Schliemann also was about to buy the land where the Palace of Knossos was buried. He called off the deal because the seller tried to cheat him on the number of olive trees on the property.
Unknown to the land owner, Schliemann had actually counted them.
That’s one of the great might-have-beens — Evans delayed the decipherment of Linear B by nearly fifty years, and his first discovery of tablets resulted in their destruction, their contents losts.
Schliemann’s other success was the excavation of Mycenae, which was also related to the Homeric cycle, but (as at Troy) he overestimated the antiquity; he was however correct about the relative chronology. The use of pottery styles to date sites in and around the Aegean came along 40 to 50 years later, and radiocarbon dating not until 1950.