Part One: Heinrich Schliemann: The Archaeologist Who Destroyed Troy

This week Robert delves into the background of the most destructive archaeologist in history: Heinrich Schlieman, who destroyed the city of Troy looking for the city of Troy. Sources: https://talkafricana.com/giuseppe-ferlini-the-treasure-hunter-who-demolished-and-robbed-the-pyramids-of-meroe/ https://www.amusingplanet.com/2021/02/giuseppe-ferlini-pyramid-destroyer.html https://www.neperos.com/article/rs503u121c474977 https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2016/12/06/just-one-italian-the-pyramids-of-meroe-and-giuseppe-ferlini-their-destroyer/#footnote_1_16431 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40000601?googleloggedin=true&seq=9 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40000601?googleloggedin=true&seq=9 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-many-myths-of-the-man-who-discoveredand-nearly-destroyedtroy-180980102/ https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/search-lost-city-troy https://www.dw.com/en/the-archaeologist-who-discovered-troy-heinrich-schliemann/a-60323937 https://archive.org/details/memoirsofheinric0000deue/page/24/mode/2up Digging for Troy : from Homer to Hisarlik : Rubalcaba, Jill : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/diggingfortroyfr0000ruba https://archive.org/details/memoirsofheinric0000deue See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back, everybody, to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And we've all had a heavy year, both in the real world and in terms of subjects on this podcast. We got the year started with, God, a lot of, lot of child abuse, way more than I tend to stack at the start of a year in a normal content schedule. And then the last few weeks have been genocide after genocide. I mean, I guess just two, but that's a lot of genocides. So I figured, let's, let's have something fun this week. So we're, we're gonna talk about a piece of shit, but we're gonna have a good time doing it. This is not gonna be like heartbreaking, depressingly, except for at a couple of points, but not in the mass murder way, just in the, oh, wow, that's

• 0:48Robert Evans?

  a bummer kind of way. Anyway, I've, I've teased the episodes enough. Let me tease our guest, Kristin Conger, host of Unladylike and Conspiracy. She wrote, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming. How are you doing?

• 1:01Speaker 01

  I'm so thrilled to be here and I'm great. I, you know, I was emotionally prepared to be, you know, just pummeled, but I'm glad to hear we're gonna be, we're gonna be having some laughs.

• 1:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah. We're gonna talk about two old timey archaeologists who sucked and like destroyed a shitload of historical artifacts by being like greedy idiots, but are like funny. Like, it's old timey, guys, 1800s Europeans rampaging around like historical sites. It's gonna be a good time, you know? No, no kids are gonna get mass murdered. I mean, some workers die of malaria, but when isn't that happening, right?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. No one's to blame for malaria, other than mosquitoes.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Is the theme of this episode, men stupid? We laugh at them?

• 1:45Robert Evans?

  No, I mean, this is, our episodes are mostly about one specific guy, Heinrich Schliemann, who destroyed Troy, like the ruins of Troy he accidentally destroyed as he was trying to find them. But we're also gonna talk about an Italian guy who destroyed some other stuff as like a little bit of an amuse-bouche. So I'm, I've got a, got a fun one for you, Kristin. Do you got anything else you wanna plug or say about yourself before we go in?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  No, I'm, I love to laugh at absurd archaeologists. This sounds fantastic.

• 2:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I'm ready.

• 2:19Robert Evans?

  This will be heartbreaking for the archaeologists in the audience, but I think everyone else will have a good time.

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• 2:31Robert Evans?

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• 5:09Speaker 06

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• 5:21Robert Evans?

  So archaeology has not existed quite as long as civilization, but as soon as we've had like civilization long enough for any of them to fall into ruin, there were people that we could rightly call precursors to modern archaeologists and historians. The best evidence for this is the fact that in ancient Egypt, there were ancient Egyptian museums and Egyptologists who studied ancient Egypt, because Egypt is that old, that like 3,000 years ago, there's guys in Egypt who are studying ancient Egypt, because it just, it just keeps going back, right?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Because of ancient Egyptian docents.

• 6:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like, the first docents would have been ancient Egyptians puzzling over artifacts from ancienter Egyptians, being like, how the fuck did they do that? They couldn't have built these ziggurats on their own? It must have been aliens. I don't think they, they were as stupid as we are, actually. The most famous of these guys is probably Khaim Viset, who was the fourth son of Pharaoh Ramses II. And he devoted a great deal of energy and public funding to restoring ancient monuments. And there's quite a lot we only know about ancient Egypt because Khaim Watson was interested in it and preserved it, right? Stuff that would have happened centuries, or even 1,000 years or something like that, before his time. So that's pretty cool, I think. Modern archaeology,

• 6:44Robert Evans?

  though, dates back to about the Renaissance, right? That's kind of when Western people started really thinking about like, oh, there's like a lot of old shit around us. Maybe we shouldn't just steal everything from it to build houses? Perhaps some of this should be preserved. You know, maybe we have enough stone that we can leave the Parthenon intact or whatever. And there's this kind of European revival of interest in classic antiquity, particularly ancient Rome. Michelangelo, the artist, not the Ninja Turtle, observed excavations of old Roman ruins, and so did a number of other notable men from that period of time. The ruins of Pompeii were discovered by the architect Domenico Fontana at the end of the 16th century, and Herculaneum followed at around 1709. And there were organized

• 7:26Robert Evans?

  excavations in like the mid 1700s for both cities. So they were digging up before the US declared its independence, they were digging up Pompeii, right? That's about how old, like, something we recognize as modern archaeology kind of goes back.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  That is wild. That's not when I thought the, the modern period would begin. Yeah, that's way, way earlier than I assumed.

• 7:47Robert Evans?

  And that's important when we're talking about the vandals that we're gonna be talking about. Some people are like, well, everyone was that way back then. Nobody thought about preserving stuff. And no, there were guys who were like, you gotta be really careful. You don't wanna just dig through and tear up a bunch of shit. You have to take careful notes about like where everything was. People had already figured that out by the time the 1700s, you know, were, were well underway. And that's kind of the era, we wind up back here a lot, because it's the era of a lot of bastards, but the, the time of gentlemen scientists and adventurers, when it was like, if you're born with enough money that you don't have to work, then you're a scientist or an adventurer, if you want to, right? And some of those guys did great things, and some of them became Francis Galton and

• 8:30Robert Evans?

  invented racism. So, you know, it's, it's, it's a real mixed bag. But it becomes really hip in the mid to late 1700s to like dig up old things, particularly ancient Egypt, again, comes into vogue. And through the 1800s, the Victorian era too, like ancient Egypt is like cool and sexy. So if you're like a rich person from like a prominent family, you might get into archaeology, you know, either doing it yourself or funding digs, both to get access to some sweet artifacts to show off. And just because it's like the cool thing to be seen doing, supporting archaeology. And, you know, this could get, this was not always, there were people who were careful curators of the past, and there were people who were just tearing through shit to get as many mummies as they could,

• 9:14Robert Evans?

  right? I mean, there's, people were like grinding up mummies to take as medicine. So not everybody was nice about it, right? Yeah, yeah, a lot of mummies wind up in people's stomachs.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't like that. I don't like that. That, that made me queasy. I don't like that.

• 9:30Robert Evans?

  I would eat mummy. You, you guys wouldn't eat a mummy?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  I think RFK has recommended mummy pills.

