# Priam's Treasure > Unknown Early Bronze Age Anatolian goldsmiths (Troy II) - c. 2550-2250 BC (Early Bronze Age, Troy II period) > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/troy-ii-goldsmiths/priam-treasure-pushkin/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-15 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unknown Early Bronze Age Anatolian goldsmiths (Troy II) - **Date:** c. 2550-2250 BC (Early Bronze Age, Troy II period) - **Medium:** Gold, electrum, silver, copper or bronze and polished stone; a mixed hoard of jewelry, vessels, weapons and tools rather than a single medium - **Dimensions:** Not a single object. Schliemann's own itemised list totals roughly 8,750 small gold rings, buttons and beads plus several dozen larger gold, silver, electrum, copper and stone pieces (see Technical). A commonly repeated figure of about 259-260 catalogued items describes the whole Schliemann Trojan collection held at the Pushkin across several separate find-groups excavated between 1871 and 1890, not Treasure A alone; this record is about Treasure A specifically and the two counts should not be conflated. - **Object type:** Antiquity - **Period:** Early Bronze Age Anatolia (Troy II); excavated in 1873 in the Ottoman Empire, on the site of Hisarlik in what is now Turkey - **Current location:** Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia, permanent exhibition (Room 7 / the Schliemann collection) - **Attribution:** unknown ## Summary In 1873 Heinrich Schliemann announced he had found the treasure of Homer's King Priam in a trench at Hisarlik, the mound in northwest Turkey he was excavating as the site of Troy. He smuggled the hoard out of Ottoman territory in violation of his own excavation permit, was sued by the Ottoman government, and eventually gave the treasure to Berlin in 1881. The Red Army seized it from a Berlin bunker in 1945; the Soviet Union then denied for almost fifty years that it still existed. It resurfaced at Moscow's Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in 1993-1994 and has been on public display there since 1996.Archaeology has since corrected Schliemann on nearly everything except the discovery itself. The hoard is now dated to the Early Bronze Age, roughly a thousand years before any Troy a historical Priam could have ruled, and Schliemann's own account of how he found it, including the well-known story of his wife Sophia smuggling the gold out in her shawl, is documented to be substantially invented. What remains real is the object: two great gold diadems, a gold sauceboat, a gold bottle, earrings, bracelets and a set of ceremonial stone axes, still called Priam's Treasure, still in Moscow, still claimed by Germany and Turkey, and still, by Russian federal law, not going anywhere.No sale has ever taken place. The dispute over this object is not a market dispute; it is a three-way argument between Germany, Turkey and Russia about who owns something none of them made and one of them stole. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 2550-2250 BC** Unknown inhabitants of the walled Early Bronze Age settlement of Troy II `[documented]` (manufacture and deposition) Established by stratigraphic excavation (Blegen, 1930s) and by radiocarbon-based chronology for the Troy II to Troy III transition, independent of Schliemann's own account. No individual owner or maker is named or nameable. - **2550-2250 BC-1873** Buried at Hisarlik, undisturbed `[documented]` (gap) The hoard's burial context and the roughly four-thousand-year interval before excavation are documented by the archaeological sequence; nothing is known of any activity at the findspot in the interim beyond the later Bronze and Iron Age, classical and Ottoman-era occupation and reoccupation of the Hisarlik mound generally. - **1873** Heinrich Schliemann `[documented]` (excavation) Excavated during Schliemann's third campaign at Hisarlik. The exact date is disputed (see Open questions) and David Traill has argued the find itself may be a composite of material recovered at different times; the fact of excavation by Schliemann's team in 1873 is not in dispute. - **1873** Heinrich Schliemann `[documented]` (removal from Ottoman territory) Moved out of the Troad by boat to Athens without going through the Ottoman customs and division process required by Schliemann's excavation permit. The permit entitled the Ottoman government to a share of finds; none of Treasure A was surrendered under it. - **1873-1875** Heinrich Schliemann, under Ottoman legal claim `[documented]` (lawsuit and settlement) The Ottoman government revoked Schliemann's excavation permit and sued him for its share of the