Eberhard Zangger (born 1958 in Kamen, West Germany) is a Swiss geoarchaeologist, corporate communications consultant and publicist. Since 1994 he has been advocating the view that a Luwian civilization existed in Western Asia Minor during the 2nd millennium BC. In 2014 he established the international non-profit foundation Luwian Studies, whose president he is.
Eberhard Zangger studied geology and paleontology at the University of Kiel and obtained a PhD from Stanford University in 1988. [1] After this he was a senior research associate in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge (1988–91). [2] In June 1991 he founded the consultancy office Geoarcheology International[ citation needed ] in Zurich, Switzerland, from where he participated in archaeological projects in the eastern Mediterranean each year until 1999.
Zangger began concentrating on geoarchaeology in 1982. His early research work and discoveries included the coastal situation of Dimini in Neolithic Central Greece, the extent of Lake Lerna [3] in the Argive Plain, the age and function of the Mycenaean river diversion and extent of the lower town of Tiryns, [4] the insular character of Asine, [5] the artificial harbor of Nestor at Pylos, [6] including its clean water flushing mechanism, and a human-made dam in Minoan Monastiraki in central Crete.
In 1992, Zangger suggested that Plato used an Egyptian version of a story about Troy for his legendary account of Atlantis. [7] [8] Zangger based his argument on comparisons between Mycenaean culture and Plato's account of the Greek civilization facing Atlantis, as well as parallels between the recollections of the Trojan War and the war between Greece and Atlantis. He recognized similarities between the Sea People invasions and the aggressors described by Plato and he also saw parallels between the Sea People invasions and the Trojan War. In 1992 Zangger arrived at the conclusion that Troy must have been much bigger than the archeological scholarship had presumed, and that the city must have had artificial harbors inside the modern floodplain. In a 1993 article, Zangger listed many commonalities between Plato's description of Atlantis and different accounts of Troy as it looked in the late Bronze Age. [9]
In 1994, Zangger presented a chronology of political and economic developments in the eastern Mediterranean during the 13th century BC. [10] This time, Zangger interpreted the legend of the Trojan War to be the memory of a momentous war which led to the collapse of many countries around the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC. Zangger's overall research goal was to find an explanation for the end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC. In contrast to the archaeological scholarship of the time, Zangger attributed greater importance to the states in Western Anatolia that are known from Hittite documents, including the Luwian kingdoms Arzawa, Mira, Wilusa, Lukka and Seha River Land. In Zangger's view, if these petty kingdoms had stood united, they would have matched the economic and military importance of Mycenaean Greece or Minoan Crete. [11]
In a review of the books The Flood from Heaven and Ein neuer Kampf um Troia in the Journal of Field Archeology, the US prehistorian Daniel Pullen of Florida State University emphasized Zangger's approach. Zangger, Pullen says, “applies the rigors of scientific methodology to explaining the end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean.” [12]
In his third book, Zangger turned to developments in the 12th century BC after the Trojan War. [13] According to Zangger, scattered groups of survivors of the Sea People invasions and the Trojan War founded new settlements in Italy and Syria/Palestine from which the Etruscan and Phoenician cultures emerged. Zangger also argued against the overrating of natural disasters as a trigger for cultural change. In his opinion, natural scientists and specialists in urban development and hydraulic engineering should become more often involved in archaeology.
In collaboration with the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources in Hannover, Zangger proposed a geophysical exploration of the plain of Troy to locate settlement layers and artificial port basins. [14] The Turkish Ministry of Culture did not grant permission to conduct this project. In 2001 Zangger said that because of a vigorous scholarly dispute with the Troy excavator Manfred Korfmann, Zangger was ceasing his research. [15] [16]
In the fall of 1999, Zangger became a business consultant specializing in corporate communications and public relations. [17] In 2002 he founded science communication GmbH, a consultancy firm for corporate communications.
Since April 2014, Zangger has been president of the board of trustees of the international non-profit foundation Luwian Studies. The commercial register of Canton Zurich (Switzerland) states as the foundation's purpose “the exploration of the second millennium BC in western Asia Minor and the dissemination of knowledge about it”. [18] The Board of Trustees includes Ivo Hajnal, Jorrit Kelder, Matthias Oertle and Jeffrey Spier.
