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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The British archaeologist, James Mellaart, comes in for a bit of stick in Revisionist Historiography for some academic sharp practice with the Hittites so I was intrigued when our old friend John Welford from medium.com posted this up
I had no reason to suspect Mellaart of being other than just the usual archaeologist up to his knavish (but respectable) tricks until I started reading...
Archaeologist James Mellaart took little notice of the dark-haired girl sitting opposite him on the train from Istanbul
— until a glance at the bracelet that she was wearing told him it was thousands of years old and made from solid gold.
That glance was to lead him to a horde of priceless treasure and to a long battle to defend himself against a campaign of suspicion. |
You betcha! More anon.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| No archaeologist could have ignored the bracelet. As the train trundled across Turkey he introduced himself. The girl told him the bracelet came from a collection at her home, and she agreed to let him examine the rest. On that evening in 1958, Mellaart was burning with eagerness as the train drew into Izmir, on Turkey’s Aegean coast. The girl took him to her home, where the collection was lifted piece by piece from its hiding place in a chest of drawers. |
Now my first thought was, "Are you kidding? In Turkey, in 1958?" But my first, second, third...n thoughts were how many faking tropes could be stuffed into so few paragraphs. The only one not there is the bit about how the evidence came to be somehow... unavailable
| Mellaart was astounded. He asked if he could photograph the collection, which he thought was comparable to the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The girl refused, but said he could stay in the house while he made sketches. For days, Mellaart worked without a break on the pieces, copying their intricate designs and taking rubbings of the hieroglyphs, noting every detail. |
And now, as they say, for The Provenance
| The girl told him that the collection had been found during the Greek occupation after the First World War. It came from a secret excavation at a small lakeside village called Dorak. |
That's right! It's the old 'Vikings have landed!' Or in this case when the Greeks thought (wrongly, as it turned out) they could expand out of their Smyrna stronghold after Greece had won, and Turkey had lost, during the First World War. It was a period of the utmost confusion but there was just time for
"I'm fed up with all this murder and rapine mullarkey."
"Me too. Why don't we do some excavating."
"Yes, different muscles entirely. What about over there?"
"Dorak, you mean. Yeah, why not." |
We resume the saga when we've all had a sit down and a nice cup of tea.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Mellaart knew that the pieces had to be relics from the Bronze Age, some 4,500 years old. He had clearly stumbled on the first evidence that a great seafaring city had flourished not far from Homer’s Troy, ruled by a warrior caste and rivalling Troy itself in wealth and influence. It was an archaeologist’s dream and all the theories would now have to be re-examined. |
It's amazing what you can find in a chest of drawers.. This is 'clearly' more important than even the Franks Casket spare panel found in a drawer in Auzon, France and now the centrepiece of the British Museum's Anglo-Saxon collection. When is someone going to put on an exhibition of important historical drawers, that's what I want to know.
| Late one night, Mellaart finished his work and left. It was the last time he saw the girl or the treasure. |
Oh, no! The girl, fair enough, I thought she was a flighty baggage and no mistake. But the treasure? There's whole maritime traditions resting on that.
| He only realised much later just how little he had discovered about the girl who was the key to his find. He could remember only that she spoke English with an American accent, that she had told him that her name was Anna Papastrati, and that she lived in Kazim Direk Street. |
And the actual house. He'd been popping in and out for some considerable time. 'Much later'? Obviously quite a long time. What with so many epochal things he had on his plate. I suffer from this myself, so I sympathise.
| However, Turkish investigators said later that they could find no trace of anyone of that name and that Kazim Direk Street simply did not exist. |
Look, I don't want to be racist or anything but who are we going to believe, a bunch of shifty Turks or a True Brit?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| When Mellaart reported to his chief at the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, Professor Seton Lloyd, Mellaart, who was the assistant director, said that he had found the treasure six years earlier and had only just received permission to publish his findings. |
You don't get many things past John Q Welford
Rather you than me, John, that's actionable. Can't you soften it just a little bit
| but it was invented for an entirely innocent reason. |
I knew you had it in you, John. To err is human, to forgive divine.
| Mellaart had been married for four years and did not want his wife to hear any gossip about him spending several days alone in the home of a young woman. |
"And where have you been for the last week?"
"I was in this house with a gorgeous little number."
