek wife, models ^foldjewelryfrom the dtg^infjs at Troy: fourintricately wrought earringstwo dan-^lini from her necklinean elaboratediadem, and a necklace.

ernment denied having taken thecache. Scholars and admirers de-spaired, presuming the treasurelost foreverdestroyed duringheav\^ fighting or massive air as-saults, or melted for quick sale bylooting Soviet soldiers.

But hope that the trove stillexists was awakened in 1990when a Russian archaeologistreported that it had been seen inMoscow in the 1960s. Thiswould seem to be corroboratedby the discover}^ of shippingN'ouchers from Berlin and item-ized receipts from Moscow for a1945 consignment that includedthe treasure. And there the mys-ter\' stands: The hoard's presentlocation remains unknown.

Reproduced by Temenite jewelersjromphotographs of the missing original, the

diadem from the Treasure cfPriam(above) is made up of 106 chains consist-

ing of 12,271 links and 4,066 tinylold sheets of various shapes.

20

Schliemann's photo ofhis find shows thetreasure at his Ath-ens home. Gold jewel-ry is displayed above

the bookcase. Silver

and electrum cups,copper weapons, andvarious vessels, in-

cluding a large one-

handled silver mugin which the smallerornaments turnedup, line other shelves.

The copper shield andthe cauldron at thebottom display an-

cient fire damage.

mound facing the sea. In that brief burst of work, he managed touncover some impressive stone walls, which he described as "six feetthick and ofmost wonderful construction," part of a building 60 feetlong and 40 feet wide. Thrilled, Schliemann harbored not the slight-est doubt that he had proven the realit)' of Homer.

Still, it took a year ofcajoling and threatening Turkish officialsbefore Schliemann was finally granted a firman. He then hired a forceof 120 workmen and, from October to NoNcmber, cut a deep trenchinto the hill. To his amazement, he found a multitude of Troys

walls built upon walls, one city upon another, a clutter ofstonework,pottery, and artifact fragments. Certain that Homeric Troy was theoldest cit\' on the site, he rushed to the bottom of the mound,discarding or demolishing what got in his way. His ruthless diggingwould earn him such epithets as "graverobber" or "the second de-stroyer of Trov" from some of the scholars of his day.

Returning in the spring of 1872, he reaffirmed his "unshak-

able faith in Homer." Yet his greatest find of the season was Hellen-

istic. He discovered a large marble relief of Apollo riding the fourhorses of the sun, dated from the fourth to the mid-second centur\^BC. In the art world the sculpture was declared a masterpiece, and he

A contemporary panoramic view of theSchlienmnns' excavation ofMycenae onthe Greek mainland (below) includes So-phia (foreground) and Heinrich (rightcenter in fedora), with workers lined up inthe background, at the site ofGrave Cir-cle A. In the photograph at left, Schlie-mann leans on one of the headless lions

for which the citadel's impressive gate isnamed. His assistant Dorpfeld sits in theopening in the wall at upper left whileSophia stays below with visitors. The10-foot-high limestone relieffrom the13th century BC is the oldest Greek mon-umental sculpture known.

was especially delighted by "the four horses which, snorting andlooking wildly forward, career through the atmosphere of the uni-verse with infinite power." While professing little interest in finds notfrom the Homeric period, nonetheless Schliemann smuggled theApollo out of the country and kept it in his garden at Athens.

As he poked about the lower strata the following year, hefound rudimentar)' potter}' and tools made ofstone. His spirits beganto wilt at such meager pickings, but he pressed on with his huge workforce. And suddenly the depths of the mound began to disgorge thesort of evidence he sought. In April, he hit upon a paved street andsome immense earthenware storage jars, suggestive of a well-developed economy. Find followed find. In May, he unearthed whathe had been seekinga large building that he designated "the ruinsof the palace of the last king ofTroy, who is called Priam by Homerand all classical tradition." In front lay remnants of two great stonestructures. These, he decided, had been the Scaean Gatescene ofone of the most moving moments in the Iliad, when Hector saysgood-bye to his wife, Andromache, before going forth to battle.

At the end ofMay came a find whose extraordinary nature wasbeyond debate. In a wall ofthe building he took to be Priam's palace,

Schliemann spotted a gleam of gold. According to his later account

of the episode, he sent the workmen away on a ruse. Then he began

to dig with his pocketknife, describing the task later as "the most

fearful risk to mv life, for the great fortification wall, beneath which

I had to dig, threatened e\'er\' moment to fall down upon me." Atlast he unearthed a trove ofgolden objects. He would explain that the

treasure must have been packed, for a quick departure, in a "wooden

trunk like those mentioned in the Iliad as having been in Priam's

palace." He and his wife slipped away, carrying the gold of Troy inSophia's embroidered scarlet shawl.

This bit of drama, believed for nearly a century, was recently

shown to have been invented. Among the inaccuracies was the site ofdiscover}': In a magazine inter\iew in 1878, Nikolaos Yannakis, one

of Schliemann's most trusted workmen, stated that this was not the

palace wall but a tomb outside the building. Whatever the reality,however, Hissarlik had yielded a true treasurea dazzling heap of

gold that totaled nearly 10,000 articles. By creating a smuggling

network of Sophia's relatives, Schliemann spirited the trove out of

the country and beyond Turkish reach, then informed the world of

his triumph. He had found, he said, the treasure of King Priam.He had not. Schliemann

was ofFby about 1,000 years. In

his frenetic drive to reach the

bottom of the mound, he hadslashed through seven layers

without recognizing them,finding the gold at the eighth

level. (There was also a ninthstratum that lay beneath the one

that held the treasure, and thedigs that began in 1988 woulduncover still earlier remains.)Each of these strata was a citybuilt on the town beneath. Thebottom stratum, later known as Troy I, dated as far back as 3000 BC,almost two millennia before Homer's citadel was beset by Agamem-non's armies. The hoard ofgold had come from the next layer, whichwould subsequendy be called Troy II and attributed to a periodbefore 2000 BC. Like Homer's Troy, which had been ravaged byfire, the buildings of this era had been burned as well. In the

Thejold diadem at right, a royal crownor headband, was among the treasures

relinquished by the CircleA shaftgravesin Mycenae. Gold objects that had been

specially made asfunerary offerings wereoften placed on a sarcophagus or shroud

as well as directly on the dead.

Gold plates decorated with naturalisticthemes adorn a hexagonal wooden pyxis,

or cosmetic box, ftvm Shaft Grave V atMycenae. The design of the 16th-century

BC reliefs represents a fusion of diverseAegean motifs in a style that is dis-tinaly and vigorously Mycenaean.