• 9:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Every American needs at least four ounces of mummy per day.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  It's a new flu vaccine, actually.

• 9:41Robert Evans?

  We could try it. I mean, if it was a smallpox mummy, it might work. Don't, that, that's probably not medically true, but it could be. So anyway, into this kind of world of both careful excavation and frenzied possessive speculation and fascination with the past, in 1797, a man is born named Giuseppe Ferlini in Bologna, which is at the time, I mean, today is part of Italy, right? At the time, Italy's like a peninsula, but it's not a country. There's a bunch of city-states who are always like up in each other's business. But it's not like a, anything, anything like the modern nation today. And Giuseppe isn't, again, our main bastard for these episodes, because there's just not enough about him

• 10:24Robert Evans?

  on his own. But I love this old bastard too much to not tell you about how he, the destruction he wrought on ancient Egyptian artifacts.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  And frankly, you weren't, you weren't gonna pass up an Italian.

• 10:35Robert Evans?

  Not a Giuseppe, not a Giuseppe.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:38Robert Evans?

  No. I can't, like, I have to do this as I say Giuseppe, right? It's just like happening off-screen, you know, if you can't see it. So we don't know much about his early life. Born in 1797, right? He had a stepmother, and the relationship was so bad, it forced him to flee home as a young man. Every source about him says that, and there's, like, that it was intolerable. The situation couldn't continue.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Giuseppe, no.

• 11:01Robert Evans?

  Giuseppe, no, come home. I don't think she wanted him home. He would have been around 18 years old at most when he leaves. And he probably studies medicine. He becomes a doctor later. So he says he studies medicine during this period. It's the early 1800s, so who knows, right? Like, you're not having to pass an exam to get into medical school. Sometimes you could become a doctor just by like convincing another doctor to let you follow him around. Sometimes you just start cutting off limbs and saying, yeah, I'm a doctor, right? We don't really know which kind Giuseppe is. It's more or less impossible. But he spends some years traveling around, looking for work. He goes to Venice, he goes to Corfu.

• 11:45Robert Evans?

  And at some point, probably while he's in his early twenties, he starts calling himself a doctor. And nobody really is asking questions at this time, so he gets to work as a doctor.

• 11:54Robert Evans?

  By 1817, aged 20, he's in Albania doing god knows what. Now, the country was occupied by the Ottoman Empire at that point. And Albanians were none too happy about that state of affairs. So a rebellion is launched and then a rebel army is formed. And the nice thing about a rebel army, they do not ask for your CV. If there's like, hey, we need doctors for this army. And you just show up and say, yeah, that's me, Giuseppe, hey. Like, you can, you can just become the army doctor. Suddenly you have thousands of lives potentially in your hands.

• 12:25Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 12:25Robert Evans?

  And that's, that's what happens. That's how Giuseppe gets his job. Unfortunately, the rebellions don't work very well. This is like a big Greek, kind of Pan-Greek Balkan series of rebellions against the Ottomans. And it doesn't work. But Giuseppe gets a few years of being paid to, probably he's mostly just sawing off limbs, right? Like, that's a lot of military doctoring. It's like, oh, you got shot. I'm just gonna cut off whatever got hit.

• 12:53Robert Evans?

  Which, I mean, I feel like I could have been a doctor back then. I still feel like I could be that kind of doctor.

• 12:57Speaker 07

  I don't.

• 12:58Robert Evans?

  I'm pretty good with it. I'm good at sawing off stuff, Sophie. It's not that hard.

• 13:02Speaker 07

  I've seen you cut meat.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  I've deboned a chicken. I think I'm qualified.

• 13:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah. People are a lot like chickens, you know, biologically.

• 13:11Speaker 07

  I'd let Kristen be a doctor, Robert.

• 13:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You know what? We just, we need like two or three people who need limbs chopped off. And whoever goes fastest, that gets to be the doctor.

• 13:21Speaker 07

  I once saw you eat back to back, one, the largest fish I've ever seen.

• 13:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 07

  And then the next day, a tomahawk steak. You cannot be my doctor. You're not chopping me, buddy.

• 13:33Robert Evans?

  So I've got it right here. Like, we could, that'll, that'll remove a gunshot limb easy.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 13:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's a medical cleaver.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  You don't even have to sanitize it.

• 13:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no. They didn't know about sanitizing back then.

• 13:48Speaker 07

  That fish was the size of like my, that fish was giant. You loved it. It was great.

• 13:55Robert Evans?

  It was delicious. It was a great fish. So the war does not go well for Giuseppe and his Greek rebels. And he decides to peace the fuck out of Greece and head to Egypt. Cause he wants to get rich and he knows that there's a lot of gold buried all over Egypt. People are stealing artifacts from ancient Egyptian sites and selling them at this point in time. And he wants to do that. The new Sultan, like the way he's, the kind of job that initially gets him there is the Sultan that he had just been fighting against is modernizing the Ottoman Army and wants European doctors for his military. And Giuseppe's like, close enough, you know? Like, ah, that's basically me. And yeah, he winds up working for the guys he'd just been fighting. As Koshak Potawari writes, quote, "In 1829, the Italian landed in Alexandria and had once headed for Cairo.

• 14:40Robert Evans?

  One of the things the governor wanted to improve was the army, and that included a more efficient military healthcare. So Ferlini enlisted as an assistant, and the following year, he was already the head doctor of an infantry battalion. As such, he accompanied the first regiment on its march to Senar, the capital of the Sultanate in the same name, of the same name, where the corps had been assigned. Senar was located in southeastern Sudan, on the banks of the Blue Nile, as Mehmed Ali's campaigns extended the borders to Ethiopia." And so he spends more than five months doing this. He visits Khartoum, he visits Wadi Hala. And he sees a bunch of different, like archaeological sites, right? There's all of these ruins of ancient civilizations he's in. Like Khartoum isn't in ancient Egypt today, but at the time, it's part of, I think Sudan today.

• 15:25Robert Evans?

  And I always has been, but it was like a polity within the Egyptian, like sphere of influence for a long time. And then, yeah, obviously during the Ottoman era, it's part of the Ottoman Empire. But there's all these ruins there and he keeps seeing them. And it just keeps kind of like tweaking this part of his brain. That's like, there's a lot of money buried in the sand here. That someone, I should just be able to take it from these people who, who currently own it and bring it back to Europe to get rich.

• 15:53Robert Evans?

  Giuseppe has what's referred to by, as a dark period in Pashawari's article. He marries an Ethiopian slave. I don't, I don't know if we'd really call that a marriage. They have a child together and then the child dies. He has a malaria epidemic that he has to treat, like while helping to run a hospital and just a horrible situation. And by the time of this period, like number one, he is done doing medical stuff. Like, he has helped, like, lead a hospital through a malaria epidemic, which I imagine is just mostly burying corpses and waiting to die yourself. Like, it just has to have been a hellish nightmare. So at the end of this, he's achieved some level of clout with the governor. And he's also like, I'm fucking done doing this doctor shit.

• 16:36Robert Evans?

  And so he convinces the governor to go with him and on an expedition through Nubia to try to find gold, right? This, this, this guy in office, he's like, hey, there's gotta be gold in some of these ruins. Let's go fucking look for it. And they don't find any, right? I started this episode by making a point about the absolute antiquity of ancient Egypt. And that means that generations of treasure hunters had been combing through this stuff for thousands of years before Giuseppe and this governor start looking for it, right?

