Hitherto the latter half of the 19th century, the historical consensus around Troy - the mythic, legendary location from Homer’s notable work, the Iliad - was thought to be just that - a legend. However, due to the work of Heinrich Schliemann, a famous German businessman and amateur archaeologist, we now know that Troy was a real place and that the millennia old Illiad had some historical truth to it. Schliemann was interested in the city of Troy from his boyhood, when he would read the Iliad and dream of himself in the situations and the vast lands Homer described. This, in turn, led him to a life of the pursuit of his childhood dream, Troy, which, of course, came to fruition. During his controversial excavation, taking place in 1870 in modern-day Turkey, Schliemann notably destroyed the top layers of the city - ironically, the very thing he was looking for. Though he is considered to be the founder of modern archaeology, Schliemann’s practices during his excavations are now a textbook example of how not to conduct an archaeological study. At the discovered site lay gold masks, various weapons, cutlery, cups, and treasure; most notably Priam’s Treasure, a collection of gold and valuable artifacts, was found with it and was later adorned by his wife, Sophia, in an otherwise infamous photograph. The artifacts later gave Schliemann legal trouble due to him smuggling them out of Turkey. Read moreSection: NewsHistory & ArchaeologyRead Later