24

Under a blazing sun and a crescentmoon, a nature goddess receives offerings

offlowersfrom devotees in a ceremonyportrayed on a gold signet ringfoundat Mycenae. The scene, measuring onlyan inch across, contains many obscuresymbolic references. The costumes of thewomen and the double ax suggest aMinoan religious influence.

uppermost levels, Troy VIII was the Greek town where Alexanderhad paid homage to Achilles, and Troy IX, the top stratum, the levelof the Roman town, with ornate public buildings. In his haste tofmd the city of the Ilicid, Schliemann had raced right by it, ignor-ing the layer, VI, that archaeologists would later agree upon asthe Troy of his dreams.

For the moment, most people accepted his gold-backed

claims at face value. He was instandy famous, and he wrung everypossible drop of acclaim from his discovery by corresponding withnewspapers, giving lectures, and publishing several books on the

subject. The gold was proof, to most scholars, that classical Greecedid not burst out ofa cultural vacuum. Indisputably, the Aegean hadknown wealth, splendor, and sophistication many centuries earlier.

Schliemann returned to Hissarlik frequently during the fol-

lowing years, and in 1878 he wrote that he had discovered "threesmall treasures and a large one of gold jewels." He then complainedthat, by the terms of his latest firman, "I had to give up two-thirds ofall the objects I found to the Imperial Museum in Q)nstantinople."In fact, whatever he may have surrendered to the Turks was a pittancecompared with the king's ransom ofsome 9,074 items he had smug-gled out ofTurkey and would later donate to Germany. He displayed

25

his treasures at the palatial home he built in Athens.Meanwhile, Schliemann's attention turned to

the other side of the Aegean, where another worthyHomeric challenge laythe fortress of Mycenae,overlooking the Argive plain in the Peloponnesus.This city was home to Agamemnon, who met a vio-lent death there: According to legend, the king wasmurdered by his wife, Clvtemnestra, and her lover,Aegisthus, when he returned from the Trojan War.Mycenae figured in many other tales, and its massiveruinsincluding walls built of huge stones, suppos-edly erected by the race of giants known as the Cy-clopeswere regarded with awe in ancient times andhad lured tourists and scholars ever since. In the sec-ond centur\^ AD, the Greek writer Pausanias hadwritten that "Clytemnestra and Aegisthus were bur-ied a little outside the wall, for they were not deemedworthy of burial within it, where Agamemnon lies and those whowere murdered with him." Most scholars felt that the mention ofAgamemnon's resting place referred not to Mycenae's main defensivewall but to the cit\' walls instead.

Schliemann disagreed. In his usual st}4e, he performed somequick, illegal excavations at Mycenae in 1874. The probes were fruit-less, but he came back with a small army ofdiggers in 1876, this timewith governmental approval in hand. Against all advice, he begansearching for graves within the citadel. A few marvelous vases, knives,arrowheads, figurines, and other items turned up. Then, after a fewweeks, he hit some tombstones. A circle of stone slabs surroundedthem, forming a nearly continuous chain of benches and suggestingthat this was Mycenae's public meeting place and sacred center. Hepressed on at a ftirious pace.

For a time the earth clutched its secrets tightly. Finally, how-ever, the diggers came upon a rectangular shaft leading down into therock. It was a gra\'e, the first of five, ranging in depth from three to15 feet. Within these shafts lay the remains of 19 men, women, andchildren, all adorned with gold: The children were wrapped in burialshrouds into which were sewn gold-foil cutouts; the precious metalhad also been fashioned into the breastplates and face masks thatcovered some ofthe men, while the women were bedecked with golddisks in the shape of bees, spirals, and octopuses. Weapons, gold

A bust ofSchliemann commissioned bySophia stands watch over the couple'stemplelike mausoleum in Athens. The siteof the tomb, chosen by Heinrich years be-fore his death, provides views of boththe Acropolis and the Aegean.

26

A portion of the frieze running aroundthe Schliemanns' tomb depicts the archae-ologist at Troy reading to Sophia fromHomer as servants and Turkish laborersremove artifacts. During his finalyears, Schliemann's obsession with thepoetgrew. "Only Homer interests me,"he told a friend. "7 am increasingly

indifferent to anything else.

"

drinking cups, brooches, pins, and other riches abounded. In sheervolume, this lode far exceeded the treasure that Schliemann hadascribed to Priam. Moreover, the artistrv^ of these objectsthe inlaywork, the embossing, the stunning imagerv' of religious, hunting, orwar sceneswas of a far higher qualitv' than anything Schliemannhad found at Troy. In the last of the shaft graves he uncovered askeleton wearing the golden mask of a mustachioed and beardedprince (cover)

. Schliemann was certain he recognized him. Recordingthis discover\% he wrote, "I have gazed on the face ofAgamemnon."

Again, he was mistaken. On the basis of pottery styles andother clues, the shaft graves later proved to date from about 1600 BC,centuries before the assumed time ofthe Trojan War (1250 BC). Yeteven Schliemann's severest critics could not deny the greatness of hisachievement, for he had unearthed, not the early Greeks he hadexpected to find at Mycenae, but a previously unknown civilization.In the following years he extracted fijrther proof of its wealth, art-istry, and power at a number of other ruined citadels on the Greekmainland. Scholars subsequently named the new culture Mycenaean,after the legendar\^ cit\^ of Agamemnon.

In the course of these digs and further efforts at Troy, Schlie-mann became a more skillful and careful archaeologist. In 1882 hetook on as his associate Wilhelm Dorpfeld, a young architect whoinsisted upon a more meticulous field procedure. Dorpfeld would getthe credit, in 1893, for defining TroN^'s nine layers and recognizingthat Troy VI, not Troy II, was Homer's fabled city. But Schliemannhimself, during the last years of his life, acknowledged seven layersand made plans for ftirther exploration of the strata.

Schlicmann's death, in 1890 at the age of 68 of a brain in-flammation after an ear operation, would leave the field to Dorpfeld.But Schliemann's own fame had grown with time, largely because ofhis prolific, if occasionally untrustworthy, writings. Messages hon-oring his memory poured into Athens. The king of Greece came tohis mansion bearing wreaths. Upon the coffin were placed copies ofthe Iliad and the Odyssey, and at its head stood a pedestal bearing, hkea presiding spirit, a bust of Homer.

