Boring old historical truth and evidence were more or less irrelevant to this outrageous fudger, fantasist, fabricator, and outright smuggler, but this is not to deny the value of his work, especially the effect of his fanfares of self-publicity on scholarship and the popular imagination. His methods (including the cavalier use of dynamite) were so damaging to the archaeological record that successive professionals have wryly congratulated him on achieving what even the Greek armies couldn’t—the complete leveling and destruction of Troy. Nonetheless, the discovery of so many strata of Hittite
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