Priam's Treasure, the Gold of Troy
About 2400 to 2200 BC
In a dim hall lined with cases, a gold diadem hangs in the air, its dozens of fine chains ending in tiny leaf shaped pendants. Around it are earrings, bracelets, thousands of beads, gold and silver cups, bronze axes and a strange gold sauce boat with two spouts. These are the objects that Heinrich Schliemann pulled from the ground at Hisarlik in what is now Turkey in May 1873, and announced to the world as the treasure of King Priam of Troy. He was wrong about the date by more than a thousand years, but the gold is real, and it is the oldest treasure of its kind ever found in the Aegean world.
Look at the craftsmanship of the diadem, made of more than sixteen thousand separate pieces of gold wire and leaf, and at the way the pendants would have swung against the wearer's forehead and cheeks. Schliemann famously photographed his young Greek wife Sophia wearing it. The pieces date from the layer archaeologists call Troy the Second, around 2400 BC, which is a Bronze Age citadel far older than the city of Homer's poem. Whether they were found in one hoard or assembled from several finds is still argued over.
Schliemann smuggled the treasure out of the Ottoman Empire and eventually gave it to Berlin, where it was shown until 1945. At the end of the Second World War it vanished from the Berlin bunker where it was stored and was assumed lost. In 1993 Russia admitted that it had been in the Pushkin Museum's vaults all along, taken by Soviet trophy brigades, and in 1996 it went on public display for the first time in half a century. Germany still claims it. The museum treats it as compensation for Soviet losses in the war, and it remains one of the most contested collections in the world.
Did You Know? Schliemann claimed he sent the workmen away and dug the treasure out with his wife Sophia, but she was in Athens that day; the story was invented.
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