November 14, 1925

James Mellaart (November 14, 1925 to July 29, 2012) is considered one of the greatest archeologists and possibly also a great scoundrel. The following biographical excerpts explain these descriptions, but first let us clarify Mellaart's significance. His discovery of Catalhoyuk has backed up what we now know based on the discoveries of the even older, nearby city, Gobekli Tepe. These discoveries revolutionized thinking about human history, though I notice in the literature this has been ignored or downplayed recently. Until Catalhoyuk, and especially Gobekli Tepe, historians assumed that the development of cities came after agriculture was established.  This necessitated rethinking many assumptions about human history.


"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 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.

July 29, 2012

Çatal Hüyük, a Neolithic Town in Anatolia (1967) is the title of a book by James Mellaart (November 14 1925 to July 29 2012) and in it he mentions the possibilty that the residents of the oldest town on the planet (that we know of) had domesticated cats. We know there were lions depicted there in what we now call art. A famous figurine of a nude woman seated between two leopards was evidence Mellaart mentioned for the idea the society had been a matriarchy.

His Telegraph obituary discusses his life, and some controversies surrounding Mellaart.


James Mellaart, who has died aged 86, ranked among the most controversial archaeologists of the 20th century after claiming to have uncovered priceless royal artefacts plundered from Dorak, near the ancient city of Troy, which he said had been missing since the site was first excavated in the 1920s.

He later played a prominent part in the discovery and excavation of the world’s oldest known cities at Hacilar and Çatal Hüyük in Turkey. These Neolithic settlements contained not only the earliest textiles and pottery known to man but also the earliest paintings found on walls (as distinct from caves).

James Mellaart

While there was no doubt about the importance of these finds, some 20 years later, in the 1980s, Mellaart attracted further controversy by attempting to pass off watercolours he had made as representations of other, poorly preserved frescoes supposedly found at Çatal Hüyük. Mellaart explained that the original murals had proved impossible to remove or preserve. They were damaged, he said, and been impossible to photograph before they crumbled to plaster dust. Indeed, the only evidence of their existence were hurried sketches made by Mellaart and not released to public examination until 1989, when they only added to the debate.

There was no independent way of testing the accuracy, even the existence, of these frescoes, which Mellaart said depicted erupting volcanoes, scenes of men sowing and tending livestock (the earliest evidence of the domestication of cattle), and formalised patterns of animals, birds and human figures in which Mellaart detected the origins of the Turkish kilim.

If his work at Hacilar and Çatal Hüyük proved contentious, however, it was as nothing to the mysterious, faintly sinister, Dorak affair, which dogged Mellaart’s career.

In 1959 he had astounded historians of the ancient world by claiming that he had been shown a hoard of treasure — gold and silver bracelets, jewellery and a fabulous collection of bronze and silver figurines — that had been illegally dug up at Dorak during the Turko-Greek war (1919-1922) from two royal tombs of the Yortans, neighbours of the Trojans.

Among the treasures, he said, were fragments of a gold sheet adorned with Egyptian hieroglyphics bearing the name of Pharaoh Sahure (believed to have ruled between 2487 and 2473 BC). There was also what he described as a “silver sword of state”, decorated with seagoing ships. From these pieces Mellaart deduced that a major seafaring nation existed in northwest Anatolia, adjacent to Troy, around the time of the Egyptians — possibly the Biblical “Sea People” .

The circumstances of Mellaart’s disputed discovery of these treasures were, in their way, no less remarkable. In 1958 he had been travelling by train to Izmir (the ancient city of Smyrna) when, as recounted by the British traveller and journalist Lord Kinross, “he picked up, or was picked up by, an attractive girl wearing a gold bracelet of a type that had been found only at Troy”.

Responding with “a nose for a site that amounts to genius,” Mellaart told the young woman he was an archaeologist, and was invited to her home. There he found a trove of similar objects taken from ancient tombs at Dorak. Although having no camera, and forbidden by his new acquaintance from hiring a photographer, Mellaart spent four days sketching the objects and taking rubbings.

But when his findings were published by the Illustrated London News, a Turkish newspaper accused Mellaart of having robbed the tombs himself and smuggled the treasure out. Despite Mellaart’s protestations of innocence, a search for the young woman proved fruitless. The name she had given – Anna Papastrati – turned out to be unknown and her address did not exist. A letter he produced that contained her name appeared on examination to have been typed by Mellaart’s Turkish-born wife Arlette.

