“A look at how Homer's writings about the ancient city of Troy inspired Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans to go in search of a city most dismissed as merely a mythical civilisation”In this National Geographic film we follow the stories that led to the discovery of the ruins of Troy, Mycenae and Knossos.
The epic poet Homer wrote of the great walled city of Troy, immortalising its destruction in the Trojan War. But by the 19th century, most people thought of the tale as fiction. Except for one man, Heinrich Schliemann, a German industrialist who followed the clues in Homer’s Iliad andOdyssey and uncovered the ruins of the great ancient cities of Troy and Mycenae, complete with fabulous treasures. He was completely captivated by the Iliad and wanted to explore these magical journeys himself.
Schliemann had an unhappy childhood but became a successful merchant. His next ambition in life was to gain respect and social standing. In 1868 he visited Pompeii on an archaeological adventure and got bitten by the ‘historic discovery’ bug.
His breakthrough came in 1871, when he discovered the remains of the burnt down city of Troy. The real archaeologists of the day discounted his finds and did not trust Schliemann’s bold accounts of his amazing finds.
Frustrated and disappointed, Schliemann continued to excavate and in 1876 he found the royal graves and treasures on the site of the ancient Greek city of Mycenae. Slowly it dawned on him that he had discovered a rich and colourful civilisation that flourished 1,000 years before the glory days of classical Greece. Schliemann’s international fame was secured!
A generation later, the Englishman Arthur Evans pushed back the frontiers of European history even further, with his spectacular discovery of the ancient palace of Knossos on the island of Crete in 1900. This civilisation was even older than that discovered in Mycenae, pre-dating ancient Greece by 1,500 years.
Evans found clay tablets, a huge palace with steps, frescos and walkways, and a host of ancient artefacts, but in a controversial move he reconstructed parts of the palace of Minos, blending his own theories of the people he called the ‘Minoans’ with the archaeological record.
Narrated by Gavin Macfadyen. This documentary is part of the highly acclaimed ‘Treasure Seekers’ series, produced for National Geographic.
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