• 17:05Robert Evans?

  So they don't, there's not a whole lot that they're, that's just, it's not easy to find good stuff, even in like the early 1800s. Now, obviously, we know that there's still great finds to be made. King Tut's tomb is still buried at this point in time. But a dilettante like Giuseppe with no relevant skill isn't searching for anything like that. He wants the low hanging fruit. And he starts hearing rumors about a smaller set of pyramids, right? Located in, in a different part of like the, this, this area, not like in Egypt proper, but in a place called Moreau, that's part of the Merotic Kingdom, which is a, an ancient kingdom. It's one of the latter kind of Egyptian successor civilizations. It's located to the south of Patolomeic Egypt.

• 17:49Robert Evans?

  And the pyramids of Moreau were mostly built from around 300 B.C. to 350 A.D. These are very recent pyramids, right? Moreau outlasted Rome's invasion and conquest of Egypt and remained independent for quite some time after that. The Merotic Kingdom was ultimately brought down by Ethiopian invaders. And that whole mess gave us the Coptic language, which is a part of why we were able to translate the Rosetta Stone. But, so you've got like a hundred or so of these little pyramids. They're like, the biggest ones are maybe 90 to 100 feet tall. So they're not the size of the ones outside of Cairo. But there's a bunch of them and they haven't been picked over quite as much as the sexier pyramids, right? Like, you don't want to go to the pyramids everybody knows, because they've been, they've been combing through that shit for a while. You want an off the beaten path pyramid, right?

• 18:34Speaker 07

  Kristen, are you ever like, wow, pyramid sexy?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, oh, hipster pyramid, okay. Really undiscovered, kind of under the radar. I love though that this is his get rich quick scheme.

• 18:49Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Pyramid digging?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:52Robert Evans?

  There were not a lot of better options back in the day. You couldn't just become an influencer and hope to get rich, you know? You had to, you had to dig through the dirt and, and risk malaria. It was a harder era for that sort of thing.

• 19:06Robert Evans?

  So Giuseppe gets it through his head that previous generations of grave robbers had probably been less thorough in Moreau than at the more famous sites. And he puts together an expedition with an Albanian businessman that he'd met during his doctor days. This guy, Antonio Stefani. And Stefani has money, so he agrees, I'll pay for the equipment and the workers. And some of these workers are slaves. They are buying slaves and also just like hiring slaves other people own. That's a pretty normal way to work in this period of time in the area. And Stefani and Giuseppe decide to split the profits of anything they find 50/50, right? So they leave for Moreau in August of 1834. Potawari writes, quote, "Accompanied by their wives, some 30 servants, hundreds of porters, and a good number of horses and dromedaries, the results of that adventure were not good.

• 19:51Robert Evans?

  First, they tried to access a half-buried temple, but to no avail, despite poking at the walls to open an entrance. Then they also failed with some sand-covered ruins, where they found a large obelisk decorated with hieroglyphs, but which, due to its enormous dimensions, they had to leave. Meanwhile, diseases began to take their toll on workers and animals." And Giuseppe, he's not killing anybody, but people are dying for his dream. Pretty much every week, they're losing, like, that's just the way digging here. If you take a couple hundred men to dig with you, at least five or 10 are gonna die of disease in the process of like digging out there.

• 20:25Robert Evans?

  You just had to kind of know when you signed on to do a job away from home. Okay, might be the last time you see me. Like, bye, guys.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  But I'm going with a doctor, so I'll be fine, right?

• 20:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he can cut off any limbs I need cut off, you know? That's, that's basically universal healthcare in 18 fucking dot.

• 20:43Robert Evans?

  So frustrated by the lack of progress, Giuseppe made an executive decision to switch their focus. They'd been digging kind of, you know, in places around here, the Pyramids of Moreau, like, and they decide to head to the most famous of them, right? Because they'd kind of been fucking around some of the lesser sites. And the most famous of the, the Pyramids of Moreau had been discovered a decade or so earlier by a Frenchman. And it was called the Great Pyramid of Queen Amane Shaketo. Amane Shaketo? And that you can see if you're, if you're looking on the Netflix, you can see like an illustration of how it looked when Giuseppe arrived. And it's a, it's a tall, kind of thin pyramid. Again, probably would have been maybe 90 to 100 feet tall.

• 21:25Robert Evans?

  And there's this like smaller, square-ish building out in front of it, but it looked like a fairly intact set of ruins, right? Like, that's a, that's a healthy looking pyramid. And you should feel some foreboding at this point, because the reason I'm not showing you, I don't have like a modern day picture of the pyramid intact to show you.

• 21:42Speaker 07

  Oh, no.

• 21:42Robert Evans?

  Is what Giuseppe is going to do as soon as he shows up there.

• 21:45Speaker 07

  Oh, fuck, okay.

• 21:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So he spends some time picking around the site and some other pyramids in the site. And, you know, I think that if you know anything about archaeology, and Giuseppe really doesn't, it would have been clear, if you wanted to get anything out of this, it's going to take years of careful work, you know, like painstaking, digging and sorting to like gradually make progress at collecting and figuring out what's there. And Giuseppe doesn't have time for that. So he decides, I'm just going to hire a small army and ransack this fucking pyramid. So he hires 500 or so impoverished workers and he has them start systematically fucking up like this pyramid, right? There are speculation that he used gunpowder to blow the top off of this queen's pyramid.

• 22:29Robert Evans?

  Giuseppe doesn't mention that in his own notes, but on his blog, Roger Pearce, who translated some of his writing, suspects that he may have left the gunpowder thing out of, his notes out of shame. What matters is that by the time he and his workers are done, that lovely pyramid I just showed you an illustration of looks like this. And again, if you can't see the video, it's just gone. That little square building is intact and 80% of the pyramid's gone. They just ripped the top off of it. So in a Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt article, Yvonne Markowitz and Peter Lacovara speculate that one of three things happened when Giuseppe and his partner busted into this pyramid, starting at the top and going down, right? Because they're like, they're blowing through it, basically. And Giuseppe, he doesn't say they dynamited it.

• 23:14Robert Evans?

  He says that they found a secret hidden burial chamber at the top of the pyramid, right? And that they had to dig away and remove all of that to get to the treasures inside it, because they do find treasure. Now, none of these pyramids, and there's 100 something Moreau pyramids, none of them have chambers like that at the top. This would have been the only one that had a chamber like that, if it had a chamber like that. Because as a spoiler, that's not true. Giuseppe finds all this stuff buried elsewhere after they've like blown the top off of this pyramid. He just lies about having found it in the top to justify why he destroyed this thing. Because otherwise, he kind of seems like an asshole, right? But wherever they find it, they do find the well-preserved mummy of Queen Amane Shaketo.

• 23:58Robert Evans?

  And they find a bunch of gold and jewels and gems and like, like they find the mother load. Like, if you're searching for Egyptian treasure, like, it's, it's everything you could hope for. There's a, it's a huge find. In that article, Lacovara and Markowitz write, "He recorded that he removed the jewels from the compartment, hiding the booty in leather bags for fear that a glimpse of the treasure would attract local bandits. For further security, he temporarily buried the loot in the sand by his tent." And he's not worried about bandits, he's worried about his own workers. He's worried they're going to want to him to share the gold that they've found. They've been dying in the desert, so they want some of that. And he is not a sharing guy, right? That's, that's not why Giuseppe blew up a pyramid.

