Priam’s Treasure is a cache of gold diadems, necklaces, bracelets, rings, and assorted gold, bronze vessels and other artifacts discovered by classical archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Schliemann claimed the site to be that of ancient Troy, and assigned the artifacts to the Homeric king Priam.
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| Gold Ear jewelry, rings and pendants |
Apparently, Schliemann smuggled Priam's Treasure out of Anatolia. The officials were informed when his wife, Sophia, wore the jewels for the public. The Ottoman official assigned to watch the excavation, Amin Effendi, received a prison sentence. The Ottoman government revoked Schliemann's permission to dig and sued him for its share of the gold. Schliemann went on to Mycenae. There, however, the Greek Archaeological Society sent an agent to monitor him.
Later Schliemann traded some treasure to the government of the Ottoman Empire in exchange for permission to dig at Troy again.
Despite Schliemann's myth making, the treasures have nothing to do with King Priam's Troy. They are much older, dating from around 2500 to 2400 B.C., not from the Homeric period, which was 1400 to 1200 B.C. Schliemann said he found Troy by using the Iliad, and for one famous photograph he dressed his wife, Sophia, in a diadem that he claimed had been worn by Helen of Troy.
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| The "big" diadem in modern exhibition |
Selection
of gold diadems, necklaces, bracelets, rings, and assorted gold and
bronze vessels found by Schliemann at Troy. Pushkin Museum, Moscow. - See more at: http://realmsofgoldthenovel.blogspot.com/2013/02/gold-of-troy-priams-treasure.html#sthash.zW2MaM76.dpuf
Detail from gold diadem with pendants. Sixty-four small chains, each with links interspaced by gold-leaf lozenges, are suspended from a long, narrow band with 3 holes on each end. The shorter central chains are framed on each side by seven longer chains that converge and terminate in four gold-leaf pendants.
The treasures are actually a thousand years older than Homer's King Priam of Troy, who died about 1200 B.C. They are a stunning collection of gold and silver diadems, bracelets, earrings, pendants, rings, plates, goblets, buttons, cups and perfume jars, which display the extraordinary artistry, technology and trading relationships of an ancient world.
There are 260 individually catalogued items at the Pushkin, but some pieces, like necklaces, have up to 200 beads of varying types. Counting every bead, there are believed to be some 12,000 individual pieces from the 17 separate digs Schliemann made at ancient Troy. Thirteen of those caches are at the Pushkin, with the rest scattered among some 45 other museums around the world.
This pin is part of "Priam's Treasure." Today it is maintained at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. It ended up there when Soviet soldiers who captured Berlin, at the end of World War II, brought it and other recovered Trojan artifacts to Russia.
