In 1873, the low mound called Hisarlık, five kilometers inland from the Dardanelles in Ottoman Turkey, was being torn apart by a wealthy German merchant named Heinrich Schliemann. He had made a fortune in indigo, banking, and Crimean War contracts, then retired at 47 to prove that Homer’s Iliad described real places. Frank Calvert, an English-born consular agent who owned half the mound, had told him where to dig. Schliemann drove a giant trench straight down through nine buried cities, employing up to 150 Greek and Turkish villagers under an Ottoman permit that required him to split every find with the Imperial Museum in Constantinople...
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