For all Schliemann's faults, he had thrilled the world like noarchaeologist before him. But he had a worthy successor on theAegean stage. Sir Arthur EvansEnglish, rich, and gifted with thesort of energ)' that Schliemann possessed. He too would reveal theexistence ofan unknown and accomplished peoplethe Minoans, ashe called them, after their legendar\' l^r^gi Minos. That ruler and hisdominion had been mentioned in Homer's Odyssey: "Out in the darkblue seas there lies a land called Crete, a rich and lovely land, washedby the waves on every side, densely peopled and boasting ninet\^cities.

. . . One ofthe ninet\' towns is a great c\xy called Knossos, andthere

. . . King Minos ruled and enjoyed the friendship of almight\^Zeus." Crete and Minos figured in various other legends, but theisland kingdom was marginal to the Greeks' picture oftheir past, and

^ (.""lU of ,i,_ " "UK- tv. V *'""n.l/.f,"* P""'^ ri.. ^^"^ "-

Sir Arthur Evans (left), pioneer in thediscovery ofMinoan civilization, exam-ines Mycenaean-style stirrup jars inKnossos around 1900. The British anti-quarian devoted much of his life to theexcavation and restoration ofKnossos,illustrating and interpreting! his discov-eries in a monumental four-volume work.The Palace of Minos. Sealstones, the mi-nutely carved objects that first drewEvans to Crete, are discussed in detail

in his Volumen (left, below).

seemed purely mythic to later scholars. Not until Evans began hisinvestigations would anyone suspect the astonishing truththat Eu-rope's first civilization had sprung from Cretan soil.

Arthur Evans had many advantages in his life and career. Bornin 185 1 in a Hertfordshire village, he grew up in a rambhng, servant-filled house, received a first-rate education, and enjoyed a measure offinancial security that was unknown to Schliemann as a youth. Hisfather, John Evans, was not only an excellent businessman but also

one ofEngland's leading antiquarians. He had many scholarly friendsand filled his house with ancient coins, Roman glass, Celtic weapons,and other bits of the past. Stimulated by this intellectual environ-ment, Arthur, as a boy, accompanied his father on local digs.

His growing up was not without pains, however. His motherdied when he was six, and his father soon remarried. When he enteredHarrow, an ehte public school, he was teased because of his extreme

nearsightedness and short stature; his height as an adult was five feet

two inches. Still, he was anything but a timid youth, ftill of self-

confidence and possessing tremendous physical vigor.Afi:er Harrow he attended Oxford, then Gottingen University

in Germany. During the summers he traveled in the Balkans, a regionthat had long chafed under the yoke ofthe Ottoman Turks. Drawingon his travel experiences, he wrote a book about Bosnia and Herze-govina, and in 1877 took a job as the Balkan correspondent of theManchester Guardian. As a journalist he proved highly opinionated;he was contemptuous of the Turks and fiercely supportive of Slavic

nationalism. The dangers of this position did not concern him. Mar-rying the daughter ofan Oxford historian in 1878, he took her to live

in the city ofRagusa (present-day Dubrovnik) . For the next five yearshe continued to send the Guardian reports ofOttoman iniquity andSlavic heroism. Finally the authorities acted, first throwing him in jailand ultimately expelling him from the country.

Fortunately, Evans had by now written a second book on theBalkans and was considered a capable historian. He took a job in1884 as curator of Oxford's Ashmolean Museuma neglected in-stitution at the time. In the face of considerable opposition, Evans

steered it into a new age, greatly adding to the collections, housing

them in a new building, and transforming the Ashmolean into aworld-famous museum during his quarter centur\' of stewardship.

The job allowed plenty of free time, which Evans did not waste. Hefound himself increasingly drawn to archaeolog)^

29

In the spring and summer of 1 883, he and his wife had touredGreece, visiting Mycenae and other prehistoric ruins and calling onHeinrich Schliemann in Athens. The Mycenaean treasures Schlie-mann had unearthed enthralled him, particularly the seals and signetringssmall objects, mosdy ofstone, that were used to press a designinto wax or clay as an indication of authenticity When inspectingthese objects, Evans found that his extreme nearsightedness was anadvantage: Because he had to bring the seals ven^ close to see themat all, he could make out features that others had not noticed

pictures and symbols that seemed somehow not native to the Greekmainland. A minuscule image of an octopus suggested a maritimecivilization; other designs looked somewhat Egyptian.

oiver the next ten vears, Evanslectured and wrote articles onmany antiquarian subjects, while pondering a larger idea. Perhaps anadvanced civilization had antedated the people who had pouredtreasure into the shaft graves at Mycenae and built great fortresseselsewhere on the Aegean mainland. Ifso, that ci\'ilization might havepossessed some method of writing, perhaps akin to Egvptian hiero-glyphs. "Throughout what is now the civilized European area, theremust once have existed systems of picture writing such as still surviveamong the more primitive races of mankind," he wrote.

The sealstones were a hint. In 1893, while visiting Athens,Evans had occasion to see small, charmlike stones engraved withsymbols that looked even more like hieroglvphs. The dealers told himthat they came from Crete, the 1 60-mile- long, Turkish-controlledisland that lay 65 miles south ofthe Greek mainland. Evans had heardof a large mound called Kephala, not far from the northern coast ofCrete, where some huge storage jars had been dug up vears earlier.Tradition identified this moundseveral acres in areaas the site ofKnossos, home of the legendary' King Minos.

Schliemann had contemplated excavating Kephala. In a letterwritten in 1888, he declared: '1 would like to end my life's labourswith one great workthe prehistoric palace of the kings of Knossosin Crete." He even attempted to buy the mound from its Turkishowners, but, suspecting he was being cheated, called offnegotiations.In 1894, Evans appropriated the dream. He purchased a share of themound, in effect preventing anyone else from excavating it. War soonbroke out betu^een the Cretans and their Turkish overlords, and

30

Evans, in white, with his associate Dun-can Mackenzie and architect ChristianDoll beside him, pausesfor a picture onthe palace's Grand Staircase, one of themost spectacular discoveries, as well as

thegreatest restoration problem, at Knos-sos. Workmen replaced burned and rot-ted timbers with iron girders and rein-forced concrete in an undertaking Evanscalled "reconstitution" of the structure.

Evansvocally anti-Turk, as alwayshad to wait a few more years.Fortunately for his plans, the Cretans won their freedom. By

the year 1900 he was ready to dig. He was 48 years old, a widowerwithout children. Seven years before, he had been shattered by thedeath of his wife from tuberculosis, and he would mourn her for therest of his long life, writing all notes and letters on black-edgedstationer}'. Knossos and Crete would be his passion.

