Could museum's gold be from ancient Troy?

The scientist had traveled from Germany to examine the ancient items that lay before him on the University of Pennsylvania laboratory table, and he was dazzled.

Earrings with cascades of golden leaves. Brooches adorned with tightly coiled spirals. A necklace strung with hundreds of gold ringlets and beads.

The jewelry bore a striking resemblance to objects from one of the world's great collections - a controversial treasure unearthed long ago from the fabled city of Troy.

Were the objects on the lab table also from the city that inspired Homer's epic poem of war?

Ernst Pernicka suspected they were, but he could not be sure. The 24 pieces had been purchased from a Philadelphia antiquities dealer more than 40 years ago, and came with no documentation of their origin. Even if they were genuine, the items likely had been dug up by looters.

Pernicka, one of the world's foremost experts on ancient metals, had come to Penn's archaeology museum last February to rub off microscopic samples from the purported Trojan gold. He would then take them back to Germany for a high-tech analysis.

At best, he thought he might get a rough idea of where the gold had been mined. But where the items had lain for thousands of years, buried in the soil, was likely to remain a mystery.

Then suddenly, a colleague who had come to the lab with Pernicka spotted a clue that apparently no one had noticed in all the decades the museum had owned the jewelry:

Encrusted inside one of the tiny gold loops was a speck of dirt.

Priam's treasure

The story begins 140 years ago, with another man who was interested in the ancient past.

A wealthy German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann was convinced there was a historical basis for Homer's Iliad, the mythical tale of Greeks fighting Trojans to secure the return of the beautiful Helen.

Unlike Pernicka, he had no formal training as an archaeologist. Still, he traveled to what was then the Ottoman Empire, a copy of The Iliad in hand, determined to find ancient Troy.

On a windy plain near the modern Turkish city of Canakkale, he started to excavate an earthen mound that had been rumored as the site of the ancient city. He dug vigorously through the layers of history, inadvertently destroying some of what he found along the way.

In 1873, he discovered a dazzling assortment of gold, silver, and lapis lazuli. Schliemann proclaimed it the treasure of Priam, the Trojan king whose son marries Helen in Homer's poem, and he received worldwide acclaim.