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Middle Archaeology

During the middle period in the history of archaeology, people became more and more interested in the subject. Unfortunately, the methods the archaeologists used at that time were very destructive. The combination of increased interest and destructive methods resulted in the loss of many valuable artifacts.

Giovanni Battista Belzoni
Giovanni Battista Belzoni was born in born 1778 in Padua, Italy. Belzoni wasn't well educated and had no scientific training but he was a better archaeologist than most people of his time. He was very eager to find artifacts. He was so eager that in only three years, he opened the tomb of Abu Simbel for the first time, opened the burial chamber of the Second Pyramid of Giza, and took the sarcophagus of Ramses II from its tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

Today Belzoni would be considered an awful archaeologist or a tomb robber because of his destructive techniques. For example, when he was searching for papyri, he destroyed any antiquities in his way. He said, "Every step I took I crushed a mummy in some part or the other."

In 1823, Belzoni died while trying to discover the source of the River Niger.

Heinrich Schliemann
Heinrich Schliemann was born in 1822 in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, in what is now Germany. He was the fifth of nine children. Schliemann had a troubled childhood: His mother died after her ninth child was born, and his father was a minister who behaved so badly that the parishioners threw things at his house and would not let their children play with the Schliemanns. Heinrich Schliemann's education was interrupted when he was 14 and went to work as an apprentice in a small grocer's shop. Schliemann's life is as interesting as his archaeology. It is full of ups and downs, romance, excitement, and troubles.

When Schliemann was 8 years old, he loved the stories of the Trojan War and decided he would excavate Troy some day. When he grew up, he became a businessman in order to make enough money to pay for his dream. He became famous for his discoveries at Troy and Mycenae at the end of the 1800s.

Heinrich Schliemann sometimes acted more like a treasure hunter than a archaeologist. He and his second wife, Sophia Engastromenos Schliemann, dug up Troy and Mycenae using the Iliad by Homer as a guide. There were nine cities of Troy, each one on top of the earlier one's ruins. Schliemann was so obsessed with finding the Troy of the Iliad that he ruined the ruins. He threw away historically valuable "debris." Because he found so many treasures, Schliemann didn't realize what he was ruining.

Schliemann also wasn't very accurate about identifying which Troy was the one mentioned in the Iliad. Thinking that Troy was very old he decided that it must be near the bottom level. Today, archaeologists think that the Troy in the Iliad is the third from the top. Because Schliemann was so sure that the Troy he wanted to find was near the bottom level, he discarded pieces of stone that would have been very useful today in learning more about all of the Troys.

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