• 24:41Speaker 07

  Giuseppe.

• 24:42Robert Evans?

  You don't blow up a pyramid to share.

• 24:44Speaker 07

  But Robert, you know who didn't blow up a pyramid?

• 24:49Robert Evans?

  We cannot prove that. And I, Sophie, I gotta be honest with you, I have done something to a pyramid that I can't talk about on air. And that's all I'll say. Here's some ads.

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  They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Vampires, minotars, 12-foot skeletons, and apartment doors? Believe it or not, we're talking about romance. It's a monster romance extravaganza on Radio 831, a romance podcast. So join me, St. Johna Basker and my co-host Tyler McCall, as we dive into the strange, horny, and wonderfully thoughtful world of falling for something not quite human. I give Tyler a crash course in monster romance, and the Villain Edit author, Rosie Dannen, joins to talk vampires, blood play, and finding tenderness in a monstrous love interest. Then, sentient object romance expert, Racy Delgado, takes us even deeper into the genre. Finally, I assign Tyler some homework, to read C. M. Niscosta's Morning Glory: Milking Farm.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  And it's a doozy, but spoiler alert, Tyler emerges ready for more monster tales, because sometimes, non-human romances can tell us the most about our desire, our fantasies, and what we actually want. Listen to Radio 831, a romance podcast, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  This Halloween, join me, Tim Harford, as Cautionary Tales journeys into the paranormal. We'll travel from 1800s America, where vampires preyed upon a terrified community, to a bizarre 1930s radio experiment which broadcast telepathic messages, and on to 1970s England, where

• 28:01Speaker 06

  intricate crop circles emerged overnight. Throughout October, I'll be examining strange stories of the supernatural and asking, what can we learn from them today? Listen to Cautionary Tales on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:25Speaker 05

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 28:29Speaker 06

  Here's what you missed.

• 28:30Speaker 05

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

• 28:44Speaker 06

  It's raw.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men.

• 28:53Speaker 06

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 28:55Speaker 05

  I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

• 29:05Speaker 06

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 29:09Speaker 05

  12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground, going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

• 29:23Speaker 06

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:30Robert Evans?

  And we're back. That wasn't a joke. Anyway, uh, I guess we'll return to the episode. So they start unearthing a bunch of relics around the base of this pyramid under the ruin of a masonry wall and worried that the locals are catching up, Giuseppe dismisses the bulk of the crew he's hired to ransack this ancient burial ground. And yet, per that article, quote, "About a week later, the workmen, sensing an important find had been made, returned with weapons, determined to receive just payment for his share of the treasure."

• 29:56Speaker 07

  Hell yeah.

• 29:56Robert Evans?

  So they armed them. It's never good when the workmen returned with weapons.

• 29:59Speaker 07

  Fuck yeah, workmen.

• 30:00Robert Evans?

  That's true today, too.

• 30:01Speaker 07

  Yeah. Support the workmen. Yeah.

• 30:04Robert Evans?

  For the workmen.

• 30:05Speaker 07

  Labor, labor.

• 30:07Robert Evans?

  That may not be true because it would be really convenient for Giuseppe if an army of like armed, dangerous local Egyptians showed up and forced him to flee because that gives him a justification for just taking all of the booty and running and not preserving the mummy because he finds this queen's mummy and destroys it, ripping off all the jewelry, right?

• 30:27Speaker 07

  That's fucking rude, bro.

• 30:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, just a ruined mummy. And he doesn't document the site in any meaningful way. As any archaeologist knows, even if, it doesn't matter how shiny and cool looking it is, if you remove an artifact from its original context and don't document that in any way, then you've lost a huge portion of the historical value that it has, right? Because you don't know where the fuck it came from. And Giuseppe, he finds most of the treasure that he finds in this one dig, but he's also like buying shit, like artifacts while he's in like the area and he just is including them all in this haul. So he's throwing a bunch of shit from like ancient Rome and other parts of Egypt together and just saying it's all part of one big haul because he doesn't give a fuck. It's just, on an archaeological level,

• 31:09Robert Evans?

  it's a disaster, right? Like, it's really fucked up. Um, but claiming that these workers had showed up with weapons gives him an excuse, right? Well, they were going to steal and probably melt it all down, these savages. They would have ruined all of the gold. So I had to grab everything, throw it into bags and run like fuck back to Europe, right? So he, and he does damage a bunch of these relics. He's so, he rips them off so hastily that some of like the clasps are broken, gems fall off and stuff. Uh, and then he bounces back to Europe to auction all this shit off in 1837. Now, he's got a shitload of gold. This is undeniably the equivalent value of hundreds of millions of dollars today, honestly. Like, if you're thinking about what artifacts of this quality are

• 31:53Robert Evans?

  really worth, at least tens of millions of dollars. But he can't prove that they're real and they're so high quality, it's so rare to actually find original intact gold and gem like jewelry from this period of time, right? Because it usually just gets melted down, that everyone's like, well, these are clearly fakes. Because nothing this good exists. No one's seen shit that looks this nice in a very long time from this part of the world. So like, you must be faking it, Giuseppe. You like found, bought some gold and had someone make this stuff? Um, and you know, part of why all of the experts doubt Giuseppe when he comes in is that he lies about where he'd found them. They can tell that that whole thing about the top chamber, holding all this gold is bullshit

• 32:37Robert Evans?

  because none of the other pyramids that have been excavated worked that way. Um, so they know he's lying about something, right? They just don't know exactly what. And it causes it. And they also know that he's thrown a bunch of like Roman artifacts he bought at a market and with the Egyptian stuff. So, so nobody really trusts him. And eventually he does manage to, to get his treasure purchased by the King of Bavaria and a bunch winds up in the Berlin Museum, partly because they were some of the first people to realize the artifacts were real, if completely separated from their proper context. All of the artifacts we talk about today, weirdly enough, are going to wind up in Germany, pretty much. Like, at least for a while. World War II is going to change some of that. When the Soviets take over Nazi Germany, they're going to be like, I don't think you guys deserve all

• 33:19Robert Evans?

  these artifacts. I think these are coming back to Moscow. Yeah. Um, so, modern archaeologists come to suspect, have come to suspect that Giuseppe made up the whole story about a secret top chamber to hide the fact that he destroyed half of the queen's pyramid for nothing. Unfortunately, the fact that he picked this lie to stick to and had obviously gotten rich off the articles he found, meant that Giuseppe's example immediately inspires an army of copycats to descend on Moreau. As soon as it becomes known, hey, this Italian fucker got rich finding artifacts in these pyramids, armies of treasure hunters descend on Moreau and they start doing exactly what Giuseppe had did to every other intact pyramid they can get their hands on. Per that article by Markovitz and Lachavera-

• 34:01Speaker 07

  That sucks.

• 34:01Robert Evans?

