National Archaeological Museum

This guide to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens follows a gold funeral mask unearthed at Mycenae in November 1876, when the impatient excavator Heinrich Schliemann kept digging through a holiday under the watch of a skeptical Greek official. Convinced he had found proof of Homer's heroes, he is said to have declared he had gazed upon the face of a legendary king. Stand close to the case and look at the mustache and ears the later scholars pointed to when they revisited Schliemann's well-documented habit of embellishing his own discoveries.