Troy on Display: Scepticism and wonder at Schliemann’s first exhibition
Andrew Shapland
Abstract
The discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann at Troy, where he excavated on and off from 1870 until his death in 1890, have generated a huge bibliography, starting with the copious writings of the man himself. In this book, Abigail Baker makes a compelling case for regarding Schliemann’s London exhibition of his finds as a formative moment in the debate about the relationship between the site of Hissarlik and the Troy of Homer’s Iliad. She describes her book as being about ‘the point of crisis at which people who knew only of the imagined Troy of text encountered Schliemann’s material Troy and the role of the museum in shaping these encounters’. This opens up a new angle on the debate, which has tended to be dominated by arguments in print over the stratigraphy of Hissarlik, now generally regarded as Homer’s Troy, and also Schliemann’s character and the reliability of his claims (outlined in Part i of the book). As Baker concludes, the framing of subsequent exhibitions involving the ancient world in terms of myth and archaeology (most recently the British Museum’s exhibition Troy: Myth and Reality, 2019–20) can be traced back to Schliemann’s influential exhibition.