The Adventure of the Golden Bracelet

The other day I was reading The Chronicles of Solar Pons.

Solar Pons, the genius detective, is the creation of August Derleth, the pulp author who is simultaneously revered for saving H.P. Lovecraft from obscurity and reviled for injecting Zoroastrian dualism and Judaeo-Christian morality into the Cthulhu mythos. Derleth also offered to take over the character of Sherlock Holmes when Arthur Conan Doyle retired, and after being politely rebuffed created his own knockoff of Holmes, with a name chosen not because it was realistic but because it had the right number of syllables.

Derleth’s Solar Pons stories are widely regarded as some of the finest Sherlock Holmes pastiches ever produced, and they are indeed remarkably close to the originals. Which is to say that they are badly written and usually more interesting in concept than in execution. The stories secure Derleth the dubious distinction of being the first author to pit Holmes — albeit an ersatz Holmes — against Cthulhu and Fu Manchu, though that doesn’t do anything to stop them from feeling like fanfiction.

But I digress.

One of the stories in The Chronicles is “The Adventure of the Golden Bracelet,” in which Pons is hired by world-famous archaeologist Simon Sabata. While riding on the London Underground Sabata had noticed a young woman wearing Bronze Age jewelry. They had started talking and the archaeologist invited himself to her home, where she showed him a treasure trove of artifacts from a little-known ancient civilization. Sabata subsequently published a paper about the treasure only to come under attack when it, the woman, and her home could not be found…

At this point I had to put the book down because this all seemed very, very familiar. On a hunch I pulled my copy of Strange Stories, Amazing Facts off the bookshelf and sure enough, there it was on page 343.

And now here.

Jimmy

James Mellaart (or “Jimmy” to his friends, which we are not going to be) was born on November 14, 1925 in London, England. His father, Jacob. was a Dutch immigrant and art dealer. His mother, Appolonia, Irish.

The Mellaarts were relatively well-to-do but lost most of their money in the 1929 stock market crash. Jacob had difficulty finding work due to the Depression, so in 1932 he moved the family back to Amsterdam. Appolonia died soon after, and though Jacob remarried his children and new wife did not get along at all.

James Mellaart coped with these frustrating new circumstances by retreating into books. When a relative gave him a book about the pyramids written by noted Egyptologist J.H. Breasted, he became fascinated by the ancient world. The precocious child threw himself into his studies, purportedly teaching himself to read ancient Greek, Latin, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. Jacob pulled some strings to keep his son out of the slave labor camps, then found him a job at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. James spent the next few years trying to reconstruct whole pots from piles of potsherds.

When the Allies liberated the Netherlands in 1944 James Mellaart briefly worked for them as an interpreter. After the war he attempted to resume his studies in Leiden but found the occupation had made everyday life very complicated and uncomfortable. In 1947 he moved back to the United Kingdom and enrolled in University College London to study Egyptology (because at the time it did not offer a degree in regular old archaeology).

Mellaart graduated in 1951 and was invited by his mentor, Kathleen Kenyon, to assist with her work at Jericho. When that proved both logistically and financially impossible for the young man, Kenyon suggested that Mellaart should apply for one of the numerous grants being handed out by the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara (BIAA).

For several years Mellaart had been obsessed with the Hyksos or “Sea Peoples”, who had conquered Egypt at the end of the Middle Kingdom. At the time no one knew who the Sea Peoples were, where they came from, or what had become of them. Had their marauding caused the Late Bronze Age Collapse? Had they been defeated and dispersed by the Egyptians? Had they spread out and settled down to become Cretans, Pelasgians, Phoenecians, or Philistines?

Mellaart’s hypothesis was that the Sea Peoples were Anatolian, perhaps allies or relatives of the Trojans. He proposed to conduct a systematic survey of Türkiye for remnants of their culture. The BIAA was intrigued and awarded him £150 to make it a reality.

Mellaart spent most of the next decade criss-crossing Türkiye by train, car, and foot. His survey turned out to be amazingly productive. It noted dozens of previously unexplored sites from the Bronze Age, the Copper Age, and even the Stone Age, including Beycesultan and Hacılar Höyük.

None of the sites were from the right era for the Sea Peoples — they were either too early or too late — but they all seemed promising. But none more promising than the site he discovered in 1958.

