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…
The scholarly publication of the longest Luwian hieroglyphic inscription from the Bronze Age is now available for free download. It was published online by Talanta – Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society and can be downloaded here: https://luwianstudies.academia.edu/EZangger
The paper, authored by Swiss geoarchaeologist Eberhard Zangger and Dutch linguist Fred Woudhuizen, includes transcriptions, translations and commentaries not only for…
As soon as the Luwian hieroglyphic inscription from Beyköy appeared, people started raising the possibility that it might be a forgery. What led to this?
Actually, my co-author and I heard about these suspicions about four weeks before the news broke. We didn’t realize that the text had been around for quite some time. Some colleagues had seen it as long as 28 years ago…
The rediscovery of the longest Luwian hieroglyphic inscription from the Bronze Age receives media attention throughout the world. Der Spiegel devotes three pages to the subject. Popular Archeology offers a substantial article in which adversaries are quoted. The US-American prehistorian Eric Cline says that outside the foundation Luwian Studies no one believes in a scenario in which the Sea People are derived from western Asia…