  Oh yeah, it's, it's really bad. Although Ferlini never returned to Nubia to continue his hunting spree, others did. Spurred by his narrative, these zealous fortune seekers destroyed the tops of nearly every pyramid in the Sudan. Needless to say, nothing was ever discovered during these decapitations. Moreover, if one uses Ferlini's dimensions of the hidden chamber, it becomes apparent that a room of this size could not structurally fit within the purported place. And here is a picture of what the pyramids looked like after the, and it's just like a line of like seven pyramids that are all ripped in half. Like, they just, between, a lot of it, they're not always blowing them up. A lot of it's like, you're just having workmen hack through the tops with like axes, pickaxes. But yeah, they're all ruined. It's just all fucked up.

• 34:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's like someone just ripped off the muffin top.

• 34:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And it's because he, he needed to lie about where he'd found the artifacts to hide the fact that he blew it up for nothing. So all of these other pyramids get destroyed because of that lie.

• 34:54Speaker 07

  So because one man was shitty and a liar, a bunch of other men became shitty liars?

• 35:00Robert Evans?

  They didn't lie. They were just ruining pyramids to try to get rich. It was a very honest ransacking, Sophie.

• 35:05Speaker 07

  All right. So one was a shitty liar and the others were just shitty. You got it.

• 35:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:10Speaker 07

  Like, running on misinformation.

• 35:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's fair to say. Um, so Giuseppe did at least have something of an excuse for his behavior, which is that he never pretended to be anything but a treasure hunter, right? I mean, he did a little. He writes in an account of the journey that he wanted to accomplish something for science. But that like one sentence, everyone knows what Giuseppe's about, right? And he never goes down as anything but a treasure hunter. Our main subject for this week is someone who was just as destructive as Giuseppe, perhaps much more so, but someone who also attained respect and fame that exists in some circles to the present day because of his crimes against history. His name is Heinrich Schliemann, and he destroyed the city of Troy. Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Schliemann, who was

• 35:56Robert Evans?

  born on January 6th, 1822, just about a generation after Giuseppe was born. His childhood home was in Mecklenburg, a part of Western Pomerania, which was under the control of Prussia and is itself a part of northern Germany that people outside of Germany don't much discuss. You don't hear about Pomeranians all that much these days because we just kind of, all the Germans got mashed together now. Nobody really talks about Prushians all that much anymore, right? They're technically a bunch of different kinds of German, but yeah, everything's, everything's a little flatter now. Uh, but this is 50 years before Germany exists almost, right? So these are all still a bunch of independent kingdoms that are often at war with each other. In fact, Heinrich grows up in a Europe that

• 36:37Robert Evans?

  had not that long ago put Napoleon down for the last time. So he's kind of coming up, really like the, Europe is still recovering from the Napoleonic wars in his childhood, right? Like, that's, that's when he's growing up. Uh, his father was a pastor and their financial situation was, I think broadly comfortable initially, but he was, they weren't rich, but they seemed to be doing okay. His parents valued education and he grew into an avid reader. At age seven, he came across a book, World History for Children, that featured an illustration of the ancient city of Troy on fire after the Greeks sacked it. Now, as I said, historians were in the process of like making being a historian a career in the modern sense. And the more reputable ones generally agreed in this period

• 37:20Robert Evans?

  of time that the Iliad was pure fiction, right? Um, the Iliad and the Odyssey, totally fictional, not based on anything real that had happened. That's not a universal conclusion, but I think it's like the more mainstream one among like academics. Perhaps there'd been a real city of Troy, but that was seen as unlikely. Um, and that's actually, we know that's wrong now, right? Like, the folk view is definitely that the Iliad was true. There was a real Troy. And Heinrich, as a kid, believes that Troy is a real place. And we know now that it was, right? There was a real Troy and there's, the Iliad, not to say that the Iliad is like an accurate history text, but there probably was some war against Troy that it was like kind of based off of, inspired by legends and rumors

• 38:02Robert Evans?

  of, right? Because we, we do know like that the place existed and that it got sacked a few times. Um, so Heinrich grows up, at least Heinrich will later claim in his autobiography and stuff, that he was always obsessed with Troy as a kid, right? We don't actually know if that's accurate because he was, at the point at which he starts claiming that, oh, as a child, I dreamed of finding the walls of Troy. He was consciously trying to turn himself into a celebrity. Um, and it's very possible that this is a complete lie. His more credible biographer, yeah.

• 38:34Speaker 07

  I was gonna say, do you think he would have been happy with the casting of Brad Pitt as Achilles in the movie Troy?

• 38:41Robert Evans?

  I don't think he would like Brad Pitt as Achilles. I don't think any of us really liked Brad Pitt as Achilles.

• 38:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 38:49Robert Evans?

  Uh, I, yeah, I, I'm frustrated at almost all of the, of the casting in, in every Iliad and Odyssey. But I also, I, I maintain that the best casting for Odysseus possible would have been Gene Wilder, right? Like, that's the, the Odyssey I want is Gene Wilder as Odysseus. Uh, like, that, that I, uh, I think we could have gotten a great film. It's a comedy. It should be a comedy. Um, so his more credible biographers throw a reasonable amount of cold water on this idea. Leo Dool, author of Memoirs of Heinrich Schliemann, points out that while Schliemann would claim late in life to have been inspired to find Troy by vivid tales of the war spun into bedtime stories by his father, he never mentioned

• 39:32Robert Evans?

  this in his earliest books, where he wrote about his upbringing, because he writes about his upbringing before he finds Troy and he doesn't talk about this shit. So I think this is myth-making, right? Post facto, or at least to some extent. It's not weird. As a kid, he probably did encounter the Iliad and the Odyssey. They were pretty, the popular stories then as they are today. Um, he would also claim in the second draft of his life story that he'd grown up raised on ghost stories, claims that their house was haunted by the pastor who'd lived there before his dad took up the job. There were also, he claims, constant stories of buried treasure in the local folklore of Mecklenburg. There were these, these treasures that were supposed to be hidden in various points in the past around the city he grew up in. And yeah, as a result, quote, this is something

• 40:15Robert Evans?

  he would write later, "My faith in the existence of those treasures was so great that whenever I heard my father complain of his poverty, I always expressed my astonishment that he did not dig up the silver bowl or the golden cradle and so become rich." Well, there's all these riches in the woods, Dad. Why are you poor?

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Just imagine if that's what your kid said. Just like, will you go treasure hunt? I mean, my god.

• 40:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, come on, dad. We're eating fucking bread for the fourth time this week. Get us some fucking gold. Um, yeah, that would, that would probably be pretty frustrating. Although, just, his dad sucks. So, uh, he claims, and again, this is almost certainly not true, but that I talked of nothing else but searching for treasure during his childhood. And as a result, I was continually laughed at by everyone except two young girls. Um, these ladies, I, oh, boy. So what I'm reading here is that the two nice ladies in town took pity on you because you were weird and wouldn't stop talking about Troy.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  If a man came up to me or a boy came up to me and was like, hey.

• 41:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm gonna find the ruins of Troy. Yeah, I think there's buried treasure in the woods.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  I'm gonna, I would be like, I'm gonna find the door and take my drink with me. Yeah, honestly, I would be probably intrigued to be like, well, okay, let's check it out.

• 41:33Robert Evans?

  Buried treasure, you say?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Do your, do your parents know where you are?

• 41:36Robert Evans?

  Look.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Are you in therapy?

• 41:38Robert Evans?

  If a weird kid, if a weird kid comes up to you talking about buried treasure, it's always worth rolling those dice. If you're, it's probably not. Don't go anywhere with a stranger who tells you he knows where there's buried treasure. That's actually a terrible idea.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Yes, I agree. Thank you.

