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…

In his new book, geoarchaeologist Eberhard Zangger portrays eight discoverers who since 1872 have explored the early history of Anatolia. In retrospect, these pioneers achieved important breakthroughs. During their time, however, they all failed within the university system. This latest piece of research history deals with the ancient documents found at Beyköy – and it reads like a crime novel. Having heard nothing of the…

The book “Die Luwier und der Trojanische Krieg – eine Entdeckungsgeschichte” was published today by the Orell Füssli publishing house in Zurich, Switzerland. It shows for the first time a nearly 30-meter-long Luwian hieroglyphic inscription describing events at the end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 BC, in the eastern Mediterranean. One of the greatest riddles in Mediterranean archaeology is thus brought to a plausible…

The conference Archeology and History of Lydia from the Early Lydian Period to Late Antiquity took place in Izmir on 17 and 18 May. Fred Woudhuizen and Eberhard Zangger presented their analysis of two letters from 1995, in total 22 pages long, in which the English prehistorian James Mellaart summarizes the contents of the three bronze tablets discovered in Beyköy in 1878. Government officials of…