
Treasure Seekers: Glories of the Ancient Aegean
- Year:
- 2001
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In the dim past of Europe,
by the shores of the Aegean Sea,
the ancient bards told stories
of a golden age long ago,
a time when men were heroes
larger than life,
when the daring Theseus
battled the Minotaur,
and soldiers clashed over the face
of the beautiful Helen
who brought down the walls of Troy.
For hundreds of generations
these tales will pass down as myths.
Then in the 19th century,
two remarkable men
dared to believe that
the myths were clues to the treasures
of a forgotten past.
Their extraordinary adventures
uncovered the roots
of Western civilization.
In the 19th century,
archeology was in its infancy.
Ancient Greece was considered
the beginning of Western civilization,
its architecture the most beautiful;
its ideas the foundation
for everything to come.
Yet its roots before the 8th century
B.C. were shrouded in mystery.
Did this extraordinary civilization
spring out of nowhere?
Or did another, almost as advanced,
come before it?
The only accounts of
an earlier age were legends
that nearly everyone dismissed
as myths.
Western literature,
the Iliad and the Odyssey, were
considered fiction, nothing more.
Homer's beloved stories
could lead the way to a real past?
In Athens today a classical temple
marks the grave of Heinrich Schliemann,
to some, the father of archeology.
To others, an impetuous fool.
To Schliemann, Homer's stories
of the Trojan War were true,
and he set out to prove it.
His incredible discoveries pushed back
European history a thousand years.
Schliemann's story
has been romanticized
in films, books, even grand opera.
But none more fantastical
than his own stories about himself.
he was the center of the world.
And I think he had a kind of
medieval map of the world
in which he was at the center
and everything else
was in concentric circles around him.
I think he was
the most frightful big head.
Schliemann throughout his life was
pretty cavalier with the truth.
He, I don't think, distinguished
so clearly as most of us do
between what is true
and what is false.
He tended to tell the story
that suited the moment.
Schliemann's personal myths stretched
all the way back to his childhood.
He was born in 1822
in northeastern Germany.
At the age of 7, he tells how
his father gave him a history book
with a picture of the ancient city
of Troy in flames.
Electrified by the site,
what had become of the great city.
His father explained that Troy had
burned to the ground leaving no trace.
Unconvinced, Heinrich disagreed:
"Father," retorted I,
"if such worlds once existed,
they cannot have been
completely destroyed.
Vast ruins of them must still remain
hidden away beneath the dust of ages."
In the end we both agreed that
I should one day excavate Troy.
It's a wonderful story, but there's
really no reason why we need to believe it.
He tells us not a day went by
where he thought about this goal
to go out and excavate Troy.
But we have thousands of letters and
many diaries when he was a young man.
There's no mention of going out
and excavating Troy.
Schliemann may have been trying to
mask the truth of a painful childhood.
His mother died young,
but not before his minister father
lost his job
by committing adultery
with the housemaid.
Schliemann had to drop out of school
to help support his brothers and sisters.
All this, I think, etched itself
deeply onto Schliemann's mind.
He was left with a bitter,
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"Treasure Seekers: Glories of the Ancient Aegean" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2021. Web. 17 Jan. 2021. <https://www.scripts.com/script/treasure_seekers:_glories_of_the_ancient_aegean_14586>.