That he was the son of
a poor country parson in a Mecklenburg village did not bother him. He
knew that he would need money but he decided to gather a fortune first
and do the digging afterwards. As a matter of fact, he managed to get
a large fortune within a very short time, and as soon as he had enough
money to equip an expedition, he went to the northwest corner of Asia
Minor, where he supposed that Troy had been situated.

In that particular nook of old Asia Minor, stood a high mound covered
with grainfields. According to tradition it had been the home of Priamus
the king of Troy. Schliemann, whose enthusiasm was somewhat greater than
his knowledge, wasted no time in preliminary explorations. At once he
began to dig. And he dug with such zeal and such speed that his trench
went straight through the heart of the city for which he was looking
and carried him to the ruins of another buried town which was at least
a thousand years older than the Troy of which Homer had written. Then
something very interesting occurred. If Schliemann had found a few
polished stone hammers and perhaps a few pieces of crude pottery, no one
would have been surprised. Instead of discovering such objects, which
people had generally associated with the prehistoric men who had lived
in these regions before the coming of the Greeks, Schliemann found
beautiful statuettes and very costly jewelry and ornamented vases of a
pattern that was unknown to the Greeks. He ventured the suggestion that
fully ten centuries before the great Trojan war, the coast of the AEgean
had been inhabited by a mysterious race of men who in many ways had been
the superiors of the wild Greek tribes who had invaded their country and
had destroyed their civilisation or absorbed it until it had lost
all trace of originality. And this proved to be the case. In the late
seventies of the last century, Schliemann visited the ruins of Mycenae,
ruins which were so old that Roman guide-books marvelled at their
antiquity. There again, beneath the flat slabs of stone of a small round
enclosure, Schliemann stumbled upon a wonderful treasure-trove, which
had been left behind by those mysterious people who had covered the
Greek coast with their cities and who had built walls, so big and so
heavy and so strong, that the Greeks called them the work of the Titans,
those god-like giants who in very olden days had used to play ball with
mountain peaks.

A very careful study of these many reli