Heinrich Schliemann, a German traveller, born at Kalkhorst, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, in 1822. His father was poor, and placed him at the age of 14 in a grocer's store in Fürstenberg, where he remained for more than five years. He then obtained employment in a mercantile house in Amsterdam, and devoted his leisure hours to the acquisition of languages, learning very rapidly, as he relates, to speak and write English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, in addition to Latin, which he had learned in his childhood. His learning Russian was the foundation of his fortune. In the beginning of 1846 he was sent as an agent to St. Petersburg, where he established a business of his own, which within a few years brought him considerable wealth. In 1854 he mastered Swedish and Polish; and in 1856 he learned modern Greek, with the help of two Greek friends, in six weeks, and three months more sufficed him to learn enough of classical Greek to understand the ancient writers. He now devoted two years exclusively to the classics, reading the Iliad and Odyssey several times.

In 1858-9 he travelled in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Egypt, and Syria, and learned Arabic. In 1863 he retired from business with the intention of exploring the Troad, but in 1864 he was induced to make a journey around the world, which occupied two years. He then settled in Paris, where he published in 1869 Ithaque, le Péloponnèse et Troie (German ed., Leipsic, 1869), giving an account of his travels in 1868 in Corfu, Cephalonia, Ithaca (where he supposed he had discovered genuine remains of the home of Ulysses, as seen by Homer), the Peloponnesus, and the plain of Troy, the result of studies of the so-called Cyclopean works of Argolis, and an examination of the topography of the Iliad. In the beginning of 1870 he returned to the Troad, accompanied by his wife, a Greek lady, and spent the seasons of 1871-'3 in excavating the plateau of Hissarlik, which he considers to have been the site of Troy. (See Troy.) His book, Trojanische Alterthümer (1874), a sort of diary of the progress of the excavations, has been translated into several languages; the English version, edited by Dr. Philip Smith (London, 1875), gives a selection of illustrations drawn from the large Atlas Trojanischer Alterthümer, consisting of 218 photographs of his discoveries, with explanatory text, which Schliemann published soon after.

He produced much irritation at Constantinople by failing to send, as promised, half of the objects he discovered at Hissarlik to the imperial Ottoman museum. In 1874 he obtained from the Greek government permission to demolish at his own expense the Venetian tower in the acropolis of Athens, which covers about 1,600 sq. ft. of the Propylaea. But the permission was cancelled, probably on account of his pending suit with the Turkish government, and Schliemann thereupon induced the archaeological society of Athens to carry on the excavations for him.