Part One: Heinrich Schliemann: The Archaeologist Who Destroyed Troy

Behind the Bastards

This episode introduces listeners to Giuseppe Ferlini, a 19th-century Italian doctor-turned-treasure hunter who systematically destroyed Meroitic pyramids in Sudan to loot gold and

Key takeaways

Giuseppe Ferlini hired hundreds of workers in 1834 to ransack Queen Amanishaketo's pyramid, likely using gunpowder to blow off the top and loot a massive cache of gold and jewelry.
Ferlini fabricated a story about discovering a hidden burial chamber at the pyramid's peak to justify the destruction, leading other treasure hunters to destroy nearly all remaining Meroitic pyramids in Sudan.

Main topics

Destructive treasure hunting in Sudan
Heinrich Schliemann's early life and business grifts

Notable quotes

He's usually in legal businesses, but he always cheats. Whenever he can cheat to get ahead, he's going to do that. And then he's just going to run like fuck when he gets caught.

Conclusion

The episode highlights how personal greed and ego have historically corrupted archaeological discovery,

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:01) Call zone media. Speaker 2 (0:05) Welcome back, everybody, to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And we've all had a heavy year, both in the real world and in terms of subjects on this podcast. We got the year started with, God, a lot of child abuse, way more than I tend to stack at the start of a year in a normal content schedule. And then the last few weeks have been genocide after genocide. I mean, I guess just two, but that's a lot of genocides. So I figured, Let's have something fun this week. So we're going to talk about a piece of shit, but we're going to have a good time doing it. This is not going to be like heartbreakingly depressing, except for at a couple of points, but not in the mass murder way, just in the, oh, wow, that's a bummer kind of way. Anyway, I've teased the episodes enough. Let me tease our guest, Kristen Conger, host of Unladylike and Conspiracy. She wrote, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming. How are Speaker 3 (1:00) you Speaker 2 (1:00) doing? Speaker 3 (1:01) I'm so thrilled to be here. I'm great. I, you know, I was emotionally prepared to be, you know, just pummeled, but I'm glad to hear we're going to be, we're Speaker 2 (1:11) going Speaker 3 (1:11) to be having some laughs. Speaker 2 (1:14) We're going to talk about two old timey archaeologists who sucked and like destroyed a shitload of historical artifacts by being like greedy idiots, but are like funny. Like it's old timey guys, 1800s Europeans rampaging around like historical sites. It's going to be a good time. You know, no, no kids are going to get mass murdered. I mean, some workers die of malaria, but when isn't that happening? Right? Yeah. No one's to blame for malaria other than mosquitoes. Speaker 5 (1:42) Is the theme of this episode Men Stupid? We laugh at them? Speaker 2 (1:45) No, I mean, our episodes are mostly about one specific guy, Heinrich Schliemann, who destroyed Troy. Like the ruins of Troy he accidentally destroyed as he was trying to find them. But we're also going to talk about an Italian guy who destroyed some other stuff as like a little bit of an amuse-bouche. So I've got a fun one for you, Kristen. Do you got anything else you want to plug or say about yourself before we go in? Speaker 3 (2:07) No, I love to laugh at absurd archaeologists. This sounds fantastic. Speaker 2 (2:16) Yeah. Yeah, Speaker 3 (2:17) I think I'm ready. Speaker 2 (2:18) This will be heartbreaking for the archaeologists in the audience, but I think everyone else will have a good time. Speaker 1 (2:27) This is an iHeart Podcast. Speaker 1 (2:30) Guaranteed human. In 1986, a man named Scott Macklem was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect. Prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm reexamining this case. Speaker 1 (2:53) Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Speaker 1 (2:59) Listen to Examined, The Backfire Effect, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 8 (3:10) I believe that whoever was in that room and did that was a murderer. A new podcast series, Fault Line Haditha, tells the story of a shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. If you've got five players and you offer immunity to four, you better be right about the fifth. Because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your killer. Listen to Fault Line Haditha on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 8 (3:40) On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard. And we pull apart the story behind the image, discovering forgotten interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I'm Emmanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (4:10) In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Petra Mathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Speaker 8 (4:21) Dear honeys, this is goodbye. