Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Mycenae

Heinrich Schliemann excavated at Mycenae in 1876. He excavated several graves finding many golden funerary gifts. He was convinced that the graves, and the bodies he found within them, were those of Agamemnon, Cassandra, Eurymedon, Clymestra, and Aegisthus but this is debatable. 

Archaeologists have disputed his beliefs ever since. However, there is no doubt is that Heinrich found undeniably ancient and wonderful things. Understanding Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Mycenae, and the still raging controversy about them among archaeologists, is impossible without understanding a little about the man.

Schliemann's Mycenaean Mummy

Did you know that Heinrich Schliemann found a mummy at Mycenae in Shaft Grave V?  Neither did I.  But I saw a link to an article by Sinclair Hood over on the Facebook group Skeletons in the Closet today.  Hood writes about Schliemann's albums, which are currently held at the National Library of Scotland, who acquired them from the Knossos Trust.

Figure 6 in the article is an oil painting of a so-called mummy from Shaft Grave V.  Hood writes that (pp. 74-76):

Schliemann gives a long and highly dramatized account of the uncovering of this burial. ‘The round face, with all its flesh, had been wonderfully preserved under its ponderous golden mask; there was no vestige of hair, but both eyes were perfectly visible, also the mouth, which, owing to the enormous weight that had pressed upon it, was wide open, and showed thirty-two beautiful teeth. From these, all the physicians who came to see the body were led to believe that the man must have died at the early age of thirty-five. The nose was entirely gone’ (Schliemann 1878, 296).