• 41:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, but he claims these two ladies, Louise and Mina Meinike, always listened to me with profound attention, especially Mina, who he had a huge crush on. They took dancing lessons together, but they weren't good at dancing, he says, because they're too obsessed planning to find Troy together one day. I don't think this girl existed. I think this is a lie he tells later about the like, lost love of his early life, who, she liked Troy just as much as I did. And she didn't think I was a freak for wanting to find buried gold.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  She wanted to dance with me, but she was so excited about Troy, she couldn't even dance with me. But she had a huge crush, huge crush.

• 42:27Robert Evans?

  She had a huge crush. She loved me, but we were too in love with Troy. That was our real passion. Uh, he's like 10. In 1831, his mom dies, and he describes her loss as an irreparable misfortune, which it must have been. He and his six siblings soon felt another piece of ill luck, quote, "which resulted in all our acquaintances suddenly turning their backs on us, including the Meinike sisters. They get shunned by the whole town." Now, Heinrich doesn't write what very bad thing caused this to happen in his own writings, but his biographer tells us that his dad had an affair with the maid before mom died. I think mom gets sick, he's stuping the maid, mom dies, and he keeps stuping the maid,

• 43:08Robert Evans?

  and he buys her a bunch of, bunch of expensive jewelry, and everyone in town finds out about it, and they ostracize the whole family because the pastor's a piece of shit. Because he's the pastor. Like, he's definitely not supposed to be doing this kind of shit.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Boy, howdy.

• 43:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not nice. Uh, Heinrich's dad sends him to live with his uncle for a while and pays to enroll him in the gymnasium, which is like a, it's like, there's a couple different high school equivalency things in the German states in this period of time. The gymnasium is the one that is meant to prepare you for college. If you go to gymnasium, it's because you're, you're studying to get a real education, right? But Heinrich only makes it three months. He claims a disaster in the family made his continued schooling untenable, and he had to leave and go to a different school. And this one is, the school, the school he has to go to isn't preparing him for college. It's preparing him to like, work a fucking bullshit job, right? Like, it's the, it's, it's, it's that kind of program, right? And the disaster that forced him to stop going to gymnasium was the fact

• 44:08Robert Evans?

  that his father got caught embezzling from the church and lost his job. Or at least he got, he got accused of having embezzled from the church, was forced to resign. There is a later investigation, and he's declared innocent. So it may just be that after, after he got caught cheating, they were like, well, we gotta get this pastor out of here, and they, they kind of fired him for a bullshit reason. I don't fully know, right? I'm not gonna, I'm not going to bat for Heinrich's dad as having not done the, uh, the embezzlement.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Because he needed the money to buy the gifts for the maid.

• 44:39Robert Evans?

  That's, that's, that's, that's what I'm calling to. At age 14, he graduated and became an apprentice in a grocery shop in town. This is not a big shop, and Heinrich would later claim, "I, of course, came into contact only with the lowest classes of society." So he's kind of working at like a quickie mart, right? Like, this is the equivalent of like, a little mini mart in a bad part of town. It's, it's the job he's doing in like, 1820s Germany as a 14-year-old. So he does this for a couple of years, and this is another, he, we've got a couple. The first claim of how he first started to hear the legends of Troy is that he got that book as a kid. The second is that his dad would tell him stories about Troy. Uh, and the third, that thing that he would sometimes claim is that

• 45:23Robert Evans?

  a, a customer came in who would drink regularly at their, their little store, who had dropped out of, of the gymnasium after spending several more years in it than he had, and who knew Homer in the original Greek. And Heinrich would bribe this other boy with whiskey to get him to recite the Iliad to him, right? And he vowed one day to learn Greek so that he would but be able to read, you know, the Iliad like this boy could. And I don't know if that's true at all. Probably the only part of this that we can safely say is accurate is that Heinrich very likely worked a dead-end grocery job as a, a young man, right? That's, that's pretty plausible. Um, he describes himself as having been relieved of the fate of remaining there as if by a miracle.

• 46:06Robert Evans?

  And here's the miracle, quote, "By lifting too heavy a cask of chicory, a blood vessel sprung in my lungs, and I got heavy blood spitting, which rendered me incapable for all sorts of hard work. My patron, seeing that in my broken health I could not be of any more use to him, took an apprentice in my place and turned me out." He's like 17 or 18.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  I was about to say.

• 46:27Robert Evans?

  He picks up a barrel of chicory so big it blows out his lungs?

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 46:34Robert Evans?

  Hey, that's fucked up.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  That's terrifying.

• 46:37Robert Evans?

  Like, on-the-job injuries were another level back then.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no workman's comp for him.

• 46:42Robert Evans?

  No, no, no. Well, like, actually, workman's comp kind of comes into existence not long after this. After the establishment of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, like, the architect of the German state, puts into program some of the first social welfare programs like that, at least in Germany, because it's like a way to fight the socialists, right? It's like, well, these socialists are promising workers a lot. We gotta give them something if they blow out their hearts lifting chicory barrels.

• 47:10Robert Evans?

  In terms of what actually went wrong with Heinrich here, Leo Duel, his biographer suspects he had tuberculosis, and so that he, he wound up coughing up blood, exerting himself, but it was the tuberculosis that caused it, not the chicory barrel. Probably more likely, I would guess. Like, I've, I've lifted stuff that was too heavy for me, but it's never caused me to start spitting up blood. So I, I think maybe tuberculosis played a role one way or the other. Um, everyone has TB in the 1820s, by the way, right?

• 47:40Robert Evans?

  Either way, whatever the actual truth here, at the end of his apprenticeship, Heinrich has a work-related injury that means he can't really do labor anymore, and he's got about 30 Prussian dollars to his name. From this humble beginning, he would eventually make a fortune. So his dream at this point of time is to get the fuck out of Pomerania and make it to America, a land where he already knows he can reinvent himself. Even in like, the mid, like, early 1800s, 1820s, 30s, people are like, yeah, if you can get over to the US, you know, anything's possible there. They'll take anybody, right? You, you can, you can really make some things happen if you're an ambitious kid with no morals in the United States. So he wants to do that, and he gets passage on a ship bound for Venezuela, working as a cabin boy.

• 48:24Robert Evans?

  And his plan is to take it to Venezuela, and then once he hits Venezuela, start finding odd jobs and make his way to the United States, right? However, this dream is cut short because after less than two weeks at sea, his ship hits a horrible storm and wrecks, and Heinrich is washed up ashore in the Netherlands. Like, literally flotsam in the sea. Yeah.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Low-key, not a bad pace to wash up.

• 48:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you're gonna wash up somewhere, I, I would pick the Netherlands over a lot of places. You know where else I'd like to wash up? At the sponsors of this show.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Worried and gets scared for her safety. Stories of survival.

• 49:53Speaker 05

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year.