From the start, Kephala-Knossos proved an archaeologicalmarvel. Under his direction, 50 workmena force soon expanded to180began digging on March 23. Four days later, Evans wrote inhis diary ofthe "extraordinar)^ phenomenon" he was uncovering. Heknew that he had hit upon a new civilization, and reasoned that itwent "at least well back to a pre-Mycenaean period."

A few more days ofwork brought one of its people into view.On what seemed to be the floor level of a hall were two pieces of afresco, a painting on fresh plaster. The fragments showed much of alife-size figure of a man holding a vase and wearing a distinctiveloincloth that archaeologists had seen elsewhere: Men wearing ex-actly this garb were portrayed in paintings that adorned the tombs ofancient Egyptian nobles. The Eg\ptians depicted them bearing trib-ute to the pharaoh and identified them as Keftiu"people of theislands." The Keftiu, Evans now speculated, must have been Cretans.

As the excavation proceeded, the maritime nature of this civ-

31

ilization became increasingly apparent. Pottery shards were

decorated with images of octopuses, sea urchins, starfish,

and dolphins. The trident, thought by some to be emblem-atic of sea power, was carved on walls, pillars, and seals.

Although Eg\'ptians had represented these islanders as

paying tribute to Eg\pt, there could be no question that

their power was great.Interred in Kephala was an enormous palace that

had been remodeled over a period of several centuries.

On the west side of the mound, Evans discovered frescofragments of what must have been a splendidly painted

chamber. It was lined with stone benches, among whichstood a high-backed stone chair with its seat at a level

above the others. Evans wrote, "The elaborate decora-

tion, the stately aloofness, superior size and elevation of

the gypsum seat sufficiently declare it a throne-room."

From this room, he was sure, King Minosor rather,many kings, since he thought minos was probably a dy-nastic tide rather than an individual's namehad ruled

a great sea empire.

That first season of digging brought mysteries,

as well. Images of bulls, which presumably had reli-

gious significance, appeared in a number of frescoesand reliefs; in certain of these scenes, a youth was

shown somersaulting over the horns of a bull in somesort of game or ritual. Representations of femalesabounded, thought to be priestesses or deities. Sometimes they were

depicted with doves or snakes, and frequently present was the double

ax, a ubiquitous symbol ofMinoan religion. Besides all these images,the excavators discovered hundreds of clay tablets inscribed with

straight rows of picture writing

probably palace records. The hopeof such a find was what had brought Evans to Knossos in the first

place. He recognized that the written characters came in two forms,which he called Linear A and Linear B, but he was unable to decipherthemand would never succeed, despite decades of trying.

Still, the first year of digging had to be considered an unal-

loyed triumph. Between March and the cessation of activities in June,more than two acres of the site were uncovered. Evans had sum-

moned a professional architect to help him fashion a general plan ofthe palace complex from indications of columns, doorways, staircas-

32

An inlaid (famini boardfrom the palaceat Knossos was, according! to Evans, the

most magnificent of all Minoan artifacts.The 22-by-38-inch board was crafted ofivory, rock crystal, jfold, silver, and bluellass paste. Players may have rolled diceand played thefame like a combinationcfbackiammon and chess, blending anelement ofchance with strategic skill.Similargames were found only in Egyp-tian tombs cfthe same period.

cs, ceilings, and floors. Knossos proved to have been a sprawlingarray of halls, corridors, ceremonial chambers, and other rooms, aUsurrounding an expansive paved court. Further digging would revealthat it had covered six acres and included some 1,400 rooms.

Evans was able to date the construction of the earliest palaceby means ofpottery and other artifacts. Finds such as Eg\'ptian stonevases at Knossos, coupled with the discovery of lavishly decoratedMinoan potter)' in Eg\'ptian tombs for which dates were known,indicated that the palace had been built in 1900 BC. Evans sank sometest pits all the way down to virgin rock and found evidence ofalmostcontinuous settlement back to Stone Age days

perhaps as long agoas 8000 BC, he thought, although later testing would show that hewas off by about two millennia.

The world was agog. These finds, wrote the Times ofLondon,"equal, if they do not surpass, in importance the discoveries ofSchliemann." Archaeologists rushed to Crete and began excavatingother ruins, rapidly adding to the picture of the Minoans as a so-phisticated and potent societ\'. Meanwhile, Evans kept digging, asproducti\'ely as ever. A spectacular staircase was uncovered on theeast side of the central court)'ard in 1901. An inlaid gaming tableappeared. More frescoes turned up, portraying religious rites andsuch decorati\T motifs as flowers and butterflies.

Year after year, Evans returned to explore the complex. Everthe plutocrat, he built a villa next to the site in 1906, stocked its cellarswith fine wines, laid in foods from Fortnum and Mason in London,and entertained a stream of visitors. He devoted an appreciable frac-tion of his wealth not just to excavating Knossos but also to recon-structing itrestoring walls, floors, staircases, and columns. Al-though the actual walls had mosdy been timber framed and thecolumns had also been wood, Evans used reinforced concrete exten-sively, taking care to match the appearance of the original as nearlyas possible. He hired a giflied Swiss artist, Edouard Gillieron, to piecetogether the fragments of frescoes and fill in the missing sections.

Archaeologists had never seen anything quite like theseCretan palaces, and they began to develop a theor\^ of what theycalled palace-complexestighdy administered economic communi-ties that testified to skills ofgovernance every bit as impressive as theMinoan talents in architecture and engineering. In the works of artshone a love for nature and the sea, for sport and celebration, forluxury and pleasure. The Minoans were evidendy a buoyant people.

33

sensing no serious threat to their sunny existence. And indeed, theirtime ofgreatness was long. E\'ans worked out a timetable for Minoancivilization, beginning around 2500 BC and extending to about1400 BC, when some unknown disaster ended their civilization.

He had strong suspicions about that disaster, however. Cretelies in an area ofintense seismic activity, prey to earthquakes. Duringthe course of his excavations, he noted that successive Knossos pal-aces had been damaged bv tremors. A great fire had ravaged the lastone, and manv walls and ceilings had collapsed. He believed that aviolent geological parox\'sm had brought the Minoan world to ruin.

Between 1921 and 1935, Evans published four books on hisfindings. Bearing the coUectixe title The Palace ofMinos, they werewritten entirelv with a quill pen. The last volume appeared when hewas 84 vears old. He had produced a scholarlv masterpiece, but manyquestions about the Minoans remained to be answered, not least theproblem of their relationship to other Aegean cultures. E\'ans wasconvinced that the magnificent accomplishments of classical Greecewere rooted in the Minoan world and that the Mycenaeans had beena kind of semibarbaric interlude. Although they were great warriors,he considered Mycenaean culture to be derivative""only a provin-

cial variant" ofMinoan civilization, in his dismissive phrase. He waswrong about this, as Schliemann had been wrong on some funda-mental issues, and a new generation of archaeologists would dig upevidence to challenge this and other of his conclusions.

