From now until 14 February 2019, proposals for presentations for Session #43 of the Annual Conference of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) can be submitted here. The conference will take place from 4–7 September in Bern in Switzerland. The session is entitled: “The political geography of western Anatolia in the LBA, and the region’s interaction with its neighbours, in particular the…
The foundation Luwian Studies will again support various research projects in 2019 which aim to increase the knowledge of the Middle and Late Bronze Age cultures of Western Asia Minor. Contributions are made to field-oriented as well as literature studies in archaeology and linguistics. The foundation aims to consider freelance scientists and university-based researchers at about the same extent. – These are the ongoing projects…
In scholarly literature, there is much attention given to the Hittites and the Mycenaean Greeks, but the Luwians of Western Anatolia are notoriously neglected. Fred Woudhuizen has compiled in this book the information currently available about the Luwians in Western Asia Minor. He focuses on the epigraphic tradition in the form of currently available Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions from this region and derives from these, as…
The Spiegel article by Frank Thadeusz on the revelations found in James Mellaart’s former study says of Eberhard Zangger’s ideas that “his theory about the Luwians, inflated with much steam, has shrunk to the size of a wrinkled balloon.” A number of media – including Wikipedia authors – have adopted this opinion. They write, for example, that Mellaart’s documents were “an essential…
For a long time the Spiegel editorial team gave the impression of enthusiastically and unreservedly supporting your theses about Troy and the Luwians. Now Spiegel journalist Frank Thadeusz has published a scathing article about you in connection with James Mellaart’s forgeries, which you until recently considered genuine. What happened?
I think several factors came together. Firstly, journalists like to link what they write to a…
The editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal “Folia Orientalia”, the Polish linguist Professor Tomasz Polański, has just published a book review of “The Luwian Civilization – The Missing Link in the Aegean Bronze Age”. The book, authored by Eberhard Zangger, was published in English in May 2016 and in German in October 2016, thus long before the now controversially discussed documents from James…
The journalist writes: “‘He used the same approach for over 50 years,’ Zangger told Live Science. ‘He would first acquire a tremendously broad and deep knowledge [about the area he was interested in]. Then, he would try to use this knowledge to develop a coherent historic panorama, ’ Zangger said. This process in itself is not uncommon for an archaeologist or historian. The only difference…
Last year, Luwian Studies received documents from the estate of British prehistorian James Mellaart for further investigation. Mellaart had identified these texts as being of particular importance. He left a note to his literary executors encouraging them to immediately publish the material. An examination of Mellaart’s study in London has now provided clear evidence that the prehistorian invented these translations of allegedly 3000-years-old documents.
Mellaart’s…
“How World War Zero wrecked three Bronze Age civilizations” – this is the title of a four-page article in the popular science journal New Scientist. The rediscovery of the Luwians, in particular the longest Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions dating to the Bronze Age, is one of the topics in the issue of 16 December 2017.
At the same time, a large
Despite a steep admission fee of eighty Swiss francs, the 140 seats in the NZZ Foyer were almost sold out, when the editor in chief of “NZZ Geschichte”, Peer Teuwsen, invited the literary scholar Jan Philipp Reemtsma and the geoarchaeologist Eberhard Zangger to a panel discussion on 27 November 2017. For one and a half hours the panellists talked about the investigation into the Luwian…