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Speaker 7 (4:30) Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (4:41) Detectives said he had stalked her before she died. Years later, they said he remained the person they continued to focus on. This is Hunter Gilmore, host of Hunting for Answers, a true crime podcast, shedding light on the silent epidemic of missing and murdered Black women and girls, bringing attention to stories that equally deserve to be told and to the questions that still remain. Listen to Hunting for Answers, a true crime podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or... wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (5:16) So, archaeology has not existed quite as long as civilization, but as soon as we've had, like, civilization long enough for any of them to fall into ruin, there were people that we could rightly call precursors to modern archaeologists and historians. The best evidence for this is the fact that in ancient Egypt, there were ancient Egyptian museums and Egyptologists who studied ancient Egypt because Egypt is that old. But like 3,000 years ago, there's guys in Egypt who are studying ancient Egypt because it just keeps going back, Speaker 3 (5:47) right? Got some ancient Egyptian docents. Speaker 2 (5:50) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like the first docents would have been ancient Egyptians puzzling over artifacts from ancient Egyptians being like, how the fuck did they do that? They couldn't have built these ziggurats on their own. It must have been aliens. I don't think they were as stupid as we are, actually. The most famous of these guys is probably Chaim Vizit, who was the fourth son of Pharaoh Ramses II. And he devoted a great deal of energy and public funding to restoring ancient monuments. And there's quite a lot we only know about ancient Egypt because Chaim Vizit was interested in it and preserved it, right? Stuff that would have happened centuries or even a thousand years or something like that before his time. So that's pretty cool, I think. Modern archaeology, though, dates back to about the Renaissance, right? That's kind of when Western people started really thinking about like, oh, there's like a lot of old shit around us. Maybe we shouldn't just steal everything from it to build houses. Perhaps some of this should be preserved. You know, maybe we have enough stone that we can leave the Parthenon intact or whatever. And there's this kind of European revival of interest in classic antiquity, particularly ancient Rome. Michelangelo, the artist, not the Ninja Turtle, observed excavations of old Roman ruins, and so did a number of other notable men from that period of time. The ruins of Pompeii were discovered by the architect Domenico Fontana at the end of the 16th century, and Herculaneum followed it around 1709, and there were organized excavations in like the mid-1700s for both cities. So they were digging up before the U.S. declared its independence. They were digging up Pompeii, right? That's about how old, like, something we recognize as modern archaeology kind of goes back. Speaker 3 (7:28) That is wild. That's not when I thought the modern period would begin. Yeah, that's way, way earlier Speaker 2 (7:34) than I assumed. And that's important. When we're talking about the vandals that we're going to be talking about, some people are like, well, everyone was that way back then. Nobody thought about preserving stuff. And no. There were guys who were like, you got to be really careful. You don't want to just dig through and tear up a bunch of shit. You have to take careful notes about like where everything was. People had already figured that out by the time the 1700s, you know, were well underway. And that's kind of the era. We wind up back here a lot because the era of a lot of bastards, but the time of gentlemen scientists and adventurers, when it was like, if you're born with enough money that you don't have to work, then you're a scientist or an adventurer if you want to. Right. And some of those guys did great things and some of them became Francis Galton and invented racism. So, you know, it's it's it's a real mixed bag. But it becomes really hip in the mid to late 1700s to like dig up old things, particularly ancient Egypt, again, comes into vogue. And through the 1800s, the Victorian era too, like ancient Egypt is like cool and sexy. So if you're like a rich person from like a prominent family, you might get into archaeology, you know, either doing it yourself or funding digs, both to get access to some sweet artifacts to show off. And just because it's like... the cool thing to be seen doing, supporting archaeology. And this could get, this was not always, there were people who were careful curators of the past, and there were people who were just tearing through