Sorting out the strands ofAegean histor\'the identity' oftheMycenaeans, the fate of the Minoans, and the accomplishments ofearlier Cycladic cultureswould provide plenty^ ofwork for the suc-cessors to Schliemann and Evans. The two giants had followed thetrail of human progress back into darkness, back into unknown mil-lennia, where they had found the light of human genius shiningbrighter than had ever been imagined. In the Iliad, Homer tells ofhow, after the victors left Tro\' to return home, the sea god Poseidonexpunged everv^ sign that humans had been there: "He made allsmooth along the rip of the Hellespont and piled the endless beachesdeep in sand again. . . ."

In their own very different wavs, Schliemann and Evans hadundone the work of Poseidon: Thev had removed the sands of timeto show what the ancient Aegean once had been. And in their foot-steps followed others who, one bv one, laid bare the othersites of the realm's no longer forgotten civilizations.

34

V

THE DIGGERS OF TROY

t is no small irony that a 2,800-year-old alle-gorical poem about a war that may never have

.^ occurred, whose heroes are most likely fiction-al, and whose "author" may well have been severalbards rather than a single individual inspired one ofthe greatest discoveries in the modern science ofarchaeology. Thclliad has been revered in Westernculture since antiquity, but for centuries seriousscholars viewed the work as an instructive parablewith no basis in fact. In the 19th century, however,the so-called "romantic school" of archaeology re-jected this interpretation. Heinrich Schliemann, awealthy German entrepreneur and self-confessedromantic, became obsessed with proving the truthof Homer's tale.

In 1868 Schliemann visited Frank Calvert, anEnglish expatriate living in Turkey, who led him toa hillock near his property. Calvert had probed themound, called Hissarlik, and knew it to be man-

made. He convinced his guest that the site matchedHomer's description, and Schliemann concludedthat this was indeed Troy. Over the next 22 years,Schliemann directed seven major excavations atHissarlik. He recruited his fellow countryman,Wilhelm Dorpfeld (above, lower r^ht), and Troysoon became Dorpfeld's overriding passion as well.

In the 1930s an American archaeologist, CarlBlegen, reopened the mound and conducted amore careful scientific examination. Still, Blegen,like his German predecessors, was a romantic. Heaccepted the "fundamental historicity" of thclliadand went to Hissarlik looking for physical evidenceto support it. Finally, in 1988, another German,Dr. Manfred Korfmann, arrived at Troy, this timewith a different agenda and no preconceived no-tions. The saga of these four menand the fate ofthe archaeological site that forever links themisan epic in its own right.

Heinrich Schliemann

A MAN DRIVEN BY A BELIEF IN POETRY

einrich Schliemannwas a complex man,motivated through-

out the last 20 years of his life byone goalto uncover Homer's

fabled city ofTroy . His methods,however, set off a storm of con-troversy that still rages. Whilesome scholars regard him as thefather of modem archae-ology, others revile himfor his reckless excavation

of Hissarlik, condemning Q^him for leaving the site a ^g"ruin of a ruin."

Calvert had realizedthat there was not one

Troy but several, builtatop one another in layers.

He counseled Schliemannto proceed slowly with

small excavations, but the Ger-

man ignored this advice in favor

ofa massive trench running right

through the mound.After three seasons ofdigging,

Schliemann concluded that thenext-to-lowest layer, Troy II (be-

low), was the "steep walled" city

of the Iliad. Wilhelm Dorpfeld

joined him later and, inadvert-ently, helped disprove Schlie-

mann's theory. In 1890 the twomen discovered potsherds in the

Troy VI level that dated from theMycenaean period, the supposedtime of the Trojan War. Thisconvinced Dorpfeld that Troy

VI was, in fact, the city they bothftfH sought. Schliemann rumi-

nated alone in his tent for

four days and then quietly

^said to Dorpfeld, "I think

you are right." He madeplans to return the next

^^ year toexplore Troy VI

^^ further but died that win-

ter. Ironically, his zealous

uncovering ofTroy II haddestroyed much of theTroy VI layer above.

To reach the deepest levelofHissarlik, where he felt

Homer's Troy must lie,Schliemann had his crewcut this^reat trench

measuring 131 feet longby 33 feet wideinto thefau ofthe hill. Hundredsoftons ofdirt and stone,

containing untold evidencecovering millennia ofhu-man habitation, were re-

moved and unceremonious-ly dumped down the slope.

"^S^^^i^mA

Thirty-sixfeet belowground level, Schliemannuncovered the remains of

j^^ Troyn (left), findinggold'

^ij*^'"" ^' -~ "^ '*'"'other treasures in this

^..,j/^*^ ^ ^f^^tim. Troyn had been'*^^i"*i

-S*^..- a wetUthy, well-fintified

^

.i^

% having been destroyed in ali great conflagration, all of

which matched Homer'sdescription. Schliemann's

^.^>-'

i^?.

error in naming this as thei* city ravaged in the Trajan

War is excusable, given hisincompletegrasp ofHis-

\' sarlik's chronokgy.

>!i^-17 kJy

Wilhelm Dorpfeld

MAKING SENSE OUT OF CHAOSm n 1882, Schiiemann luredm Dorpfeld away from an ex-M cavation at Olympia. Dorp-feld applied his skills as an archi-

tect to Hissarlik's complexstratigraphy, eventually identifv'-

ing nine distinct layers.After Schliemann's death in

1890, the digging stopped until

1893. Concentrating on theTroy VI level, Dorpfeld uncov-ered much ofwhat had not beendemolished by Schiiemann, in-cluding sections of the walls (be-low). "Our master Schiiemannwould never have dared to hopethat the walls of which Homersang had been preserved to so

great an extent," Dorpfeldwrote. He also found evidencethat this city, much like Troy II,had met a violent end. Ratherthan trumpet his discovery as arepudiation of his late mentor'stheory, Dorpfeld instead mag-nanimously concluded, "Schiie-mann has been vindicated."

Members cfDorpfeld's work crew pose atop Hissarlik with the Tro-jan plain in the background. The height of the citadel above thesurrounding flat countryside would have provided ample warningofan attack. During the time of Troy VI, the Dardanelles, knownin ancient times as the Hellespont, lay a milefrom the hill.

