The Frauds of James Mellaart: A Scientific Appendix to Postblogging Technology, July 1955, I

 Specifically, the science of archaeology. James Mellaart is in the news in the summer of 1955, popularising the discovery and first year of excavation at the Bronze Age site of Beycesultan, which Mellaart identifies as the capital of the Arzawan appanage of Mira, or, more exactly, as Mira itself. There was by 1955 a longstanding discussion of the geography of Arzawa, in which the locations of the associated polities or cities of Mira, Hapalia, Wilusa, and the Seha River Land was much contested based on scant references in Egyptian and Hittite texts. If "Wilusa" suggests "Illium" to the alert reader, congratulations for picking up on the context of the debate. We now understand why Mellaart was so disappointed that, as of the publication of the Time article, his proof of the Beycesultan-Mira identity was "champagne glass-shaped vessels" and not "epigraphic evidence." 

Fortunately for  Mellaart's ambition to be the most famous archaeologist ever, he left the Beycesultan site with one year to go (and perhaps missing a seal proving the Mira connection, in Luwian settling the related linguistic controversy, and from a c. 2000BC strata, making it the oldest evidence for Indo-European), and began working at Catalhoyuk instead. This is not the place to even attempt to capture the importance of Catalhoyuk for our understanding of the Neolithic, even if it has been tarnished slightly by the revelation that among Mellaart's frauds are some of the murals he claims to have discovered there, and which were of so much importance to our current understanding of the Neolithic mind. (Eberhard Zangger published his summary of these discoveries in "James Mellaart's Fantasies," Talanta L (2018): 125--82.) I would add that Wikipedia has Mellaart excavating "nearly two hundred buildings in four seasons," where Ian Hodder's team excavates a single building at a time. To my mind, Mellaart's claims to interpret Catalhoyuk's material culture are exposed to impeachment too, but what do I know?

The reason that Mellaart left Catalhoyuk so soon is that he was expelled from Turkey in 1965 on suspicions of involvement in the illegal antiquities trade. I don't have the brain cells to follow the ins and outs of the case, but some remarks by Zangger raise the issue in a different way, because it is clear that Mellaart had an unusual ability to find Turkish archaeological sites. The most obvious explanation for that is that he had some kind of intelligence network, and the antiquities trade would have given him that. Presumably some looter put him on to Beycesultan, too. 

For most of the rest of his life, Mellaart seems to have diverted considerable energies into claimed  Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions, including  Beykoy 2, which has been published, and a much longer one comparable to the Parian Chronicle, but giving a history of Arzawa instead of Greece. The latter, Mellaart claimed, was taken from a monumental bronze plate that no longer existed, and he never published the text, either. It now appears that it was fundamentally a true crime Silmarillion, an intended forgery that Mellaart never completed because he was too busy revising and modifying it. 

I didn't even know that the Parian Chronicle existed until this morning! It's the sort of thing that you'd think would get more attention! It is very unfortunate that we don't have an Arzawan equivalent, but perhaps it isn't surprising that 800BC wasn't up to the standards of 250BC. It would be otiose of me to try to summarise the debate over Arzawan history because it would drag me right into the middle of the Matter of Troy and engage Trevor Bryce's cautions about taking the earliest Hittite histories we have in text at face value, but what seems safe to say is that as of 1370, Arzawa was a western Turkish polity that seemed to have the upper hand over the Hittites, but which was such a newcomer to Great Power politics that it corresponded with the chancery of Pharaoh Amenhotep III in Hittite rather than the Akkadian that was the standard language of international diplomacy at the time. Amenhotep's government overlooked the gaucheness of the correspondence because Arzawa seemed to be the coming thing. But it wasn't, and the Hittite revival shattered it into three appanages, the locations of which is the crux of the Arzawan debate. The usual assumption is that, Mira aside, the core of the Arzawan state was in the Meander river valley, and that its capital was at Ephesus. I find here a fascinating argument, based in part on activated neutron analysis of the letters from the Egyptian archives, that the actual core region of Arzawa is in Aeolia. Smyrna, not Ephesus, in other words. (Although Ephesus is still deemed to be an Arzawan city, but the capital of the sub-Arzawan Seha River Lands, and not the core region.)

The very small salience of Arzawa having its capital at Smyrna is that Smyrna is quite close to Sardis, the capital of the historic Lydian state, and this raises the question of the relationship of Luwian and Lydian, or alternatively of the place of the Lydian speakers who must have then existed to the officially Luwian Arzawan state. Or anyway so Max Gander wants to argue. (Max Gander is  on the job market, hint hint.)

Returning for a second to James Mellaart, it would be in character for the man that he would have a chip on his shoulder, and it turns out that it pertains to the Bronze Age and not the Neolithic. He is convinced that his promotion of the Arzawan Luwians, offended against the official Turkish view that the Hittites are the true ancestors of the modern Turkish state. So the real reason that he was kicked out of Turkey was some kind of nefarious conspiracy to suppress the TRUTH! Being as contrarian as they come, I'll allow some kind of validity here, and throw in some historical linguistics. The northern corner of the Aegean has been a weird place for our dominant narrative of the history of Indo-European for a long time, mainly because the non-Indo-European Etruscans are sourced there by some ancient Greek writers, and related to the "Pelasgians" who preceded the Greeks and contributed a pre-Indo-European substrate to Greek. We now know that at least genetically the Etruscans were identical to their Latin neighbours.

So if genetics is history, some of those Andronovan axe-wielding battleaxe wielders were Etruscan-speakers. Does this mitigate the guilt of these patriarchal  bastards for suppressing the Mother Goddess-worshipping, matriarchal Anatolian farmer culture? Sure! Why not. If genetics isn't history, we are still allowed to source our Tyrrhenians from Lemnos and presumably other parts of the northern Aegean. We do have Etruscan-adjacent texts from Lemnos, so there is something to be explained. 

So anyway Max Gander interprets one of the weirdest passages in the scant corpus of Hittite writings on Arzawa as a tussle over control of a group of purple dyers from around and about mainland Aeolia who are off on Lesbos, presumably making purple dye, and certainly having to do with the great god of Lesbos. (Google search turns up cults of Aphrodite and especially Apollo at Mytilene. It turns out that the cult of Apollo is actually first attested in the Arzawan corpus, although in connection with Wilusa, and not Lesbos.) Did some purple-dyers from the Aeolian coast end up in Etruria, or more, plausibly, vice versa? Wikipedia says that "Scholars such as Norbert Oettinger, Michel Gras and Carlo De Simone think that Lemnian is the testimony of an Etruscan commercial settlement on the island that took place before 700 BC, not related to the Sea Peoples," so I see I am on the same wavelength as real scholars. Interestingly, Lemnian and Etruscan have a four-vowel system similar to Hittite and Akkadian, says further Wikipedia, suggesting "areal influence." 

So. Question for the historical linguists out there. Areal where? If Lemnian came from Tuscany to the northern Aegean in the Early Archaic, then wouldn't the linguistic influence have been exerted in Tuscany? If so, it seems like,, whatever crackpot theories might be entertained around here about Indo-European, Etruscan must have been pretty mutable under the Early Iron Age influence of those travelling "prophets and poets" from the Eastern Mediterranean per Homer, or fisheries workers, per me. 

Something to chew over. And that's it, I'm going to go get dinner, and, tomorrow, without further procrastination, make arrangements to get the second-half-of-1955 volumes of all my favourite magazines out of the library.