The Archaeological search for the ancient city of Troy Essay

The Archaeological search for the ancient city of Troy - Essay Example According to the myth that he created, in the early childhood little Henry has set a fantastic goal - to find Homer's Troy and immortalize his own name. For this he earned a fortune and turned his life into one of the most amusing stories in world history. In this a very interesting tale’s finale: Troy has been found and wiped out. Heinrich Schliemann was born in 1822 in the family of a Protestant pastor in Germany. During his childhood he heard many stories about ancient castles and buried treasures. Those stories along with the "World History for Children" book, which he got when he was 8 as a gift from his father, according to him, became the impetus for the journey to a mythical Troy. Later, in his autobiography Schliemann wrote that when he saw pictures of Troy, the city, glorified by the blind Homer in the immortal "Iliad", he decided once and for all to find the city. Archaeology, the science of finding and excavation the ancient civilizations hardly existed in the begi nning the XIX century. And Schliemann's idea of basing his search on the work of literature, taking it at a face value sounded crazy. What if the poet, albeit the great one, used metaphors and wrote about imaginary things? Heinrich’s father fell into financial problems and the boy had to look for an employment. Beside the work, he was spending his money on further his education. Wanting to verify the statement â€Å"A man who speaks two languages is worth two men†, Henry decides to study foreign languages, starting with the mother tongue – German, polishing pronunciation. Using his own method of learning within only three months he learned English and French – within next months. On March 1844, after being fired from his next job, he approached the richest import and export firm in Amsterdam â€Å"Schroeder and Co" and offers himself as a commercial agent to work with foreign partners. â€Å"Schroder and Co† had the trading business virtually ever ywhere in the world and Heinrich proved to be a real catch for them. Not only he knew languages, he also knew how to trade. He was working for two people and receiving one salary. After a year of hard work he has made a great success – the director of the company made him his personal assistant. At that time the most profitable market for the company was Russia. Technical complexity of its development was that the representatives of Russian trading companies generally did not know any foreign language. It was difficult to negotiate. Schliemann took the initiative to rectify the situation and started to learn the Russian language. Soon he became fluent in it and was stationed to Russia. In 1846 Russia met Schliemann with intolerable cold. The path to his dream journey to Troy lied through the endless snow, which still had to be turned into gold. Spring brought Heinrich Schliemann fabulous profits. He started his own company and over the next few years he creates an entire trad ing empire, which specialized in the purchase of European goods in Amsterdam and selling them in Russia. It seemed the market in Russia is conquered, and Schliemann left to America, where he invested in gold mining. Profiteering gold was successful, but the outbreak of the Crimean War in Russia in 1854 opened new horizons for the company.