3 Heinrich Schliemann Books
/Heinrich Schliemann was a pioneer in the field of archaeology focusing primarily on pre-Hellenistic archaeology. His techniques were often destructive by today’s standards but that is often the case with pioneers in the field. He did publish his finds and I browsed through 3 of them back in May - all freely available. I’ve selected a few images from each of the books.
The Book of the Mycenae (1877)
Is that the back part of a crane on the right side of the pot? The three disks give me ideas for Zentangle tiles. Two of them are clearly nature based – an octopus and a bee.
Ilios : the city and country of the Trojans (1880)
The simplicity of the gold bracelets…I wondered if people wore them all the time once they put them on or if they were items were only worn intermittently. The decoration on the whorls – another source of Zentangle patterns. It’s appealing when a culture has the practice to make ordinary objects into art.
Tiryns; the Prehistoric Palace of the Kings of Tiryns, the results of the Latest Excavations (1886)
(Use the arrows to move through the three sample images to take a closer look). This is the only book of the three that has color images…using it effectively to depict the fragments of wall painting with the whole pattern derived from the fragments. The fragments of vases were complete enough to have meaning on their own. The terracotta idols appeared to be mostly women!
I posted about Sir Arthur Evans a few weeks ago. He was another pioneering archaeologist with some overlap with Schliemann; Evans took over the excavation of Knossos after Schliemann’s plan to do so ended with his death.