Mellaart and colleague David French were surveying the plains west of Konya when they stumbled across a massive mound which

looked promising. Çatalhöyük (“the mound at the forked road”) turned out to be a proto-city, once home to 8,000 souls at the end of the Neolithic Period, more than 10,000 years ago.

The BIAA began excavating Çatalhöyük in 1961 and what they found radically changed our thinking about the dawn of human civilization. The city was a time capsule of the distant past, of the very moment humans stopped being hunter-gatherers and took up agriculture. The earthen mound’s treasures included murals and frescoes, clay pots, woven textiles, obsidian mirrors, all among the earliest examples of those crafts then known. It turned out artifacts that offered fragmentary and fleeting insights into early art, religion, and culture – ones that begged for explanation and interpretation.

The excavations made Mellaart the BIAA’s golden boy and a world-famous celebrity, or least as world-famous a celebrity as an archaeologist could be. One did not have to subscribe to scholarly journals to learn about his work – you could read breathless articles all about it in regular old newspapers like The Daily Telegraph and The Illustrated London News.

And then in 1964 the Turkish Department of Antiquities abruptly refused to issue new permits, effectively shutting down all archaeological work in the country.

The BIAA assumed that the refusal had something to do with government concerns about looting and smuggling. Artifacts from the BIAA’s dig sites had been turning up on the art market. The problem was that no one, not even the Turks, seriously thought that Mellaart or the BIAA were directly involved.

All the Department of Antiquities would say was that all archaeological operations were under review “until the Dorak matter was settled.”

Oh boy.

The Royal Treasure of Dorak

I have to turn back the clock a few years to explain this one.

On November 28, 1959 the Illustrated London News ran the sensational headline: “The Royal Treasure of Dorak: a first and exclusive report of a clandestine excavation which led to the most important discovery since the Royal tombs of Ur.”

In the accompanying article, Mellaart described an excavation of two small tombs found on the shore of Uluabat Gölü (“Lake Apolyont”), near Dorak, just west of Bursa in the northwest part of Türkiye near the Sea of Marmara. The occupants of the tombs must have been royalty, because they had been buried with grave goods so lavish they practically defied imagination.

“…a splendid sceptre with a pear-shape fluted head of light-green stone and a diagonally fluted ivory handle with gold-capped ends…”

“…two black obsidian beakers, one smooth polished, the other vertically fluted, a vertically fluted depas (two-handed drinking cup) of gold, and a one-handled coup with repoussé design…”

“…a dagger (11 3/8″ in length) with a carnelian pommel, silver blade, and hilt covered with embossed gold sheet…”

“…a lance with silver head and chased midrib, the long-decayed wooden shaft being encased in alternate ribbed gold and plain silver tubular pieces of casing…”

“…a silver sword of state…” decorated with sailing ships…

“…a sceptre, the spherical head of which was made of pink-veined white marble. Its wooden handle was cased in gold sheet, ribbed and ornamented with gold granulation….”

“…a gold jug with cutaway spout and embossed decoration and a smaller silver, half-corroded, two-handled depas with horizontal ribbing…”

“…a necklace of about twenty gold beads in the form of double-spirals, such as have been found at Ur, Troy, Poliochni, and Brak…”

“…other necklaces, consisting of carnelian, rock-crystal and gold beads, or of white marble and gold, or striped onyx, or of gold-capped obsidian, and of rock-crystal beads…”

“…an ivory comb, worn in the hair, with a centre roundel framed by an open-work band, depicting two finely-carved wild goats or ibexes and two dolphins, the whole picked out in red and blue colour, and provided with a gold edge, carved rosettes, and a carnelian rivet head surrounded by gold granulation…”

“…five amazing figurines in electrum, silver, and bronze…” depicting goddesses, queens, and handmaidens…

The four-page article included beautiful full-color illustrations of the treasure, drawn by BIAA staff from rough sketches provided by Mellaart.

Based on distinctive potsherds found with the more spectacular artifacts, Mellaart was able to identify the tombs’ inhabitants as nobles of the Yortan culture, rough contemporaries of the Trojans.

He was able to more explicitly date the tomb to somewhere around the 25th Century BCE thanks to the remnants of an Egyptian throne bearing the names of the Pharaohs Sahure and Neferirkare.