"Doing what, might I ask?"
"Working a scam, whadya think? I'm a British academic, not a sex god."
"Oh, that's all right."
"Yes, could be a professorship in it, I shouldn't wonder."
"Shall I bash you over the head with a rolling pin to lend verisimilitude to your story?"
"I don't think that will be necessary." | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Things now began to get very difficult for Mellaart as accusations began to fly around. He published his findings in the Illustrated London News in November 1959, having previously written to the Turkish Department of Antiquities to warn them of the planned publication; however, the letter never arrived. |
This must wait for the morrow. Ed Morrow.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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James Mellaart, the son of an art dealer and married to a member of the Turkish upper class, was well-known as an archaeologist and a forger. In the 1960s he was expelled from Turkey and banned from further excavations.
A scientific evaluation of notes found last year concealed deep in Mellaart’s former study has just been published. The documents leave no doubt that the famous prehistorian lived in a dream world. For decades he tried to substantiate his lofty fantasies with invented Neolithic murals and translations of equally fictitious Late Bronze Age tablets – always insisting that these were his modest reflections on really existing prehistoric artifacts.
Mellaart did not part with anything: even junk mail and empty cigar boxes did not leave the apartment. That is how the fantasies to which Mellaart had devoted himself over the decades finally came to light. His study did not just contain the final results of his work as intended for publication (!), but also the elaborate drafts and tool kits that were required for their fabrication. |
https://popular-archaeology.com/article/james-mellaart-pioneer-and-forger/
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| When Mellaart reported to his chief at the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, Professor Seton Lloyd, Mellaart, who was the assistant director, said that he had found the treasure six years earlier and had only just received permission to publish his findings. |
Wiki article on the 'Dorak affair' quotes the letter of permission
In mid-October 1958, a letter was received by the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, where Mellaart was deputy director. It read:
Dear James, Here is the letter you want so much. As the owner, I authorise you to publish your drawings of the Dorak objects, which you drew in our house. You always were more interested in these old things than in me! Well, there it is. Good luck, and goodbye. Love, Anna Pappastrati.
The letter was dated "18/10/1958" and the return to sender address was "Kazim Direk Caddesi no. 217, Karsiyaka – Izmir."
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But it was later reported that | The supposed letter from Anna Papastrati has similarities with the typewriter used by his wife in the institute and for his other correspondence at that time. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorak_affair
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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In view of Detective Chief Inspector Vered's blundering interventions, I'll skip to the actual truth.
The truth?
It appeared that secret and influential enemies were busy in the background. But what could be their reason for trying to discredit him by suggesting that the story was just an invention to further his career? Mellaart had, after all, already achieved a world reputation and he needed no publicity stunts to advance it. |
Didn't think of that, did you, Mr So-Called Detective Chief Inspector Vered?
| And who was Anna? Was it sheer coincidence that she had met Mellaart on the train that day, or had she been planted there by someone who knew that her bracelet could hardly fail to catch the archaeologist’s eye. |
Honestly, Hatty, it was staring you in the face. You've used the same trick yourself often enough on the Reading-Paddington line.
| One theory was that Mellaart was the bait in a cunning trap set by a smuggling gang who already had the Dorak treasure hidden away and ready for sale. The gang would know that the value of their loot on the black market would be enormously enhanced once it was pronounced genuine by an unsuspecting expert of Mellaart’s repute. |
Estimates range from three to five times.
| The authoritative article in the Illustrated London News provided this stamp of authenticity. The pieces could then have been quietly shipped away to secret buyers all over the world. |
Secret at the time but we know now, thanks to a series of monographs by I Fleming, the identity of most of them though not the names of their white cats.
| If that is really what happened, then the truth about Anna and the vanishing fortune may have been locked away forever behind the doors of some of the world’s wealthiest and most unscrupulous art collectors. | |
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Mellaart appears unlucky that the treasure disappeared, along with the pretty girl.
It reminds me of the time I once lent my copy of THOBR to a beautiful Italian brunette.
In Mellaart's case, however, Fortuna had really smiled in that he still had his drawings of the lost artefacts, all supporting his views in his chosen area of study, and he could seek to publish later.
