Priam's Treasure

only to fall for an archaeologist who exposes the lies underpinning the Nazi regime.

Inspired by the true, little-known story of the curators who risked their lives to save Priam's treasure and the Aryan myth manufactured by Himmler's Arneneb Institute.

Beyond her own novels, Elizabeth is a driving force in Australian historical fiction.

She co-founded the Historical Novels Society Australasia and established the AORA Historical Novel Prize, the richest literary prize of its kind in Australia and New Zealand, and is a long-time contributor to the History Girls blog.

And so I use the history as a scaffold.

And then I, for example, in this World War II book, I found the story of these amazing German museum curators that protected their national treasure.

And I was able to access the diaries and correspondence of a curator called Wilhelm Unversart, who actually was protecting Priam's treasure.

So I was able to use, I was able to use kind of his actual story to be the spine, and then I wove, wove the history around Yeah, the story around it, by introducing Freya Bremer into being someone that works with him in the museum.

Standing over the Antikythera mechanism's gears, I found myself stuck on a simpler question than anything Schliemann ever asked.

If a civilization could calculate the heavens in bronze over two thousand years ago, what exactly did it take to lose all of it to the dirt? Priam's treasure, Troy to Moscow.

It is a peculiar paradox of archaeology that the people most obsessed with uncovering the truth are often the quickest to invent it.

And the same appetite that led Schliemann to misdate a golden mask in Athens had already produced something even more spectacular a few years earlier at Hisarlik itself.

In the late eighteen seventies, Schliemann and his partner Frank Calvert pulled a glittering hoard of gold and copper artifacts from the Trojan mound and declared it Priam's treasure, belonging to the legendary king of Troy.

He even invented a story about his wife, Sophia, smuggling the gold past suspicious workmen in her shawl.

She was actually in Athens at the time, and modern dating has since placed the hoard in the Troy II layer, hundreds of years too old to belong to any historical Priam.