The article and its implications were staggering. If nothing else, the exquisite grave goods made from non-local materials showed the Yortans to be a highly advanced culture with advanced manufacturing techniques and trade lines stretching across the Mediterranean. More importantly, the Egyptian throne and silver sword suggested the Yortans may have been the very Sea Peoples that Mellaart had been searching for.

At this point may be asking yourself, why have I not heard of this amazing treasure, only slightly less fabulous than that of Tutankhamen, but perhaps even more archaeologically significant?

Well, there’s the rub.

The Girl on the Train

If you read the article carefully you will realize it does not say that Mellaart had discovered the tombs or unearthed anything. All it said was that he had viewed the treasure, which was “in private possession in Izmir.”

In the summer of 1958 Mellaart was on a train from Istanbul to Izmir when he noticed a young woman, perhaps 20 or 21, sitting across from him. She was, in his own words, “very attractive… in a tarty sort of way,” but what caught his attention was the golden bracelet she was wearing, because it looked similar to Bronze Age jewelry Heinrich Schliemann had unearthed at Troy.

He introduced himself to the woman as an archaeologist and asked her about the bracelet. She confirmed that yes, it was very old, mentioned that her family had several others like it, and then invited him to come see the rest.

Mellaart was skeptical, thinking the bracelet was likely a modern reproduction and the other artifacts would be common Roman or Byzantine junk, but he went anyway. Because when an attractive woman invites you to come up and look at her etchings, you go. Even if she is a bit tarty. Especially if she is a bit tarty.

It was dark by the time the train reached Izmir, and Mellaart didn’t know the city very well. He remembered taking a ferry to the Karşıyaka district across the bay and then a taxi to an old, grand house. There the woman introduced him her to her father, “an elegant but sick and plaintive old man,” who was just sitting down to a late supper.

Throughout the evening the woman tantalized Mellaart with a slow reveal of fabulous artifacts. She started off small, with some gold earrings and a silver bracelet that seemed to be of a set with the one she was wearing. After dinner she showed him a curiosity cabinet that blew his mind. It was packed full of gold and silver jewelry. Alabaster fragments and marble figurines. Elaborate drinking vessels. Swords, daggers, and axes. And so much more.

And every last one of them seemed to validate Mellaart’s hypothesis that the Sea Peoples were Anatolian.

The archaeologist was flabbergasted. He asked where these artifacts had come from, and was told that they had been illegally excavated from a tomb near Dorak during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922. There were even photographs of the dig and extensive notes in Greek, though they were all slightly charred around the edges as if they’d been rescued from a fire.

Mellaart was convinced he had stumbled across something huge. He needed to document it so he could show others, but he had left his camera at home. He asked if he could go fetch it and return in a few days. She refused, but allowed him to stay as a guest for the next three days so he could sketch the artifacts and transcribe and translate the dig notes.

When the long weekend came to an end Mellaart asked for permission to write about the treasure. The young woman refused, because her family weren’t keen to let the Turkish authorities know that they were in possession of illegally looted artifacts. However, she promised to try to convince her father to change his mind, then mail him some photographs and possibly permission to publish.

As Mellaart got into the taxi that would take him home, he belatedly realized he didn’t know his host’s address… or even her name. As he pulled away she shouted out that she was Anna Papistrati of 217 Kazim Dirik Street.

Mellaart’s sketches and notes created quite a stir at the BIAA. Institute director Seton LLoyd desperately wanted to publish them, but he had a problem. It would be unwise and unethical to publish unverifiable information from an illegal dig in a serious academic journal. On the other hand, they might make for an interesting feature in a popular venue like the Illustrated London News.

Mellaart wrote to Anna, asking for permission to publish, but he didn’t get a reply until October 18, 1958…

Dear James:

Here is the letter you want so much. As the owner, I authorize you to publish your drawings of the Dorak objects, which you drew in our house. You were always more interested in these old things than in me!

Well, there it is. Good luck and goodbye.

Love,

Anna Papistrati

That was the last James Mellaart (or anyone) heard from Anna Papistrati.

An Affair to Remember

The Illustrated London News article on the Dorak treasure caused a sensation in the United Kingdom when it was published in November 1959. It somehow seemed to fly under the radar of everyone in Türkiye for almost three years.