I was left with nothing, my annotations were in the margins.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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A triple loss. For you, for me, for the world. If only Wiley were still alive we might have been able to reconstruct them. Your wife may know where the book is buried, clutched Cuthbert-style in her hand.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Wile E. Coyote wrote: | | In Mellaart's case, however, Fortuna had really smiled in that he still had his drawings of the lost artefacts, all supporting his views in his chosen area of study, and he could seek to publish later. |
Drawings of lost artefacts brings to mind manuscript copies based on a lost original. You would no more doubt the word of monks than you would question the honesty of a reputable archaeologist, would you? Not sure if publishing in the Illustrated London News is quite on a par with a charter entered in a gospel book but it's the same principle.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| You would no more doubt the word of monks than you would question the honesty of a reputable archaeologist, would you? Not sure if publishing in the Illustrated London News is quite on a par with a charter entered in a gospel book but it's the same principle. |
The Abbot Johannes Trithemius outlines the difference between the transcribed and printed word.They are in fact very different, according to the Abbot.
| Abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim wrote a letter, De Laude Scriptorum (In Praise of Scribes), to Gerlach, Abbot of Deutz in 1492 to describe for monks the merits of copying texts. Trithemius contends that the copying of texts is central to the model of monastic education, arguing that transcription enables the monk to more deeply contemplate and come to a more full understanding of the text. He then continues to praise scribes by saying "The dedicated scribe, the object of our treatise, will never fail to praise God, give pleasure to angels, strengthen the just, convert sinners, commend the humble, confirm the good, confound the proud and rebuke the stubborn".[38] Among the reasons he gives for continuing to copy manuscripts by hand, are the historical precedent of the ancient scribes and the supremacy of transcription to all other manual labor. This description of monastic writing is especially important because it was written after the first printing presses came into popular use. Trithemius addresses the competing technology when he writes, "The printed book is made of paper and, like paper, will quickly disappear. But the scribe working with parchment ensures lasting remembrance for himself and for his text".[38] Trithemius also believes that there are works that are not being printed but are worth being copied |
The Scribe it seems ensures lasting remembrance for himself and his text, it is therefore somewhat unfortunate that The Abbot was not immune to making it up.
| it was soon discovered that he inserted several fictional passages into his works. Even during Trithemius's lifetime, several critics pointed out the invented sources he used.[6][failed verification][7] [8] His forgery regarding the connection between the Franks and the Trojans was part of a larger project to establish a link between the current dynasty of Austria with ancient heroes. While his colleagues like Jakob Mennel and Ladislaus Suntheim often inserted invented ancestors in their works, Trithemius invented entire sources, such as Hunibald, supposedly a Scythian historian.[9][10] For his research on monasteries, he utilized “Meginfrid,†an imagined early chronicler of Fulda and Meginfrid's nonexistent treatise De temporibus gratiae to substantiate Trithemius's ideal of monastic piety and erudition, which were supposed to be the same values shared by the monks of the ninth century.[11] Others opine that Meginfrid was not strictly forgery but the combination of wishful thinking with faulty memory.[12] |
Oh dear.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Yet he has a point. We know that run of the mill copiers were so lowlife they were sometimes women. But when you come to full blown monastery scribes you're talking about people who had nothing to copy from, they were, in your phrase, 'making it up'. If anything, 'writers' seemed to have had a higher status then they do now. And I should know.
Johnny Trithemius gets a tip o' the cowl for coming up with his Franks & Trojans series. Very influential in its time. I'm surprised he didn't make it on to one of the early Booker shortlists. Though before St Hillary they didn't much favour historical fiction. "Positively genre, darling," as Roy Strong put it.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Still forgery, when all is said and done, is a modest crime of the second order that generates a lot more excitement from ortho than it actually deserves.
Mellaart's case (he confidently proposes after a quick google without really knowing) is explainable, he had an interesting theory, he was frustrated that academic folks were starting to ignore it, so he bolstered it a bit by adding a few of his own drawings purporting to be copies, it's really at the level of a very rash challenge in football after the opposition has played a few minutes Tika Taka.
Abbot Johannes Trithemius crimes appear much worse. (j'accuse) It looks like crimes of the first order.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I agree wholly with this. As I say in Rev Hist, if galleries are full of fakes, what diff? But when it's history itself...
PS Glad to hear you have otters in your five-a-side. Most progressive. We have to make do with seals. "On your head, Sammy!"
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