In May 2016, Luwian Studies went public with a website in German, English and Turkish. At the same time Zangger's book appeared: The Luwian Civilization – The missing link in the Aegean Bronze Age. As part of its research, the foundation has systematically catalogued over 340 extensive settlement sites of the Middle and Late Bronze Age in Western Asia Minor. These sites are presented in a public database on the website. [19]
In June 2017, Zangger received unpublished documents from the estate of the British prehistorian James Mellaart, which the latter had marked to be of particular importance. [20] The material in Mellaart's estate referred to two groups of documents, both of which were allegedly found in 1878 in a village called Beyköy, 34 kilometers north of Afyonkarahisar in western Turkey. On the one hand there was a Luwian hieroglyphic inscription (“HL Beyköy 2”) on limestone which must have been composed around 1180 BC. Mellaart, however, only possessed a drawing of this inscription. According to Mellaart's notes, in addition to this, bronze tablets bearing Hittite texts in Akkadian cuneiform were also found at Beyköy (“Beyköy text”). These described the political events during almost the entire Bronze Age from the perspective of rulers in western Asia Minor. Mellaart only possessed English translations of these documents.
In December 2017, Zangger and the Dutch linguist Fred Woudhuizen published in the Dutch archeology journal Talanta the Luwian hieroglyphic drawings (including texts from Edremit, Yazılıtaş, Dağardı and Şahankaya) that were retrieved from Mellaart's estate. [21] However, early in 2018 Zangger distanced himself from Mellaart and accused him of having falsified documents. [22] Further research in Mellaart's former study in London in February 2018 had revealed that Mellaart had completely invented the (allegedly cuneiform) “Beyköy text”. [23] On the other hand, Woudhuizen, who published together with Zangger, [21] continues to believe that the Luwian hieroglyphic inscription HL Beyköy 2 is certainly not forged by Mellaart and probably genuine.
In June 2019 Zangger together with the archeologist and astronomer Rita Gautschy of the University of Basel, published a new interpretation of the Hittite rock sanctuary Yazılıkaya at Ḫattuša, according to which the sequence of rock reliefs in chamber A could have been used as a lunisolar calendar. [24] [25]
Troy or Ilion was an ancient country located in present-day Hisarlık, Turkey. The place was first settled around 3600 BC and grew into a small fortified city around 3000 BC. During its four thousand years of existence, Troy was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt. As a result, the archeological site that has been left is divided into nine layers, each corresponding to a city built on the ruins of the previous. Archaeologists refer to these layers using Roman numerals. Among the early layers, Troy II is notable for its wealth and imposing architecture. During the Late Bronze Age, Troy was called Wilusa and was a vassal of the Hittite Empire. The final layers were Greek and Roman cities which in their days served as tourist attractions and religious centers because of their link to mythic tradition.
James Mellaart FBA was an English archaeologist and author who is noted for his discovery of the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. He was expelled from Turkey when he was suspected of involvement with the antiquities black market. He was also involved in a string of controversies, including the so-called mother goddess controversy in Anatolia, which eventually led to his being banned from excavations in Turkey in the 1960s. After his death, it was discovered that Mellaart had forged many of his "finds", including murals and inscriptions used to discover the Çatalhöyük site.
Luwian, sometimes known as Luvian or Luish, is an ancient language, or group of languages, within the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. The ethnonym Luwian comes from Luwiya – the name of the region in which the Luwians lived. Luwiya is attested, for example, in the Hittite laws.
The Sea Peoples are a hypothesized seafaring confederation that attacked ancient Egypt and other regions in the East Mediterranean before and during the Late Bronze Age collapse. Following the creation of the concept in the 19th century, the Sea Peoples' incursions became one of the most famous chapters of Egyptian history, given its connection with, in the words of Wilhelm Max Müller, "the most important questions of ethnography and the primitive history of classic nations".
In classical Greece, Lerna was a region of springs and a former lake located in the municipality of the same name, near the east coast of the Peloponnesus, south of Argos. Even though much of the area is marshy, Lerna is located on a geographically narrow point between mountains and the sea, along an ancient route from the Argolid to the southern Peloponnese; this location may have resulted in the importance of the settlement.
Wilusa or Wilusiya was a Late Bronze Age city in western Anatolia known from references in fragmentary Hittite records. The city is notable for its identification with the archaeological site of Troy, and thus its potential connection to the legendary Trojan War.
