The Character Of German Activist Heinrich Schliemann

The Character of Heinrich Schliemann Author Name Institution Born in January 1822, Heinrich Schliemann was a German activist and a pioneer in the field of archaeology. He was one of the advocates of the historicity of place specified by Homer and an archaeological excavator of Hissarlik, now assumed as the site of Troy, Tiryns, and Mycenae. Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans studied Aegean Civilization of the Bronze Age. The two men helped each other in different projects, but Schliemann could not accomplish many of his tasks and didn’t fulfill his dreams because he received severe injuries in October 1890 and passed away two months later (Cremin, 2007). Heinrich Schliemann belonged to a low-income family; his father was an ordinary Pastor, and his mother had died when Schliemann was only nine years old. After her death, Heinrich’s father decided to send him to live with an uncle. At the age of 11, he was enrolled in a local school, followed by his transfer to a vocational training institute. His father’s poverty made it impossible for Heinrich Schliemann to continue his studies, so it was his early academic experience that shaped the course of Heinrich’s education as an adult (Easton, 1998). Heinrich Schliemann was found of collecting ancient stones, and in 1868, he visited different sites in Greek. The same year, he published a number of books in which Heinrich apparently stated that Hissarlik was the original site of Troy. He later submitted his dissertation to the University of Rostock for further review. In 1869, he received his Ph.D. degree from the same institute. All Classics students and teachers believe that Heinrich Schliemann is the most celebrated archeologist and scholar of all time. Still, his name and reputation have been under attack because of a lot of reasons. Some people believe that Heinrich Schliemann did not contribute to the field of archeology. He was, instead, a person with insufficient reading and writing skills (Mühlenbruch, 2010). Several groups of scholars call him a fraud, but others claim that Schliemann is the father of archeology. Turkish and Spanish scholars even argue that several artifacts Heinrich Schliemann had discovered at Troy have nothing to do with reality. During digs in Mycenae, Heinrich found a large funeral mask which he thought was originally used for covering Agamemnon’s face after death. Some archeologists and historians suspected that Mask of Agamemnon was from 1550–1500 BCE, years before Trojan War took place (Wade, 2001). Throughout his life and even after his death, Heinrich Schliemann was criticized in one way or the other. First of all, being the son of a poor father, he could not complete his higher studies and was forced to do an ordinar...