Mark Gagnon

But Mr. Schliemann, well, he was a complicated guy, okay, to put it mildly.

He was a self-made millionaire, a compulsive liar who would fabricate

the very own parts of his own autobiography, and an amateur archaeologist with a lot more ambition than actual archaeology insight.

He was convinced, against the scholarly consensus of the time, that Homer's Troy was a real place, and he believed that it was buried beneath a mound called Hisarlik in northwest Turkey, near the entrance to the Dardanelles.

Now, he started digging in 1870, and what he found stunned the world.

he found buried under hussar like it's not just one city it was a bunch of cities layered on top of each other on top of each other over and over like a cake and over the centuries city after city had been built in the same exact spot each one rising from the ruins of the last and obviously civilizations do this all the time you would either stumble across this you know great place to live and there'd be some huts that were kind of burned down he'd be like oh let's just build on top it's great it's already cleared out you know there's a river nearby

Archaeologists would eventually identify at least nine major layers spanning roughly 3,000 years to the Roman period.

Now, Schliemann, in his excitement, dug straight through several layers and literally just went all the way down and said that he found Priam's Troy.

He even claimed to have discovered Priam's treasure, a cache of gold jewelry and artifacts that he smuggled out of Turkey and presented to the world as proof that this was actually the ancient city of Troy.

Now, what's crazy about this whole thing is that he later admitted that he just made up parts of the story and the treasure that he actually discovered came from a lair a thousand years too early.

Isn't that wild?

He discovers gold that's actually older than Troy.

It's dating back to around 2500 BC, long before the Trojan War.

But later, the discoveries of more careful archaeologists revealed that the layer known as Troy V-I-I-A, or 7A,

dating to somewhere between 1220 and 1180 BC, show distinct evidence of some type of violent destruction.

There's fire damage and arrowheads that are scattered and even like unburied human remains, which is very strange for the time.

And this combination of damage and weaponry and emergency storage jars crammed inside houses had been interpreted by some archaeologists as signs of a siege.

though there are not any written records that identify the attackers or what the city even was.

The 20th century archaeologists responsible for these new discoveries are these guys Wilhelm Dorpfeld and Carl Blagen.

And then there was Manfred Korfmann, who led a massive institutional project in 1988, which also contributed to many of these discoveries.