Part of the "gold of Troy" stored in Berlin proves the authenticity of the discovery of the German entrepreneur and archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, made during the excavation of the Hisarlik hill in the territory of modern Turkey on May 31, 1873, the scientific curator of the Museum of Primitive and Ancient History, as well as the New Museum, told RIA Novosti Berlin Bernhard Heb.
“The collection of the New Museum contains a part of Priam's treasure: silver dishes, small gold objects, bronze items. If we consider the entire ensemble, including the part that is in Russia and the part that we have, then it is in Berlin that the most important exhibit is located - a two-handed silver vessel, in which, among other things, the famous golden diadem, exhibited in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, was discovered … Therefore, the value of our part of Priam's treasure is quite significant, "the expert said, adding that" thanks to the examinations carried out with this vessel, we know for sure that this diadem was there, as well as that the material corresponds to the era of the Early Bronze Age, that is, it is not a fake and, with a high degree of probability, it was indeed discovered all together."
Troy is a legendary fortified city in Asia Minor off the coast of the Aegean Sea. The poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey" by the ancient Greek poet Homer about the events of the Trojan War and its consequences have become classics of world literature and part of the cultural heritage of mankind. The ruins of Troy were discovered by Schliemann in the late 1860s during excavations on the Hisarlik hill. In the same place, studying the ancient walls of the so-called "house of the Trojan king Priam", Schliemann discovered a treasure. In his memoirs, he described in detail how he personally dug it out with a knife. The most famous of the "Priam's hoard" ensemble are women's gold head jewelry and tiaras, in which the wife of the archaeologist Sophia Schliemann was photographed.
“Schliemann was a pioneer, he had no predecessors. We can say that he was a good archaeologist. He and his successor, Wilhelm Dorfeld, did indeed attempt to separate cultural layers, and modern archaeologists are still guided in Troy by this fundamental division. Schliemann was a child of his time, and from this point of view he did quite well,”says Cheb.
Contemporaries and some current colleagues of the German archaeologist accuse him of falsification and fraud: allegedly, the "gold of Troy" was not dug up, but collected or even bought by Schliemann in different places and then passed off as "Priam's treasure". According to critics, this can explain the excellent condition and high artistic level of the artifacts. However, Bernhard Heb, curator of the Trojan exposition at the New Museum in Berlin, does not think so.
According to Cheb, Schliemann, “most likely, during his lifetime, he managed to understand his mistake” - the gold he discovered cannot be “Priam's treasure”, because “it was found in a cultural layer that dates back to the early Bronze Age, while the events described by Homer take place hundreds of years later. " However, the expert expressed confidence that "what we mean by Troy, and what Homer described in the Iliad, is definitely connected with this place, if we assume that the events of the Trojan War took place in reality." He added that already the ancient Romans revered the vicinity of the Hisarlik hill as a historical, legendary Troy.
At the end of World War II, in 1945, valuables from German state museums, including Priam's treasure, were hidden in a bunker on the territory of the Berlin Zoo. Fearing the plundering of the collection, the director of the museum of primitive and ancient culture, Professor Wilhelm Unferzagt, handed over the "Trojan gold" to the Soviet commandant's office. Then it was transported to the USSR as a trophy art and until 1993 was kept in a special storage, in 1996 it was first exhibited in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