find. Schliemann paid compensation, reported as an initial 10,000 French gold francs later settled at 50,000 francs, and retained the treasure; his permission to excavate at Hisarlik was later restored. - **1874** Offered to, and declined by, the Kingdom of Greece `[documented]` (declined gift) Schliemann offered the treasure to the Greek state, together with an offer to build and endow a museum for it in Athens at his own expense. The Greek Prime Minister and the Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Education told parliament in 1874 that Greece would not accept it. - **1881-1939** Royal Museums of Berlin (Museum fur Volkerkunde, later Museum fur Vor- und Fruhgeschichte) `[documented]` (gift and display) Schliemann donated the treasure to Germany in 1881 on condition it be kept in its entirety in Berlin. Displayed publicly for some sixty years until galleries closed with the approach of war. - **1939-1945** Museum fur Vor- und Fruhgeschichte, Berlin, in wartime storage `[documented]` (wartime concealment) Moved into a Reichsbank vault and then, by 1941, into an anti-aircraft flak tower at the Berlin Zoo for safekeeping under Director Wilhelm Unverzagt. - **1945** Soviet Committee for Arts Affairs / Red Army trophy brigade `[documented]` (seizure) Unverzagt surrendered himself and a full inventory to Soviet forces at the flak tower around 1 May 1945 rather than risk uncontrolled looting. Andrei Belokopytov's trophy brigade moved the crates to eastern Berlin; Igor Grabar's Bureau of Experts selected the collection for removal; a special flight carried it from Tempelhof to Vnukovo airport on 30 June 1945. - **1945-1993** Soviet state, undisclosed location (later confirmed as the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts) `[documented]` (concealment and denial) Placed in a restricted 'Special Collection' from 1949 with no right of publication or exhibition. Soviet authorities denied knowledge of the treasure's survival throughout the Cold War; the Pushkin Museum's holding of it was not publicly acknowledged until 1993. - **1993-present** Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow `[documented]` (public exhibition and disputed ownership) Researcher access from December 1994; first public exhibition opened 15 April 1996. Germany asserts restitution rights under a 1990 bilateral treaty on the return of displaced cultural property; Turkey asserts a claim as country of origin; Russia's 1998 federal law declares the material Russian state property and forecloses ordinary restitution claims. The dispute is unresolved and the object remains in Moscow. ## Open questions - What is the true discovery date? Schliemann's own papers and publications give 27 May, 31 May, 7 June and 15 June 1873 at different points, and no single account has been shown to be reliable on its own. - Is Treasure A a genuine single find at all, or an assembled composite? David Traill has argued in print that Schliemann combined a core group found on 31 May 1873 with other gold objects recovered earlier, and presented the whole as one dramatic discovery; this argument is not universally accepted. - What exactly remains in Berlin today, itemised piece by piece, as against what is shown only in replica? Sources agree Berlin holds 'the less glittering part' of the wider Schliemann Trojan collection but no source consulted for this record gives a complete modern inventory of the Berlin holdings. - Will Germany and Russia ever resolve the restitution dispute, and does either side's current political relationship make that more or less likely than it was in 1998? No announced negotiation was found as of this record's last verification. - How many individual pieces does Treasure A actually contain once every bead and ring is counted separately, and does that figure match Schliemann's original 1873 inventory piece for piece? Published totals vary depending on whether beads are counted individually or by strand. - What did the 50,000 gold franc Ottoman settlement actually mean in period terms, against a contemporary wage or a comparable object's price the same year? No source consulted for this record supplied a citable historical-wage comparison with a named method, so none is given here rather than an invented one. - Were any of the specific gold objects analysed in the 2022 Pernicka and Horejs laser-ablation study drawn from Treasure A itself, or exclusively from other Schliemann-era Trojan gold held in Athens? The published summaries consulted do not specify object by object which hoard each sample came from. ## Sources - [1] Wikipedia, 'Priam's Treasure'. Tertiary source consolidating the excavation account, the itemised