Letter, Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society 12 (1992/3), p. 80.Dear Sir,
by Peter James and Nikos Kokkinos
Regarding James Mellaart's review of Centuries of Darkness in BAIAS 11 (1991-2), while it contains several constructive comments, we note that the key evidence which he adduces against our case comes from two unpublished texts: an Arzawan document referred to as the 'Beyköy Text', and a letter of Assurbanipal to 'Ardu, king of Arzawa'. The information claimed to be recorded in them we find little short of fantastic. For example, that Assurbanipal should have written a letter to the king of Lydia (=Arzawa!), listing the latter's 21 ancestors with regnal years and detailed synchronisms with Assyria, seems far-fetched, to say the least.
Your reviewer states that translations of these texts, by A. Goetze and E. I. Gordon respectively, are "in press", but fails to specify where. Since Goetze and Gordon died in the early 1970s, both these documents must have awaited publication for a remarkably long time. Further, we find it extraordinary that no cuneiform expert we have consulted has heard of such discoveries. It is with regret that we have to point out that crucial evidence of this kind must always be accessible by some means before it is used as a basis for passing judgement on someone's work. We hope that no ramifications will arise from Mellaart's "vital material for chronology" - such uncorroborated citations merely muddy the waters of scholarship.
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Is there any truth in the rumour that scholars have fabricated or falsified evidence in order to disprove CoD?James Mellaart (1991/2), a famous archaeologist and, until recently, a lecturer at University College London... claimed to have access to an unpublished cuneiform text which gives a list of synchronisms between Lydia (a kingdom in western Turkey in classical times) and Assyria, running back 21 generations from the 7th century BC through to the Late Bronze Age. According to Mellaart it confirmed the conventional chronology and made "short shrift" of our model... Despite his best efforts, Professor David Lewis, an eminent epigraphist at Oxford, could find no trace of such a tablet. Other scholars, such as cuneiform expert Professor David Hawkins of the School of Oriental and African Studies, are confident that the text is simply not real. With evident embarassment, the editor of the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society, which had carried Mellaart's review, published a note, alongside letters from ourselves (James & Kokkinos 1992/3) and Lewis, stating that Mellaart's "alleged documents... should not be cited as valid source material." (Gibson 1992/3, 82). And there this extraordinary episode ended. Mellaart does not appear to have mentioned his tablet since.
The Dorak Affair's Final ChapterThere were drawings of an ancient comb with a dolphin motif, of jewel boxes again decorated with dolphins, of a vase in the shape of a bird of gold and silver; there were sketches of the gold leaf covering which was said to have extended over the surface of the wooden throne which could have been a present from Egypt, details of the rug which had disintegrated when the tombs had been opened, and even rubbings of the sword blade etched with ships and of a sherd of alabaster which had been marked with hieroglyphics. And every one of these drawings had been annotated in Mellaart's hand... Earlier this week in phone conversations I had with David Stronach, Professor of Near East Archaeology at the University of California - Berkeley, Stronach disclosed that Jimmie Mellaart invented Dorak. He called it a "dream-like epsidode"... But most important of all in relation to the Dorak mystery, Stronach's was the other handwriting Pearson & Connor refer to above in Mellart's memoirs.
Opinion: Suzan Mazur
Monday, 10 October 2005
Here's one I didn't ping due to age of the original piece, but it's in the Digest 110. Enjoy!
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