Digging by the Book

Program Archaeology While most read Homer's Iliad as an entertaining epic, one man believed it was more than a story and could actually be used as a literary map to find ancient Troy; his name was Heinrich Schliemann and he found treasure and a buried city in what is now Turkey. But was it Troy? This video looks at "program archaeology," how archaeologists dig in the ground to find evidence for the stories in books. In a similar context, the episode covers the work of Flinders Petrie, who unearthed proof that the Israelites had really once lived in Egypt. Inspired by Schliemann's example and Petrie's findings, a whole wave of excavations ensued with the hopes of verifying the existence of various figures from the Bible.