inventory, the Ottoman lawsuit, the Berlin and Soviet custodial history and the 1998 Russian law; flagged for eventual replacement with the Pushkin Museum's own published catalogue. - [2] Wikipedia, 'Sophia Schliemann', for Sophia Engastromenos's actual whereabouts and brief presence at Hisarlik in 1873 and Schliemann's later admission that the shawl story was invented. - [3] Wikipedia, 'Heinrich Schliemann', for biographical dates, business career, the disputed 1851 citizenship and San Francisco fire claims, and the scholarly assessment of his excavation methods. - [4] Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, '150 Jahre Auffindung des "Schatzes des Priamos" in Troja durch Schliemann'. - [5] Noah Charney, 'Lost Art: Homer's Troy and Priam's Treasure', The Art Newspaper, 6 May 2018. - [6] Christian Science Monitor, 'Under Protest From Germany, Moscow Displays Ancient Gold Treasures', 17 April 1996. Source for the exhibition opening date, Irina Antonova's and Ambassador Ernst Jorg von Studnitz's quoted statements, and the 1990 bilateral treaty. - [7] Apollo Magazine, 'Haul of shame - the "trophy art" taken from Germany by the Red Army'. Source for the 1996 Turkish request for return and historian Frank Grelka's assessment, and the 1998 Yeltsin legislation. - [8] gw2ru.com, 'How the Gold of Troy became the USSR's war booty'. Source for Andrei Belokopytov's trophy brigade, Igor Grabar's Bureau of Experts, the Tempelhof-to-Vnukovo flight of 30 June 1945, and the 1949 Special Collection restriction. - [9] Smithsonian Magazine, 'The Many Myths of the Man Who Discovered - and Nearly Destroyed - Troy'. - [10] Deutschlandmuseum, 'The Treasure of Priam', calendar entry for 31 May 1873. - [11] David A. Traill, 'How Schliemann Smuggled "Priam's Treasure" from the Troad to Athens', Hesperia 57 (1988). - [12] David A. Traill, '"Priam's Treasure": Clearly a Composite', Anatolian Studies 50 (2000), pp. 17-35. - [13] David A. Traill, 'Schliemann's Discovery of "Priam's Treasure": Two Enigmas', Antiquity. - [14] Susan Heuck Allen, Finding the Walls of Troy: Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik (University of California Press, 1999), as reviewed in Bryn Mawr Classical Review. - [15] Rustem Aslan, lecture, 'The Turks and Troy: The "Treasure of Priam" according to Ottoman Documents', Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago. - [16] Gastroia: Journal of Gastronomy and Travel Research, 'Atina'da Ne Oldu? "Priamos Hazineleri" ve Osmanli Devleti'nin Tutumu' (Turkish-language study drawing on Basbakanlik Osmanli Arsivi records of the Ottoman lawsuit). - [17] Academia.edu (preprint), 'Troy III-V: new radiocarbon dates confirm a gap in Blegen's sequence', for the Troy II to Troy III radiocarbon transition date of approximately 2267 BC. - [18] Wikimedia Commons, File:Big golden diadem with pendants.jpg, photo by Szilas, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, inventory 10 and 13-14. - [19] Wikimedia Commons, File:Golden diadem with pendants.jpg, photo by Szilas, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, inventory 11-12 and 15-16. - [20] Wikimedia Commons, File:Golden sauceboat with two handles.jpg, photo by Szilas, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, inventory 5. - [21] GreekReporter, 'The Priceless Treasure of Troy Greece Refused to Accept'. General-audience journalism source for the 1874 Greek parliamentary refusal of Schliemann's offer; flagged for replacement with a primary Greek parliamentary record or the Schliemann archive correspondence. - [22] Christoph Bachhuber, 'The Treasure Deposits of Troy: Rethinking Crisis and Agency on the Early Bronze Age Citadel', Anatolian Studies 59 (2009), pp. 1-18. - [23] Eurasia Review, 'Gold From Troy, Poliochni And Ur All Had Same Origin' (5 December 2022), reporting the portable laser-ablation study by Ernst Pernicka (Curt-Engelhorn Center for Archaeometry, Mannheim and University of Tubingen) and Barbara Horejs (Austrian Archaeological Institute, Vienna). - [24] Universitatsbibliothek Heidelberg digital collections, catalogue entries for Heinrich Schliemann, Trojanische Alterthumer: Bericht uber die Ausgrabungen in Troja (Leipzig, 1874) and Atlas trojanischer Alterthumer: Photographische Berichte uber die Ausgrabungen in Troja (Leipzig, 1874), for publication details and the 217-plate atlas print run; full text not accessible at time of research due to a site access barrier, bibliographic facts taken from search-indexed catalogue metadata and flagged for direct verification. - [25] Hesperia 93.4 (2024), pp. 701-769, 'New Light on "Priam's Treasure"'. 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