• 50:25Speaker 04

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Vampires, minotars, 12-foot skeletons, and apartment doors? Believe it or not, we're talking about romance. It's a monster romance extravaganza on Radio 831, a romance podcast. So join me, St. Johna Basker, and my co-host Tyler McCall, as we dive into the strange, horny, and wonderfully thoughtful world of falling for something not quite human. I give Tyler a crash course in monster romance, and The Villain Edit author Rosie Dannen joins to talk vampires, blood play, and finding tenderness in a monstrous love interest. Then, sentient object romance expert Racy Delgado takes us even deeper into the genre. Finally, I assign Tyler some homework to read C. N. Niscost as Morning Glory Milking

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Farm. And it's a doozy, but spoiler alert, Tyler emerges ready for more monster tales because sometimes non-human romances can tell us the most about our desire, our fantasies, and what we actually want. Listen to Radio 831, a romance podcast, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  This Halloween, join me, Tim Harford, as Cautionary Tales journeys into the paranormal. We'll travel from 1800s America, where vampires preyed upon a terrified community, to a bizarre 1930s radio experiment which broadcast telepathic messages, and on to 1970s England, where

• 52:04Speaker 05

  intricate crop circles emerged overnight. Throughout October, I'll be examining strange stories of the supernatural and asking, what can we learn from them today? Listen to Cautionary Tales on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 52:28Speaker 05

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 52:31Speaker 06

  Here's what you missed.

• 52:32Speaker 04

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

• 52:40Speaker 05

  It's real.

• 52:41Speaker 04

  Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

• 52:47Speaker 06

  It's raw.

• 52:47Speaker 04

  I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men.

• 52:56Speaker 06

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 52:57Speaker 04

  I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

• 53:07Speaker 06

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 53:11Speaker 04

  12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now.

• 53:21Speaker 05

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 53:33Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, this segment from a Deutsche Well article by Sabine Uhl describes Heinrich's next chapter of life well enough, after he comes ashore in the Netherlands. He finally reached Amsterdam after many detours, where he found a job as a messenger at a trading post. His ability to learn languages helped him. In only a year, he had learned Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Later, he added Russian to his repertoire and knew when to strategically deploy his language skills. After moving to Russia, he dealt in raw materials for munitions and made a lot of money. Right? So, he gets a j- he's just kind of a generic, old-timey businessman, right? He works at an import-export firm, and he's just buying things one place, selling them for a higher price at the next

• 54:14Robert Evans?

  place. Yeah? And that's how he gets sent to Russia. He settles in St. Petersburg, and he spends his time, like, yeah, doing import and export stuff. And he does very well at this, enough that a bunch of different companies hire him to move their goods, and he starts to make really good money. As he obtains, you know, the beginnings of a fortune, he commits to filling in what he saw as the holes in his education, learning new languages because it was of prime importance to Heinrich. And he develops a system, he will later claim, that allows him to learn any language in six weeks. And I don't know if that's- that'd be a very impressive system. I don't know if-

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Mr. Duolingo.

• 54:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's gotta be better than fucking Duolingo. But he gets really good. He's like a polyglot. He's one of these people that just takes to new languages incredibly easily. And one of his hobbies, he writes diary entries, like, his entire life, like thousands of pages. And when he's in a different country, he will write in the language of whatever country he happens to physically be in at the time.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  That's kind of cool.

• 55:12Robert Evans?

  Right? Like, he's that kind of polyglot. It's a pretty good flex. Like, I gotta give it to Heinrich. That's pretty sick. Yeah, he would later explain his business success this way in a letter to a friend. "In every situation of my life, I always proved how much of a person can accomplish with iron energy. I performed miracles during my four-year stay in Amsterdam from 1842 to 1846. I did what nobody else has ever done and could ever do. When I became a merchant in St. Petersburg, I was the most able and prudent businessman of the entire exchange. Later, as a traveler, I was a traveler par excellence." He's a narcissist, right? "Everything I did, I was the best at it, the best anyone's ever seen." He's very Trumpy. "No one's ever seen a trader better than me in Amsterdam. No one's ever seen a better businessman in St. Petersburg. I was the top," you know?

• 55:57Robert Evans?

  A very familiar kind of narcissistic, rich guy writing style.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  And how old was he at this point?

• 56:04Robert Evans?

  He's in his 20s. He gets rich fairly- he gets- or he starts to get comfortable fairly young. I don't know how rich he is, but he's doing all right. He's probably exaggerating that so- like, his financial success somewhat, I have reason to believe, because in 1850, he receives word that his brother Ludwig, who'd moved to California and gotten rich in the gold rush, had just died. And kind of seeking to get- take Ludwig's money, because I don't think he has quite as much as he pretends he had at this point, and he really wanted Ludwig's money, he moves to the United States in order to get access to it. From the book Finding the Walls of Troy by Susan Allen, "On hearing of his brother's death in California, Schliemann traveled to the United States in order to recoup some of the fortune Louis Schliemann had made as a San Francisco innkeeper during the gold

• 56:47Robert Evans?

  rush. He arrived in 1851, just three years after the gold was discovered, when the state's population was rising from 14,000 to 250,000. Within months of his arrival, Schliemann had set up a bank where he bought gold dust and sold it to an agent of a London firm. In five and a half months, he had sold $1.35 million in gold dust, with a profit, according to today's values, of roughly £162,000, or about $243,000. When the Rothschild agent in San Francisco threatened to break off relations with Schliemann because of consistently short wait consignments, Schliemann sold the bank and, feigning fever, left in a hurry. He returned to St. Petersburg and quickly married a Catarina Leishen in 1852." And so

• 57:29Robert Evans?

  basically, he moves to the US to get his brother's money. He starts a bank, he starts moving gold dust, and he's shorting everybody. He's not sending as much, and he's fucking with the measurements. He's scamming them. And he has to flee the country to run back to Russia, because he gets in trouble for doing it. And that's fun, right? We love a good little codman, you know? He's- and that's the thing about Heinrich. He's usually in legal businesses, but he always cheats. Whenever he can cheat to get ahead, he's going to do that, and then he's just gonna run like fuck when he gets caught. In short, he's an American, right? He's in- he's one of the first Americans. Even though he's back in Europe, he's not gonna be a citizen for years more at this point. This man is

• 58:09Robert Evans?

  always an American in his heart, right? He never found a grift he didn't love. So he winds up back in Russia, right, as the Crimean War starts. And he decides, you know what I'm good at? Being a war profiteer. Might as well be a war profiteer again. Susan Allen writes that he capitalized on shortages during the British blockade of Russian ports and invested all his cash in a risky venture whereby supplies would be offloaded in Prussia and transported overland to St. Petersburg. When it paid off, he repeatedly turned over his money and doubled his investment in a year. So he takes the fortune he already has, and he doubles it by cashing in on the Crimean War, right? That people are starving, there's not enough stuff, and he invested in this overland. Yeah, he's a good- he's

• 58:49Robert Evans?

  a war profiteer, you know? By the war's end, he is a very wealthy man, probably by mo- the modern equivalent of like a decamillionaire, maybe even more, right? Maybe- maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in modern money.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  He's just hitting all the grifts.

• 59:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Well-

• 59:04Robert Evans?

  He's hitting all the grifts. He's- he's knocking them every- he does everything but genocide, really, in his time.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  You know, and- and we appreciate that.

• 59:12Robert Evans?