Carl Eleven

he ravaged mound ofHissarlik lay undisturbed

.^ until 1932 when theAmerican archaeologist CarlBlegen arrived, bringing a new,more conscientious approach.Blegen documented every step ofthe diggingwhich was now aslikely to be done with a brush aswith a shovelon film, p=^Focusing on the few re-maining untouched areas

Schliemann and Dorffeld in-tentionally left sections ofHis-sarlik intact to reflect its orig-inal height. Blegen dubbedone the Island and took thephoto at leftwith a man ontop for scaleat the outset ofhis seven^ear project. The Is-land yielded a wealth ofdataabout Troy lU, IV, and Vlesser-known settlements thathave never been identified asthe legendary city ofthe Iliad.

Two photos show the so-calledIsland during different stagesofthe excavation. Above, thelayer containing Troy IV hasbeen reached. Two years later,only the stump of the Islandremains (left) after the walls ofTroym have been removed.Schliemann left another pin-nacle (background), known asthe Megaron, which sitswithin thefoundation ofalarge building he identifiedas the palace of Troy n.

Manfred Korfinann

TROY VIEWED WITH FRESH EYESW ne hundred years afterI ^^ Schliemann's death,^^^ Troy at last attractedan archaeologist who did notcome seeking Homer in the ru-ins. "We are not proceedingfrom the Iliad; we proceed, rath-er, as prehistorians from thishighly mteresting cross-roads of cultures," says '

Dr. Manfred Korfrnann.Heading an internationalteam of scholars, Korf- ^mann plans a thorough15-year reevaluation ofHissarlik with space-agetechnology', sophisticated ^ : "

computers, and aerialphotographs (right). Al-ready the team has discov-

ered a settlement below

Troy I, which it calls Troy 0.A critical portion of the

project involves shoring up thesides of Schliemann's trench andstabilizing other exposed walls toprevent damage by the 300,000tourists who now flock to the siteeach vear. Thev, like the eminent

%.-i

^^^^cMji '^'."^^

scientists who preceded them,are lured by Trove's mystique.

Still, given the archaeological

history of the site, Korfmanncannot avoid questions aboutHomer. Along with most schol-ars today, he has reverted to

Dorpfeld's Troy Vlh as the cityof the Trojan Warif itever took place. "I believethe Iliad contains a histor-

ical kernel of truth: that

i^ '*^ wars were constantly

jfs" -;^ fought over this geopolit-

^ ically important location,which controlled thestraits and the approach to

':^ the Black Sea. The ques-tion ofwhether there ever

' ^ was a Paris, or a Helen,"^

': must take a backseat."

After removing a centurfs worth (^accumulated, detritus andvegetation from thegreat trench, workers construct a retainingwall to Jbrestall fitrther erosion. Thegoal is to restore the trenchto the way it appeared during Schliemann's excavations as amonument to the history ofarchaeological research.

T W O

THE CITYBENEATH THEASHES OF

STRONGHYLE

The cerulean wa-ters of the Aegeannow ripple abovewhat was once thecenter of the an-cient island ofThera, sunk underthe sealike the

mythical Atlantis

by a huge volcanicblast more than3,500 years ago.

hile the dust raised by picksand hammer blows swirled around their heads, the quarr\' masterson the Aegean island of Santorini must have cursed silendy at newsof a discovery their workmen had made. Time was money. And theywere not prepared to delay production, or sacrifice profits, for thesake ofsaving a few mysterious stone walls inconveniendy poking upin the midst of the diggings.

The quarriers, as forward-looking 19th-century entrepre-neurs, had no doubt where their own best interests lay. Their oper-ation was a vital cog in the greatest engineering project of the day

the construction of the Suez Canal. The pumice they extracted fromthis small volcanic islandthe southernmost of the Cyclades group,lying 70 miles north of Crete and 115 miles southeast of the nearestpoint on the Greek mainlandwas an essential ingredient in themanufacture of a durable, seawater-resistant cement required by thecanal builders for the new harbor installations at Port Said.

In January 1866, however, a few months after work on theSuez Canal project had begun, the long-dormant volcano that hadcreated this abundant supply of pumice became active once again.Several French archaeologists and a group ofGreek scientists arrivedto observe the eruption and its effects at first hand. Inevitablv, thewalls so assiduously ignored by the quarry operators attracted the

45

visitors' attention. A member of the Greek government's scientificmission examined the blocks, recognizing at once that they predatedthe deep blanket ofpumice and ash spewed out by volcanic eruptionsin ancient times.

The quarry operators, who did not share the official's excite-ment, continued their activities, indifferent to the likelihood thatthey were crushing valuable archaeological material into powder.Nevertheless, the landlord of the sitethough apparentlv powerlessto stop the quarr)'ing

^joined forces with a local doctor to conducta small-scale excavation. Together they uncovered a house with sev-eral rooms and a collection of potter}' fragments.

Intrigued by these finds, a French vulcanologist, FerdinandFouque, enlisted the help of a local peasant, who pointed out ravineswhere antiquities had been found and showed Fouque some of thediscoveries he and his neighbors had madea pair of golden ringsand two small tombs, long since plundered. When he began to dig forhimself, Fouque found a crypt with a central pillar made of lavablocks, blades car\'ed of the black volcanic glass known as obsidian,a human skeleton, and pieces of broken potten% vi\'idlv decorated inpatterns that resembled no known classical st\^le.

Spurred by Fouque's reports, a team of French scholars,Henri Mamet and Henri Gorcex, initiated their own, more formalexcavation in 1870. They uncovered the remains of other buriedhouses, all solidly built and of considerable size, and found storagejars, their contents charred and blackened but still recognizable asbarley, lentils, and peas.

Burrowing under a vineyard, they braved a passageway thatled beneath a heap of pumice and loose gravel and found themselvesconfronting an extraordinary' sight: walls covered with smooth whiteplaster and painted with highly realistic, vixidly colored frescoesinpale yellow, blood red, dark brown, and a blue of astonishing bril-liance. But when they tried to dig away the volcanic debris piledagainst them, the frescoes crumbled. The archaeologists knew theyhad little time to sur\'ey this disco\'er\'the gravel bank above theirheads was clearly on the verge of collapse. Before the undergroundavalanche occurred, they managed to remove a substantial hoard ofbroken pottery. Once pieced together, the rescued fragments yieldedone hundred vases, finely decorated in a completely unfamiliar style.

Neither Fouque nor his compatriots were able to identify ordate the makers of these objects and the buried buildings that had

46

Before Stronghyle vented its wrathon Thera in the second millenniumBC, the island basked in the south-ern Aegean (left, top). With theexplosion, much of Stronghyle'sinterior was blown out and thesurrounding walls collapsed. Sea-water flooded the new basin, alter-ing Thera's face (middle) . Overtime, the northwestern sectionseparated from the main portion,later called Santorini, to form theisland Therasia (bottom) . Addition-al eruptions led to the formationoftwo other islands.