shit to get as many mummies as they could, right? I mean, people were like grinding up mummies to take as medicine. So not everybody was nice about it, right? Yeah, yeah. A lot of mummies wind up in people's stomachs. I Speaker 5 (9:13) don't like that. I don't like that. That made me queasy. Speaker 3 (9:17) I don't like that. I Speaker 2 (9:18) would eat mummy. You guys wouldn't eat a mummy? I Speaker 3 (9:21) think RFK has recommended mummy pills. Yeah. Every Speaker 2 (9:25) American needs at least four ounces of mummy per day. It's Speaker 3 (9:28) a new flu vaccine, actually. Speaker 2 (9:31) We could try it. I mean, if it was a smallpox mummy, it might work. That's probably not medically true, but it could be. So anyway, into this kind of world of both. Careful excavation and frenzied, possessive speculation and fascination with the past. In 1797, a man is born named Giuseppe Ferlini in Bologna, which is at the time. I mean, today it's part of Italy, right? At the time, Italy is like a peninsula, but it's not a country. There's a bunch of city states who are always like up in each other's business. But it's not like anything. like the modern nation today. And Giuseppe isn't, again, our main bastard for these episodes because there's just not enough about him on his own. But I love this old bastard too much to not tell you about how he, the destruction he wrought on ancient Egyptian artifacts. Speaker 5 (10:20) And frankly, you weren't going to pass up an Italian. Speaker 2 (10:24) Not a Giuseppe. Not a Giuseppe. No. I can't, like, I have to do this as I say Giuseppe, right? It's just like happening off screen, you know, if you can't see it. So we don't know much about his early life. Born in 1797, right? He had a stepmother and the relationship was so bad it forced him to flee home as a young man. Every source about him says that and that it was intolerable. The situation couldn't continue. Giuseppe, no! Giuseppe, no! Come home! I don't think she wanted him home. He would have been around 18 years old at most when he leaves. And he probably studies medicine. He becomes a doctor later. So he says he studies medicine during this period. It's the early 1800s. So who knows, right? Like, you're not having to pass an exam to get into medical school. Sometimes you can become a doctor just by like convincing another doctor to let you follow him around. Sometimes you just start cutting off limbs and saying, yeah, I'm a doctor, right? We don't really know which kind Giuseppe is. It's more or less impossible. But he spends some years traveling around, looking for work. He goes to Venice. He goes to Corfu. And at some point, probably while he's in his early 20s, he starts calling himself a doctor. And nobody really is asking questions at this time. So he gets to work as a doctor. Speaker 2 (11:42) By 1817, aged 20, he's in Albania doing God knows what. Now, the country was occupied by the Ottoman Empire at that point. And Albanians were none too happy about that state of affairs. So a rebellion is launched and then a rebel army is formed. And the nice thing about a rebel army, they do not ask for your CV. If there's like, hey, we need doctors for this army. And you just show up and say, yeah, that's me, Giuseppe. Hey. Like you can you can just become the army doctor. Suddenly you have thousands of lives potentially in your hands. Wow. And that's that's what happens. That's how Giuseppe gets his job. Unfortunately, the rebellions don't work very well. It's like a big Greek kind of pan Greek Balkan series of rebellions against the Ottomans. And it doesn't work. But Giuseppe gets a few years of being paid to probably he's mostly just sawing off limbs. Right. Like that's a lot of military doctoring is like, oh, you got. shot i'm just gonna cut off whatever got hit like um which i mean i feel like i could have been a doctor back then i still feel like i could be that kind of doctor i'm pretty good with it i'm good at sawing off stuff soapy it's not that hard i've Speaker 3 (12:51) seen you cut meat i've deboned a chicken uh i think i'm qualified yeah people Speaker 2 (12:56) are a lot like chickens you know biologically i'd let Speaker 5 (12:59) kristen be a doctor robert Speaker 2 (13:01) yeah You know what? We need two or three people who need limbs chopped off. And whoever goes fastest, that gets to be the doctor. I Speaker 5 (13:09) once saw you eat, back to back, one, the largest fish I've ever seen. Speaker 2 (13:15) Yeah. Speaker 5 (13:15) And then the next day, a tomahawk steak. You cannot be my doctor. You're not chopping me, Speaker 2 (13:21) buddy. So I've got it right here. That'll remove a gunshot limb easy. Oh, sure. Yeah. It's a medical cleaver. Speaker 3 (13:31) You don't even have to sanitize it. Speaker 2 (13:33) Yeah, no. They didn't know about sanitizing back then. Speaker 3 (13:36) That Speaker 2 (13:37) fish was the size Speaker 5 (13:38) of, like, my... That fish was giant. It was delicious. It was great. It was Speaker 2 (13:44) a great fish. So the war does not go well for Giuseppe and his Greek rebels. And he decides to piece the fuck out of Greece and head to Egypt because he wants to get rich. And he knows that there's a lot of gold buried all over Egypt. People are stealing artifacts from ancient Egyptian sites and selling them at this point in time. And he wants to do that. So the new sultan, like the way he's the kind of job that initially gets in there is the sultan that he had just been fighting against is modernizing the Ottoman army and wants European doctors for his military. And Giuseppe's like, close enough, you know, like, that's basically a me. And yeah, he winds up working for the guys he'd just been fighting. As Kashuk Padaweri writes, quote, in 1829, the Italian landed in Alexandria and had once headed for Cairo. One of the things the governor wanted to improve was the army, and that included a more efficient military health care. So Ferlini enlisted as an assistant, and the following year he was already the head doctor of an infantry battalion. As such, he accompanied the 1st Regiment on its march to Sinar, the capital of the Sultanate of the same name, where the corps had been assigned. Sinar was located in southeastern Sudan, on the banks of the Blue Nile, as Mehmet Ali's campaigns extended the borders to Ethiopia. And so he spends more than five months doing this. He visits Khartoum. He visits Wadi Halfa. And he sees a bunch of different archaeological sites, right? There's all of these ruins of ancient civilizations he's in. Like Khartoum isn't in ancient Egypt today, but at the time, it's part of, I think, Sudan today. And I always has been, but it was like a polity within the Egyptian like sphere of influence for a long time. And then obviously during the Ottoman era, it's part of the Ottoman Empire. But there's all these ruins there and he keeps seeing them and it just keeps kind of like tweaking this part of his brain. That's like there's a lot of money buried in the sand here that someone I should just be able to take it from these people who who currently own it and bring it back to Europe to get rich. Speaker 2 (15:41) Giuseppe has what's referred to as a dark period in Pachauri's article. He marries an Ethiopian slave. I don't Speaker 1 (15:49) know Speaker 2 (15:49) if we'd really call that a marriage. They have a child together and then the child dies. He has a malaria epidemic that he has to treat while helping to run a hospital in just a horrible situation. And by the time of this period, number one, he is done doing medical stuff. He has helped... lead a hospital through a malaria epidemic, which I imagine is just mostly burying corpses and waiting to die yourself. Like it's just has to have been a hellish nightmare. So at the end of this, he's achieved some level of clout with the governor. And he's also like, I'm fucking done doing this doctor shit. And so he convinces the governor to go with him and on an expedition through Nubia to try to find gold, right? This, this. This guy in office, he's like, hey, there's got to be gold in some of these ruins. Let's go fucking look for it. And they don't find any, right? I started this episode by making a point about the absolute antiquity of ancient Egypt. And that means that generations of treasure hunters had been combing through this stuff for thousands of years before Giuseppe and this governor start looking for it, right? So they don't, there's not a whole lot that they're, that's just, it's not easy to find good stuff, even in like the early 1800s. Now, obviously, we know that there are still great finds to be made. King Tut's tomb is still buried at this point in time. But a dilettante like Giuseppe with no relevant skill isn't searching for anything like that. He wants the low hanging fruit. And he starts hearing rumors about a smaller set of pyramids, right, located in a different part of like this. Not like in Egypt proper, but in a place called Moro. It's part of the Morotic Kingdom, which is an ancient kingdom. It's one of the latter kind of Egyptian successor civilizations. It's located to the south of Ptolemaic Egypt. And the pyramids of Moro were mostly built from around 300 BC to 350 AD. These are very recent pyramids, right? Moreau outlasted Rome's invasion and conquest of Egypt and remained independent for quite some time after that. The Merodic kingdom was ultimately brought down by Ethiopian invaders, and that whole mess gave us the Coptic language, which is a part of why we were able to translate the Rosetta Stone. But... So you've got like 100 or so of these little pyramids. They're like the biggest ones are maybe 90 to 100 feet tall. So they're not the size of the ones outside of Cairo. But there's a bunch of them and they haven't been picked over quite as much as the sexier pyramids.