British journalists believed Mellaart’s story, however, and cast him as the victim of unfounded Turkish suspicions that Mellaart had been involved in the antiquities black market.

The Turkish secret police compiled a dossier on him, and after three years of clamour in the Turkish press about the smuggling of artefacts abroad — some objects apparently from Mellaart’s sites had turned up outside Turkey — the authorities in Ankara announced that Mellaart was part of a plot to smuggle £48 million-worth of Dorak “national treasures” out of Turkey.

Although a criminal case against him was dropped in a general amnesty in 1965, Turkey’s Department of Antiquities cancelled Mellaart’s permit to dig.

Some experts have suggested that the mysterious girl was a honeytrap working for a gang of dealers seeking authentication for their treasure from a respected archaeologist before selling it to a wealthy collector. Mellaart, who stoutly maintained the truth of his story, was inclined to agree. Another theory held that while the Dorak treasure did exist in whole or in part, Anna Papastrati did not.

In 2005 the Scottish archaeologist Professor David Stronach, who conducted excavations with Mellaart at Hacilar, was quoted by an American journalist, Suzan Mazur, as saying that Mellaart had invented the whole story, calling it a “dreamlike episode”. But as another American, the author Michael Balter, noted after investigating the Dorak affair: “Unless the treasure shows up one day, the mystery is likely to remain unsolved.”

James Mellaart was born on November 14 1925 in London. His Dutch immigrant father, descended from Scottish migrants called Maclarty (a division of the Clan Macdonald), was an expert in Dutch Old Master paintings and drawings.

When Jimmy was six, the family moved to Holland following a downturn in the art market. When he was 11 an uncle gave him a book on ancient Egypt. He was spellbound; as a teenager he taught himself Ancient Egyptian, followed by Ancient Greek and Latin.

At the outbreak of war he was drafted to serve in the slave labour force of the occupying Nazis. But his father managed to secure him a job in the National Museum of Antiquities at Leiden which, as James recalled, “kept me out of German hands”. Surrounded by archaeological finds from around the world Mellaart sealed his fascination with antiquities. In 1947 he became a student of Ancient History and Egyptology at University College, London, graduating in 1951.

Even as a boy he seemed to have had an sixth-sense for ancient remains: he found an Iron Age brooch on a seemingly barren hill fort in Herefordshire, and, on a trip to Cyprus, a hoard of Mycenaean bronze. In what was then Palestine, he was sent out one morning into the Biblical city of Jericho to look for tombs by the archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, a pupil of the celebrated Sir Mortimer Wheeler. Mellaart returned at lunchtime to say he had found one, intact.

When Kenyon left for the weekend, having dug down to what she believed was the extremity of the bedrock outside the city’s famous walls, Mellaart rashly seized the opportunity to dig down further still. On her return, Mellaart explained that he knew they could dig no further because instead of pottery fragments he had found fish fossils.

This (as one enthusiastic account put it) was the moment “when modern man took over from his cave-dwelling ancestors, the moment when he turned from hunting and gathering to agriculture.”

Appointed assistant director of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, Mellaart helped to direct excavations on Turkish archaeological sites , leading his first dig at Hacilar (1957–60) before turning his attention to Çatal Hüyük (1961-63). There, with almost the first slice of the spade, he discovered the ruins of a Neolithic city. Under a huge mound 20 metres high, 13 layers of habitation were revealed that dated back 9,000 years and housed up to 10,000 people.

Inside the mud brick houses and shrines – so densely packed that they had no front doors but were entered through the roof – Mellaart and his team found bull’s heads, skeletons, mirrors of black obsidian and plaster reliefs, as well as the wall paintings that would prove so contentious.

Mellaart’s triumph at Çatal Hüyük earned him both academic and popular acclaim, and his book Çatal Hüyük, a Neolithic Town in Anatolia (1967) became an classic.

He was for two years a lecturer at Istanbul University, but as pressure against him mounted in Turkey he left, in 1964, to take an appointment to lecture in Anatolian archaeology at the University of London, where he remained until 1991.

Considered charming but naive — “an innocent duped” was one authoritative verdict — Mellaart remained sanguine about his notoriety, which he ascribed to the rivalry and jealousies besetting the archaeological world. “As for all the unpleasantness, I’ll just say this: honi soit qui mal y pense.”

Mellaart was the author of several books, as well as chapters in Cambridge Ancient History (1964) and numerous scholarly articles in Anatolian Studies and other learned and specialist journals.

He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1980.

He married, in 1954, Arlette Meryem Cenani, with whom he had a son.


Here is a good site for more information.