  And we appreciate, like, leaving the genocide off the list, yeah. He's rich enough, I don't think he's quite 30, that he seriously considers retiring. Or, I think he would have been around 30. He seriously considers retiring, right? But during one of his business trips, he'd visited the British Museum and been enthralled by a scale model of the Temple of Ramses II. And this seems to be what either ignited or reignited the fascination with Troy that he'd had as a kid. We know he writes his father in March of 1856, that he'd planned to visit the land of beloved Homer, aka Greece, and began to study for such a trip, learning ancient Greek and Latin, and starting a book club for other nerds. Travel is a very serious thing in the mid-1800s. Again, you might

• 59:54Robert Evans?

  die anytime you go more than like five minutes from home. So, you gotta be really- if you're gonna travel, you're gonna learn the local languages and do all of this work, right? It's- he puts a lot of effort into his trips. You gotta give him that. And he keeps this up for years, writing constantly of his ambition to visit Greece "for purposes involved with my beloved sciences." And he- by this point, by the late 1850s, it seems fair to say that he planned to visit Greece, and he had maybe some ambitions to try and, like, find ruins of the stories that he'd read about there. Whether he's not talking about excavating Troy at this point, but he's talking around the subject. His first trip to Greece isn't until the end of 1858, and he has to return early because a former business partner sues

• 1:00:37Robert Evans?

  him in London? I think it- but it didn't say Petersburg. But this is why he has to go back home, because he scammed somebody again, right? Although he does win his case, but I don't think that means he was probably in the right, just knowing Heinrich.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Sure. He probably paid off the judge or some- some kind of-

• 1:00:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he probably bribed the judge. Yeah. And then he starts work. He was, he was planning to retire, but he goes back to work right after this court case ends because the Civil War, the US Civil War starts in 1860. And you bet your ass Heinrich war profiteer Schliemann is gonna profiteer the shit out of the US Civil War. So he heads to the United States and he makes a bunch of money speculating in cotton, indigo, and other commodities. In 1864, as the war is winding down, he retires again and departs this time for finally, he's gonna have his world tour. He's gonna be traveling for like a year or two, and he's gonna visit every place in like the classical European imagination. He starts in Carthage and he goes all throughout,

• 1:01:35Robert Evans?

  you know, the Mediterranean basin and, and eventually on to Japan and through China. Like, he goes all over the fucking world. Uh, he spends 50 days crossing the Pacific to get to the Americas. And in his letters home, Schliemann would write about his newfound appreciation for the importance of preserving ancient ruins and monuments. As he sees all of these ancient monuments in different countries, he's like, I've been, I've been taken with the importance of preserving our shared cultural heritage. And as he writes about that, he also writes about breaking off and stealing a piece of the Great Wall of China.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Dude.

• 1:02:07Robert Evans?

  So, not super consistent. Um, biographer Susan Allen tries to explain this by calling it hypocritical disrespect for governments that did not concern themselves with the preservation of monuments, right? That, well, the Chinese aren't taking good enough care of their Great Wall, so I need to bring a piece of it home with me to keep it safe, right? Um, in January of 1866, Heinrich has returned home to his wife and multiple children in St. Petersburg, but he doesn't really like doing that. And as Susan Allen writes, quote, "Schliemann again abandoned his family to go visit the British Museum like weeks after he returns." He's like, but you know what? I don't really wanna raise my kids. Caterina,

• 1:02:49Robert Evans?

  you've got that, right? You, you can handle the having a family thing? Alright, I'm gonna head to the museum for like six months.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  I'm shocked that Mr. Griff guy is in the good wife guy.

• 1:02:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, another Trump parallel. He has kids at this point. Yeah, another Trump guy. He barely know, his children only know him through his letters, pretty much. Um, so he, he spends weeks at the British Museum and then he, he goes to France to study literature for a month at the Sorbonne. Um, his family is based in St. Petersburg this whole time, and he just does not want to be anywhere near them. In his letters home, he makes a couple half-hearted attempts to convince his wife to like, move, why don't you come to Paris? And he actually threatens to divorce her twice because she won't. What he never does at any point is make spending time with his family a priority. And his son only comes to know him through his letters, which are mostly about his passion for antiquities. He's like writing letters that are basically

• 1:03:39Robert Evans?

  like, I love antiquities so much more than raising my own kids. Yeah. Later in 1868, he visits Italy. And as a tourist, he gets to watch his first archaeological dig. This is in Pompeii and it's being held by a different Giuseppe, uh, who was an actual trailblazing archaeologist from finding the walls of Troy. At Pompeii, with its marvelous preservation, urban city plan, and, uh, relation to the coastline, he was awakened to the possibilities of archaeology. On the 16th of June, he recorded Fiorelli's innovative method of reclaiming the incinerated bodies of Pompeians. Schliemann was impressed by Fiorelli's use of a railway to dispose of unwanted debris and by the sheer history of archaeological exploration there. Yet the impatient Schliemann could not stomach

• 1:04:22Robert Evans?

  the amount of time, two weeks, that Fiorelli took to clear Wannhouse. And that's fast in archaeology terms today. So he like, he loves the look of all this, but he's like, but all this time, what if there was a way to excavate ancient ruins really fucking fast, right? And he's gonna keep thinking along these lines. And we'll talk about where that leads him and what it leads him to destroy in part two, which is gonna involve the destruction of the ruins of the city of Troy. But that's all we've got for today. Kristen, how are you feeling?

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Uh, I feel like I, I don't know if I never wanna watch Indiana Jones again or watch it right after this recording.

• 1:05:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Robert Evans?

  I can, I can imagine like Indiana Jones being the stories a guy like Giuseppe tells to explain like why he just has the artifact and no notes about where it came from. And the place he got it from is destroyed. Yeah, these Nazis. Oh, man. They were, they were so bad. I had to just grab that big golden crate and run with it, you know? It killed them all. Don't open it. Don't look inside too close. Just give me the money.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  And then with this guy, he would have added like, and by the way, women loved me. Oh.

• 1:05:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, with Heinrich, yeah.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  It crushes.

• 1:05:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm back with the girlies.

• 1:05:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So that's, uh, that's what we got for part one. You got any pluggables to plug, Kristen Conger, before we head out?

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  I do. Uh, you can listen to my podcasts on Ladylike, which is about women, culture, politics. Um, and if you are more interested in more kind of women behind the bastards, honestly, uh, listen to Conspiracy, she wrote, which is all about

• 1:06:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  women's roles in, uh, conspiracism and disinformation and, um, you know, just spreading a lot of fascist bullshit.

• 1:06:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Sounds great. We'll check all that out and check us out Thursday when we're back with more of Heinrich Schliemann's bullshit.

• 1:06:22Speaker 07

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 1:07:15Speaker 04

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 1:07:20Speaker 03

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

• 1:07:38Speaker 05

  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But soon they'll find it.

• 1:07:48Speaker 06

  He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly.

• 1:07:53Speaker 07

  They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff. And they said, maybe she'll find out where this girl is. I saw him, violent. Backhand there, pow!

• 1:08:04Speaker 06

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why have so many crop circles appeared around Britain? How did thousands of people demonstrate powers of telepathy? Can the dead suck the life from the living? Join me, Tim Harford, for a trip into the paranormal throughout Halloween month on Cautionary Tales. Listen to Cautionary Tales on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:08:49Speaker 05

  In February of 2024, celebrated illiterate and children's book author Petra Mathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Dear honeys, this is goodbye. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  You broke me. You do not deserve happiness. I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life, until the messages started. Someone's not gonna make it out of this alive. Every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal, Season Six, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.