Schliemann, Paul

Paul Schliemann was the self-declared grandson of Heinrich Schliemann the discoverer of Troy. He was at the centre of an early Atlantis hoax in 1912 when he declared in a New York newspaper article that he had inherited, from his grandfather, artefacts made in Atlantis. He claimed to have ancient documents describing the destruction of Mu and insisted that the Azores were a remnant of Atlantis and that Troy had been a colony of Atlantis. For good measure, he informed the world that the Atlanteans fully understood electricity and had aircraft and power-driven ships. All of which reminds me of some of the later claims of Edgar Cayce!

Additionally, he claimed to have solved the Atlantis mystery after studying the Mayan Troano Codex in the British Museum. Unfortunately, the Troano Codex was housed in a museum in Madrid where it still resides. A further mistake by Paul was to claim that his grandfather referred to the Lion Gate at Mycenae on Crete, when in fact it was situated on mainland Greece.  These errors were compounded by his reference to Atlantean coins which is completely anachronistic as coinage only came into use in Lydia around the time of Solon.

Heinrich Schliemann’s collaborator, William Dörpfeld, testified that although Schliemann had occasionally referred to Atlantis, he was unaware that he had made any serious study of the subject or had written anything about it.

Furthermore, Heinrich actively sought publicity and it would have been completely out of character for him not to have claimed the glory for himself of having discovered Atlantis.

Despite all this, the story was widely quoted and is still accepted as reliable by some writers. The full story is now available on the Internet^(a).

I recently discovered an article^(b) in The Mail of Adelaide in South Australia of February 28^th 1925, which in turn was quoting an unnamed San Francisco source, purporting to be based on an interview with Paul Schliemann, ‘son’ of the late Heinrich promoting a forthcoming book on his search for Atlantis. This was a clear attempt to extend the 1912 hoax, but was not spotted by The Mail, considering the amount of space that they allocated to the article as well as the accompanying images.

Egerton Sykes wrote an extensive article about Paul Schliemann’s claims, adding further questions that needed to be answered^(c). In 1966, Sykes wrote that Paul had died during World War I, and that his widow later married Panagis Tsaldaris, who became Prime Minister of Greece^(d) (This is doubtful – TO’C). Nevertheless, as late as 1974, Sykes was still  accepting Schliemann’s 1912 claims as credible^(e).

Less than a decade later Marjorie Braymer devoted a short chapter of her book Atlantis: The Biography of a Legend ^[198.72] to a more critical review of the Paul Schliemann episode, concluding with “The whole story had struck the more reflective Atlantologists as being much too good to be true. The fact is that Heinrich Schliemann did not have a grandson named Paul” and the artefacts never materialised!

>>In 2001, Atlantis: Beyond the Pillars of Hercules, a novel based on the claims of Paul Schliemann, was published by Cy Wenberg. This is not to be confused with the non-fiction book with the same name ^[1954] written by Peter Heller. Other authors have used the same title without the ‘Atlantis’ prefix. The most important of which ^[221] was by Rhys Carpenter a former Professor of Archaeology.<<

Also see: Chevalier Pino

^(a) https://www.sacred-texts.com/atl/hif/index.htm

^(b) https://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/page/5286895?zoomLevel=1&searchTerm=Atlantis discovered&searchLimits=sortby=dateAsc

^(c) Atlantis, Vol.4, No.5, January 1952 & Atlantis, Vol.11, No.2, January 1958

^(d) Atlantis, Vol.19, No.4, July/August, 1966

^(e) Atlantis, Vol.27, No.4, July/August, 1974