Until quite recend\', scholarswere virtually unanimous in theview that the eruptionwhichsent debris flying 20 miles high

occurred around 1500 BC. TheGreek archaeologist SpyridonMarinatos, in particular, believedthat the repercussions of this blastdestroyed the Minoan civilizationon nearby Crete. Others speculat-ed that the explosion caused tidalwaves that may explain the biblicalaccount of the parting of the RedSea. But no hard evidence sup-ported these theories.

Analysis of ancient wood sam-ples from as far away as Irelandand California does show, howev-er, that trees were stunted in the1620s BCas a result perhaps ofglobal cooling caused by an ashcloud. Samples from Greenland'sice also reveal high levels of acidit\'dating to 1645 BC, give or take 20years, indicative of volcanic activi-ty somewhere in the world. Cluessuggesting a date earlier than thepreviously accepted 1500 BC havebeen found on Thera itself in theform ofwood and seeds buried inthe ash fall, carbon-dated to nolater than 1600 BC.

housed them; Sir Arthur Evans's rediscovery of the Bronze Agecivilization ofMinoan Crete still lay 30 years in the future. The firstexcavators knew only that this mysterious people were the denizensofsome remote era, unknown to modern scholars and unsung by theold Greek poets. Although a team of German archaeologists, led byBaron Hiller von Gaertringen, would do some digging on Santoriniin the 1890s, a determined effort to investigate the riddle ofthe islandand uncover the artistic glories buried deep beneath volcanic debriswould not be made for nearly a hundred years.

When a serious and sustained excavation was made, the his-tory of the ancient world had to be rewritten. The discovery helpedfill in a vast blank space in the cultural history of the eastern Medi-terranean, a hitherto unknown era one thousand vears before the riseof classical Greece. Old notions, of barbarous islanders dozing insome kind ofcultural torpor until jolted awake by Greek civihzation'sclarion call, proved to be far from the truth.

What lay hidden under Santorini's ash and pumice were theremains of a well-ordered and outward-looking societ\'. Its memberssavored the blessings of peace and prosperity' and lef^ behind thempositive proof of their creative energ\', artistic talents, and sophisti-cated tastes. The inhabitants of Bronze Age Santorini, known inancient times as Thera, enjoyed a level ofmaterial comfort that manycommunities today would en\T.

On their sun- blessed, mountainous island, refreshed bv cool-ing breezes redolent of wild herbs, the inhabitants of Thera builtthemselves a town of fine, tall houses. Behind their linteled doors laywell-proportioned rooms adorned with the finest examples of thefresco painter's art. From their windows and rooftops, the towns-people watched the traffic on the watersfishermen carr\ing homethe da)^s catch, neighbors from adjacent islands arriving to offer theirwares for sale or barter, mariners bringing more exotic importsfrom distant shores.

In these pleasant surroundings, the islanders Hved and grewincreasingly rich, reaping the benefits of their fortunate position onthe crossroads of the Aegean's most important trade routes. Theirsmall homelandbarely four miles in width at its broadest point

was an important steppingstone for voyages between Crete, theGreek mainland, and the whole of the eastern Mediterranean. Forgenerations they would enjoy unprecedented prosperity and an ap-parently unbroken peace.

47

This seemingly idyllic little world perched precariously on ageologic time bomb. E\'en today, the scattering of Aegean Islands,afloat in an azure sea, tricks the eye and lulls the mind into a false senseof peace. In fact, the geologic histon' of the area involves a series ofcataclysms that began about a million years ago and may not evennow be entirely ended.

T he Aegean itselfwas born dur-ing an earthshaking spasm inthe Pliocene epoch, five million years before the current era, when thewaters of the Mediterranean Sea spilled over onto the Aegean land-mass. In this upheaval, two great fragments ofthe planet's crustthetectonic plates underlying the landmasses of Africa and Eurasia

rubbed and chafed against each other. Molten magma, welling upfrom the fissures where these plates met, blistered into numerousvolcanoes, whose crests rose up out of the waters of the southernAegean to form an array of islands between Turkey and the jaggedpeninsulas of mainland Greece. These volcanoes began eruptingfrom the time oftheir birth; over the eons, most became inactive. Butone in the southern Aegeanthe ancients called it Stronghyle, "TheRound One"was far from extinct and would stir one day to menacethe region's inhabitants.

It happened in the middle of the second millennium BC. Aviolent eruption blew apart Stronghyle, reducing Thera over time tothree fragmentsthe main island of Santorini (known todav by itsancient name ofThera), and the diminutive isles called Therasia andAspronisi. (Today, two new landmassesNea Kameni and PalaeaKameniare visible.) These remnants were left surrounding a greatbay into which Stronghyle's ruptured cone had collapsed and wereburied, some 200 feet deep, under layers ofhot pumice and tephra

a thick, powdery volcanic ash.Experts believe that a vast area was affected by the blast, not

only along the Aegean but also around the Mediterranean shorelineand on the islands of its subsidiary' seas. Depending on where theylived, people must have been shocked by the bangs, shaken by theearthquakes, terrified by the darkened skies oraccording to theprevailing windschoked by clouds of airborne ash and suffocatedby poisonous gases.

Those who survived these events could not have forgottenthem. In the view of some scholars, the memory^ of the horrors has

48

Spyridon Marinatosshown here inspect-ing a ceramic vessel decorated with Mi-noan motifi unearthed at ash-coveredAkrotiri on Theramarveled that theprivilege hadfallen to him "not (^exca-vating the usual decayed ruin but ofexploring a town abandoned and obliter-ated in the space ofa few weeks."

been preserved in myth: Images of volcanic catastrophehave found their way into the lore of Greece and places farbeyond it. The Greek poet-chronicler Hesiod, in the eighthcentury BC, was the first known compiler of his people'sancient tales of the gods and their cosmic struggles. Hedescribed the terrible effects of combat between Zeus andthe screaming monster Typhon, whose black tongues flick-ered from the mouths of his hundred snakes' heads whileflames flashed from his multitudinous eyes. "And the heatfrom them both gripped the purple sea, the heat ofthunderand lightning and of fire from such a monster, the heat offiery storm winds and flaming thunderbolts," wrote He-siod. "And the whole earth and firmament and sea boiled.And long waves spreading out in circles went seething overthe headlands, and unquenchable earthquakes broke out."