Anatolian hieroglyphs are an indigenous logographic script native to central Anatolia, consisting of some 500 signs. They were once commonly known as Hittite hieroglyphs, but the language they encode proved to be Luwian, not Hittite, and the term Luwian hieroglyphs is used in English publications. They are typologically similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs, but do not derive graphically from that script, and they are not known to have played the sacred role of hieroglyphs in Egypt. There is no demonstrable connection to Hittite cuneiform.
The Denyen is purported to be one of the groups constituting the Sea Peoples.
Troy in the Late Bronze Age was a thriving coastal city consisting of a steep fortified citadel and a sprawling lower town below it. It had a considerable population and extensive foreign contacts, including with Mycenaean Greece. Geographic and linguistic evidence suggests that it corresponds to the city of Wilusa known from Hittite texts. Its archaeological sublayers Troy VIh and Troy VIIa are among the candidates for a potential historical setting for the myths of the Trojan War, since aspects of their architecture are consistent with the Iliad's description of mythic Troy and they show potential signs of violent destruction.
Til Barsip or Til Barsib is an ancient site situated in Aleppo Governorate, Syria by the Euphrates river about 20 kilometers south of ancient Carchemish.
The Trojan language was the language spoken in Troy during the Late Bronze Age. The identity of the language is unknown, and it is not certain that there was one single language used in the city at the time.
Beycesultan is an archaeological site in western Anatolia, located about 5 km southwest of the modern-day city of Çivril in the Denizli Province of Turkey. It lies in a bend of an old tributary of Büyük Menderes River.
The Luwians were an ancient people in Anatolia who spoke the Luwian language. During the Bronze Age, Luwians formed part of the population of the Hittite Empire and adjoining states such as Kizzuwatna. During the Hittite New Kingdom, Luwian replaced Hittite as the empire's dominant language. In the early Iron Age, a number of Luwian-speaking Neo-Hittite states arose in northern Syria. The Luwians are known largely from their language, and it is unclear to what extent they formed a unified cultural or political group.
The Middle Bronze Age Migrations are postulated waves of migration during the Middle Bronze Age. This proposal was advanced in the mid-20th century by scholars such as Mellaart, who argued for a connection between the spread of the Indo-European languages and archaeologically attested destructions and cultural changes around the 20th century BC. However, more recent research has disfavored the notion of Indo-European invasions, interpreting the evidence as favoring a more gradual process of assimilation.
The prehistory of Anatolia stretches from the Paleolithic era through to the appearance of classical civilisation in the middle of the 1st millennium BC. It is generally regarded as being divided into three ages reflecting the dominant materials used for the making of domestic implements and weapons: Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age. The term Copper Age (Chalcolithic) is used to denote the period straddling the stone and Bronze Ages.
Frederik Christiaan Woudhuizen was a Dutch independent scholar who studied ancient Indo-European languages, hieroglyphic Luvian/Luwian, and Mediterranean protohistory. He was the former editor of Talanta, Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society.
Paesus or Paisos, in the Trojan Battle Order in Homer's Iliad called Apaesus or Apaisos (Ἀπαισός), was a town and polis (city-state) on the coast of the ancient Troad, at the entrance of the Propontis, between Lampsacus and Parium. The city of Apaššawa from the Hittite documents is identified as Paesus. In the Iliad, Amphius, son of Selagus, was said to be from Paesus. At one period, it received colonists from Miletus. It suffered Persian occupation during the Ionian Revolt. In Strabo's time, the town was destroyed, and its inhabitants had transferred themselves to Lampsacus, which was likewise a Milesian colony. The town derived its name from the small river Paesus, on which it was situated. It was a member of the Delian League and appears in tribute lists of Athens between 453/2 and 430/29 BCE.
Luwian Studies is an independent, private, non-profit foundation based in Zürich, Switzerland. Its sole purpose is to promote the study of cultures of the second millennium BC in western Asia Minor. The foundation encourages and supports archaeological, linguistic and natural scientific investigations to complete the understanding of Middle and Late Bronze Age Mediterranean cultures. Western Anatolia was, at that point in time, home to groups of people who spoke Luwian, an Indo-European language.
Karkiya or Karkisa was a Late Bronze Age region in western Anatolia known from references in Hittite and Egyptian records. It is believed to refer to the classical era region of Caria or to a region where ancestors of the Carians lived at the time, though this identification has not been firmly established.
Kalašma or Kalasma was a late Bronze Age polity in Northern Anatolia on the border of the Hittite Empire.
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