Free In Search of the Trojan War by Michael Wood Page B

archaeological and antiquarian studies, but also ranging far and wide in linguistics and comparative ethnology. He also made it his business to visit all the major museum collections for the purpose of comparison with the often perplexing finds at Troy. If his thought lacked true scholarly discipline (‘industrious but not clear-thinking,’ said his schoolmaster) and if his theories were often far-fetched, he wasusually thinking in the right direction. His ideas became clearer as his career progressed because he enlisted the help of specialists – Virchow, Sayce, Müller, Dörpfeld and so on, many of them the most distinguished scholars in their own field. Today it is customary to deride Schliemann’s archaeological technique as well as his character, but it is worth remembering that, in terms of the general study of the past, the period of Schliemann’s adult life, 1850–90, was perhaps the most revolutionary in the history of science. In 1859, the year of Schliemann’s first visit to Athens and the islands (a brief account of his travels appears in The Times of 27 May that year), Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species and created an entirely new climate for the study of man, history and the development of civilisation. (Interestingly enough, one of the first scholars to praise Darwin’s work in public was the English antiquary John Evans, father of the excavator of Knossos – Schliemann, incidentally, would come to know them both.) At this stage the very idea of prehistory had barely entered into the language of science. The word itself only came into common currency in Europe with Daniel Wilson’s Prehistoric Annals (1851) and John Lubbock’s Prehistoric Times , published in 1865: it was Lubbock who coined the words Paleolithic and Neolithic to describe phases in prehistory. Lubbock visited Schliemann at Troy in 1873 and Schliemann used his book when writing Ilios , of 1880. Lubbock’s crowning work, The Origin of Civilisation (a title intended to echo Darwin), came out in 1870, six years before Schliemann’s dig at Mycenae would alter forever our perceptions about the origins of European, and especially Aegean, civilisation.
    At the time of Schliemann’s maturity, before he dug Troy, most western intellectuals viewed ‘civilisation’ as meaning their own culture: a Christian, western, capitalist, bourgeois, imperialist democracy. Their texts were the classical writers and the Bible, and empires such as the British and German were seen as the logical culmination of ancient culture, whose traditional components were Rome (for its government and law), Israel (for religion and morals) and Greece (for intellectual, artistic and democratic ideals). This was ‘civilisation’, and hence ‘history’ wassimply a matter of the Greek, Roman and Hebrew ideas shaping the western tradition. But from the middle of the century archaeology started to reveal the riches of civilisations far more ancient – Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Sumerian – which, when their languages were deciphered, turned out to have had an incalculable influence on the development of the ‘younger’ civilisations of the Mediterranean. In the century that followed The Origin of Species we became almost blasé about our state of knowledge: the discovery of the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Hittites and Minoans were all important steps forward, to be followed by the non-western civilisations of India, China and pre-Columbian America. And so was born the science of archaeology, an old word which in the seventeenth century referred to the study of history in general, but which appears in the strict modern sense, as the scientific study of the material remains of prehistory, in Wilson’s Prehistoric Annals in 1851. Only thirty years later, in 1880, R. Dawkins could write in Early Man : ‘The archaeologists have raised the study of antiquities to the rank of a science.’ This was essentially the achievement of Schliemann, as Virchow