Other Greek myths and legends spoke of entire is-lands that wandered aimlessly around the seas like shipsadrift, perhaps a distorted reference to the chunks offoam-like pumice the volcano disgorged, which would have beenlight enough to float. Historians have also been intrigued

by the Greek philosopher Plato's account of a lost continent calledAtlantis, wondering if the tale of this doomed worldallegedlylearned by the Athenian lawgiver Solon during a visit to Eg\^pt'spriestsmight indeed have some kind of basis in fact. The storv'concerned a highly civilized society, one that could boast of achieve-ments well in advance of its age, that sank beneath the waves in asingle catastrophic night.

The vanished land, according to Plato's narrator, Critias, hadbeen an island empire nourished by warm- and cold-water springs;its fertile plains yielded "ever\^ varietv' of food" in abundance, whileits forests were luxuriant enough to support all manner of wildlife,including elephants. "Also," said Critias, "whatever fragrant thingsthere now are in the earth, whether roots, or herbage, or woods, oressences which distill from fruit and flower, grew and thrived in thatland . . . fair and wondrous and in infinite abundance."

The first inhabitants of Atlantis were the offspring of a unionbetween a mortal woman and Poseidon, the god of the sea. Theyhusbanded their natural resources wisely and built themselves a fmecapital city containing great waterways spanned by handsome bridg-es, walls coated in precious metals, palaces glowing with stones in

49

variegated colors, and an ivory-roofed temple fiarnished with statuesofgold. For centuries, peace and harmony prevailed within the king-dom, and ancient laws and customs were lovallv honored. But thishappy state came to an end w hen the base, human side of the At-lanteans' nature began to overpower the spark of divinit\' they hadinherited from their immortal ancestor. Thev became corrupted withambition, hungr\' for power, hypocrites hiding under a false shell.

So Zeus, father of all the gods, saw fit to punish them, and,wrote Plato, "There occurred xiolent earthquakes and floods, and ina single day and night ofmisfortune the island ofAtlantis disappearedin the depths ofthe sea." Yet did the land sink completelv? Did smallislands remain? Whatever the distortions of the stor\', mutatedthrough centuries of rctellmg, aspects ofthis tale roughlv correspondto the geologic events occurring during the second-millennium erup-tion of Stronghvle.

Tunneling under as much as 150 feetcf volcanic ash and pumice, excavators atAkrotiri discovered^reat quantities cfpottery vessels, like the freshly exposed

stirrup jars shown above. Such passage-ways as the one pictured inset, which fol-lows an unpaved Theran road, wereerected to keep the ruins undergroundand thus protectedfrom the elements.The danger cf walls and ceilings collaps-ing eventually forced the archaeologiststo make use of different methods.

50

Sheltered beneath metal scaffolding anda moldedfiberglass roof, the completelyexcavated West Housethought to be theresidence ofa wealthy sea captainshowstypical architectural features of the time,

including a second story, a window besidethe door, and a paved street in front.

When in 1 885 the peripatetic Victorian visitor James Theodore Bentarrived on Thera, which he called "this mysterious workshop ofVulcan," he responded with a thrill of horror to its lowering land-scape, its black beaches, and its per\'asive atmosphere of desolation,"fascinating in its hideousness." Bent's bleakly romantic picture ofanempt)^ wilderness, however, was not quite accurate. Besides the quar-riers, still busily blasting away at the island's crust, there was a peasant

communit}' eking a living from the grayvolcanic soil and resting in the shade of itsown grapevines. When the first wave ofexcited 19th-century investigators had ar-rived, these local farmers had helped withthe excavations. Small boys who hadwatched their fathers at the diggings andperhaps saw the dirt brushed gingerlyfrom the earliest finds grew up to play acrucial role in the excavations undertakenin the 20th century.

In the 1930s Spyridon Marinatos,a Greek archaeologist, became convincedthat Thera's buried ruins held the answer

to a mystery that had long puzzled schol-ars. In 1939 he published a paper puttingforward his theory that the great Minoanpalaces in Crete, and the empire over

which they presided, had been destroyed by the same eruption thathad ravaged Thera in the second millennium BC. He would cling tothis theor\' throughout his life, although it has since been rejected bymost archaeologists.

World War II, and the subsequent civil war in Greece, pre-vented Marinatos from testing this proposition in the field. He re-turned to Thera in 1958, shordy afi:er an earthquake had struck theisland, to examine its effects and perhaps find support for his thesis.Climbing a limestone ridge 1,200 feet high, he inspected ancientGreek and Roman ruins at the summit. But it was not until the1960s, when he was appointed director general of the Greek Ar-chaeological Service, that he was able to raise enough funds to launcha serious investigation.

Starting out as a professor ofarchaeology at the University ofAthens, Marinatos had risen through the Greek Archaeological Serv-

51

ice, becoming its Director ofAntiquities and Monuments of Greecein 1956. Under its aegis he had excavated burial sites in Attica,discovered the remains ofMinoan buildings at Amnisos and Vathy-petro on Crete, and explored settlements and cemeteries of the Mid-dle and Late Bronze Age in Messenia, on the mainland. Now he wasin a position to establish a major excavation that would not only caphis career but would also satisfy Greek national pride; at the time,virtuallv all of the important digs in the Aegean were under thesponsorship of foreign organizations.

In 1965, Marinatos reconnoitered the island, calculatingwhere to dig the first trench. He reasoned that the sunken mountainonce had protected the southern coast from violent northwest winds.Here the village ofAkrotiri, a picturesque town of little white housesand churches, sunswept all winter, offered, even in modern times, asafe harbor from storms.

By this time, the excavations carried out by the French led byMamet in 1870 and by von Gaertringen's German team in the 1890shad almost entirely vanished under the plough. But by jiggling thechildhood memories of certain elderly islanders, Marinatos was ableto relocate the sites that had attracted his predecessors' interest. Theold men led him to places in the environs of Akrotiri where the soilhad subsided, apparently because ofmovements in ruins buried un-derneath, or where strange outcrops of stone suggested the presenceof subterranean walls and doorways. In some places, he found don-keys drinking from circular stone water troughs that he recognized asmassive prehistoric mortars.

After undertaking a detailed survey of this promising area,which produced maps and aerial photographs, Marinatos began todig in the ravine that linked modern-day Akrotiri with the sea. With-in a few hours of putting spade to soil, he began to uncover theremains of an ancient city.

It quickly became apparent that the buildings were often twoor three floors high. Marinatos struggled over the logistics of exca-vating the structures without causing the partlv coUapsed walls ofupper stories to cave