"Mellaart.... In the early 1950s... made a survey of the Anatolian hinterland – then considered an archaeological desert – largely on foot, identifying and later working on several sites. He led his first dig at Hacılar, near Burdur, producing painted pottery and female figurines suggestive of the Anatolian mother-goddess Cybele.
"In November, 1958, he turned his attention to Çatalhüyük, a mound or ‘tel’ which he had seen from a distance five years before on the plain of Konya, a place considered too high, wild and remote for human settlement. Work began in 1961.
"With almost the first slice of the spade Mellaart discovered the ruins of a neolithic city. Under a mound 500 metres long and twenty metres high were revealed thirteen levels of habitation dating back nine thousand years and housing up to ten thousand people at the peak of its existence. Inside the mudbrick houses and shrines – which had no front doors but were entered through the roof – Mellaart and his team found bull’s heads, skeletons, mirrors of black obsidian, plaster reliefs, and wall paintings so extraordinary that their interpretation remains controversial to this day. ... Mellaart’s discovery put Turkey right on the map of early civilisation. On the eve of his eightieth birthday in November 2005, I visited Mellaart and his wife Arlette in their flat near Finsbury Park in north London It is a run-down area, largely taken over by Muslim immigrants; but the ornaments and décor of the Mellaarts’ small apartment transport the visitor back into an even more exotic world, the ancient Near East....
"Mellaart described his intuition for discovery as “a feeling of being able to tell if a mound contains something more than just rock.” In his case intuition had been supported by “good book knowledge and my training in the Iron Age”. His early enthusiasm for geology and Egyptology were also a help.
"Mellaart still speaks with the Dutch accents of his youth. His family lived in Holland where his father, descended from Scottish migrants called ‘Maclarty’ (a sept of the Clan Macdonald) was an expert in Dutch old master paintings and drawings. Caught in Holland by the outbreak of the Second World War, the son found a job at the museum in Leiden, which “kept me out of German hands.” After the war he read Egyptology at University College, London, before joining the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara.
"It was on a dig at Fikirtepe, near Istanbul, that he met Arlette Cenani, the adoptive daughter of a prominent Turkish businessman (her own father, a Romanian, had died when she was twelve). Arlette – herself a trained archaeologist and fascinated by the subject since the age of ten – was immediately attracted by Mellaart’s intelligence. They married and had a son Alan, who is today a headhunter (of the corporate sort) in Istanbul. Among the archeologists they knew were Max Mallowan and his wife Agatha Christie, whose detective stories they had admired but whose person they found rather remote...[Regarding the scandals Mellaart said later]....
“I think my mistake was to trust that I would be helped by everyone who thought highly of one’s work,” he said. Mellaart has sometimes been compared to the flamboyant Heinrich Schliemann, who dug Mycenae and Troy. But he resists the comparison. “Schliemann was a thief,” he says with a dismissive laugh. “And he thought the Trojan war was an historical event.”
"It was while he was still in only the fourth season of his dig at Çatalhüyük that the sky fell in. The Turkish authorities, responding to three years of clamour in the Turkish press about the smuggling of artefacts abroad, cancelled Mellaart’s permit, forcing him to return to London. Some objects apparently from his sites had turned up outside the country, and the Turkish press, led by Milliyet, sought a scapegoat. Mellaart was the most famous archaeologist in Turkey. More significantly, he was the man involved in the mysterious ‘Dorak affair’.
"In 1959, at the instigation of the British Institute, The Illustrated London News had published Mellaart’s drawings of an extraordinary hoard of objects, said to have been taken clandestinely from the village of Dorak, not far from Troy, in the 1920s, and shown to the young archaeologist in strange circumstances.
"Travelling on the train to Izmir in the summer of 1958, Mellaart said that he had met a girl called Anna Papastrati who was wearing a solid gold bracelet which he could not fail to notice. She told him she had many more things like it at home, and invited him back to see them. Mellaart had no camera with him, and the girl would not allow him to hire a photographer. So for several days he stayed at her house in the suburbs of Izmir drawing the treasures. After some months she wrote giving him permission to publish the drawings. But when attempts were made to trace the treasure, neither it, nor Anna Papastrati, nor even the house where she lived, could be found.
"The affair remains a mystery to this day. The most popular theory is that the girl was working for a gang of dealers who needed authentication for their treasure before selling it to some rich millionaire. Mellaart, who stoutly maintains the truth of his story, is inclined to agree. When I asked him if he thought now that he might have been used by dealers, he said: “That is perfectly possible. But somehow I don’t think like that, so [at the time] it never occurred to me.”.....
"But he was not finished with his Neolithic city. He described to students more wall paintings which had not appeared in his preliminary reports, and which, when they were finally published in 1989, caused another sensation and more controversy.
"These ‘reconstructions’ .... were based on drawings made at the time by several members of the team, including Mellaart himself. Unlike the previous wall paintings, which were taken to the Ankara museum, these had been impossible to remove or preserve. Mellaart explained that they were burnt, or otherwise damaged, impossible to photograph, and had to be sketched quickly before they crumbled to plaster dust.
"These ‘reconstructions’ .... were based on drawings made at the time by several members of the team, including Mellaart himself. Unlike the previous wall paintings, which were taken to the Ankara museum, these had been impossible to remove or preserve. Mellaart explained that they were burnt, or otherwise damaged, impossible to photograph, and had to be sketched quickly before they crumbled to plaster dust.
"These murals illustrated the world as it looked to the people of Çatalhüyük who lived around 6500 BC: panoramic views of their landscape with volcanoes smoking or erupting in the distance; birds-eye views of the Mediterranean and its islands; scenes of men sowing and tending cattle; herds grazing; storks and flamingoes flying in formation overhead; a train of ox-drawn sledges wending across the plain. Other paintings showed what appeared to be goddesses with panthers or vultures,and formalised patterns of bulls and streams, birds and human figures...."
This picture is associated with Mellaart's archives.
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