Interesting History: Troy

Troy is an ancient city made famous first by Homer in the Iliad (c. 1250 BC) and then by Brad Pitt in the film Troy (c. 2004).  It is best known as the namer of the Trojan Horse and the site of the Trojan War, which serves as something of a prequel for The Odyssey, making it the bane of high school students everywhere.  The city itself was thought to be mythical for a while, on account of how no one could find it.  And that's where the story gets interesting.

The man who actually discovered Troy was Heinrich Schliemann, a German archaeologist.  When he got to the site, he discovered that there were actually ruins of at least nine ancient cities, all stacked on top of each other.  This was fairly common practice in ancient times, because if somewhere was good enough to live (and like Troy, right on a lucrative trade route), there was no reason to let a few ruins get in your way.  You just built right on top of them.

When Schliemann saw this, he figured that since the Troy of the Trojan war was from Grecian times, it had to be on the bottom.  So he went right to blasting.  He went all the way down to the bottom level, where he claimed that he had discovered Troy and King Priam's treasure.  The only problem was that this left about a thousand-year gap in Troy's history.  But screw that, he found treasure!

See, treasure!

People just accepted this for about 20 years, until another archaeologist found that one of the other cities in the pile matched up with Homer's description much better.  A city five freaking levels above where Schliemann had claimed Troy was and almost 2,000 years younger.  So in his fervor to find Troy, Schliemann had actually blown straight through it, and did such a good job of it that archaeologists are still complaining about how much he destroyed to this day.