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Heinrich Schliemann whose work was to give a new impetus to the study of Greek origins and to be the beginning of the revelation of an unknown world of ancient days, was born at Neu-Bucknow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany, on January 6, 1822. He was the son of a country minister. When he was barely seven years old, he received a child's history of the world in which the picture of the destruction of Troy made a profound impression on him. At that age he vowed to search those sites when "he was rich." By the time he was ten he had produced a prize-winning essay on the Trojan War.
But his father was poor, and Schliemann, for all his dreams, had to work prosaically. In St. Petersburg, during the Crimean War, he married secretly a Russian noblewoman. Through her he became a buying agent of the Russian army and made a fortune. In 1850 he was forced to leave Russia, came to America, went to California and became an American citizen. He made a second fortune in America, and in 1868 started to Greece to fulfil his ambitions.
Brilliant beyond any other archaeologist of his time, and filled with curious intuitions that ran counter to current beliefs and which were uncanny in their accuracy, he met with instant success. One of his learned compeers has said of him that "If it did not seem so absurd, one might say that Schliemann is an incarnation of some ancient Mycenean, and remembers just where to look." At any rate he began to cut the soil from Hissarilk in 1870, and in 1873 he discovered the "Great Treasure of Priam." It has always been said that Schliemann did not reveal all of this treasure, and this wonderful story of his grandson confirms this.
Schliemann started at the virgin soil, and of course, the first city he found was the oldest. It was in the second city that he fond the treasure. This city he though was ancient Troy. But above this were the remains of seven other cities.
It was afterward proven that the sixth, city above the second was really ancient Troy! The second city was immensely more ancient, and very conservatively, its destruction may be placed at 20,000 B. C.! It had been a very great city, with Cyclopean architecture and a high grade of civilization. All this is immensely important in view of the announcement of the "Chronos of Atlantis" vase found there. The priests of Sais told Solon that Atlantis had been destroyed 9,000 years before their conversation. This would seem to prove that the second city of Schilemann was actually the metropolis of an Atlantean colony, and that the mother country was still existing at the time the Treasure was placed in the second city!
A dispute with the Turkish Government over the Treasure stopped his Hissarlik work, and he turned his attention to Mycenae, on the Island of Crete, the historic capital of Agamemnon of the Iliad. He excavated the wonderful Lion Gate, the famous Shaft Tombs and Dome Tombs, but not till now has the news of the Atlantean inscription he found in the Dome Tombs been made public. He found, too, in the Shaft Tombs the most remarkable hoard of treasure that ever greeted the eye of a discoverer.
In them was gold in profusion. It was beaten into face masks and wrought into hundreds of articles.
It can be said that in this treasure were other vastly more precious objects having a direct bearing upon Atlantis, which Dr. Schliemann kept secret, as he had his discoveries in the second city. What these were will be told in due time by his grandson.
The other extraordinary discoveries of Dr. Schliemann in Crete can be found in the records. In 1890 he died.
This brief sketch is necessary to explain how great and authority and discoverer was the man whose grandson speaks in these pages, and to show upon what real foundations this article, whose astonishing claims are bound to raise some incredulity, is based.