In 1962 the newspaper Millyet (“The Nation”) ran an article about the treasure that made several sensational allegations. First, that Mellaart was part of an international ring of artifact smugglers; second, that the Dorak treasure had not been unearthed in the 1920s by parties unknown, but by Mellaart himself in the early 1950s; and finally, that Mellaart had then spirited the treasure out of the country and sold it. Other newspapers jumped on the bandwagon, with Cumhuriyet (“The Republic”) moaning…

Tremendous capital gone out of the country in front of our very eyes. Not even a single object remained to us of an historic treasure 2,000 years old which has come out of our soil.

Which is factually wrong on a couple of levels but we’ll let that slide. All you need to remember is that the Turkish press was whipping popular opinion into an uproar.

Initially the Department of Antiquities dismissed the articles as sensationalistic garbage. They did not particularly like Mellaart, who was more than a little tactless and egomaniacal, but they did not think he was a smuggler. One official, Ahmad Donmez, did not even seem particularly concerned that the treasure had disappeared…

Never mind. I am glad that you saw it at least. If it is ever found, we can now prove that it belongs to Turkey.

Mind you, shortly after making that statement Donmez quit the Department of Antiquities to become a dealer of antiquities with questionable provenance, so take that attitude with a grain of salt.

Unfortunately for Mellaart, artifact smuggling was quickly becoming one of the Turks’ top priorities. Criminals were looting archaeological sites with impunity. Every local bazaar seemed to have pilfered items and crass forgeries for sale.

The ones that first caught the authorities’ attention were distinctive red-striped pots and jars which seemed to come from Hacılar. Hacılar, where Mellaart and the BIAA had been the only one allowed to dig. Mellaart had even authenticated a few of these looted pieces which had wound up in the hands of American museums. When a lot of the pots wound up on the auction block at Sotheby’s, that was the final straw.

The authorities figured it couldn’t hurt to at least try and investigate what was going on with the Dorak treasure. They referred the matter to the secret police, who didn’t find anything damning… but they did find a lot that was concerning.

Let’s start with the most serious allegations: that Mellaart had looted the treasure himself. Villagers in Bursa and Dorak had made statements to Milliyet implying that they had seen two foreigners, a man and a woman, digging in the hills outside of town in the early 1950s. Fortunately, Mellaart’s movements were pretty well-documented so it couldn’t have been him. It later turned out the unknown duo were members of the Turkish parliament looking for mineral deposits to exploit.

However, Mellaart’s friend and mentor Seton Lloyd did not help matters by claiming he had sent Mellaart on a trip to Dorak to see if he could locate the tombs. In 1960. Which was a year after Illustrated London News article had been published, and several years before anyone had made a stink about it. A trip which Mellaart does not seem to have actually made. The best case scenario here is that Lloyd was thoughtlessly lying to cover his ass. The worst case scenario was that he was hiding something.

That brings us to Mellaart’s story, which was already full of inconsistencies and further muddied by the fact that he told different versions of it to different audiences.

Most of the time he was on a train from from Istanbul, but sometimes he was on a train from Denizli. Sometimes he spoke to Anna Papistrati first, sometimes she spoke to him first. Her father may have had dinner with them, or he may have only been a shadowy figure lurking in the background, or he may not have existed at all. He was at the house sketching for a long weekend, or maybe a week, or maybe a fortnight.

When Mellaart first told Lloyd about the encounter, he said that it took place six years earlier, in 1952, and that he had been sworn to secrecy until only recently.

No one was particularly concerned by any of this in isolation. They all assumed James Mellaart had a sexual relationship with Anna Papistrati, despite having been married to Arlette Meryem Cenami since 1954.

Surely, then, most of these inconsistencies were the young archaeologist trying to make it look like he hadn’t been cheating on his wife with a young woman who was “attractive… in a tarty sort of way.” So sometimes he claimed the encounter had happened before his marriage, and then shortened the length of his stay in her home and invented a shadowy chaperone to make it all seem less inappropriate. Assuming an earlier date for their encounter and a longer subsequent relationship would explain a lot of weird things, like why Anna Papistrati’s letter seemed to imply a more intimate relation than a weekend’s acquaintance would otherwise suggest.

Of course, the bigger issue was that Anna Paistrati did not seem to actually exist.

The Turkish security services went looking for her and reported back that 217 Kazim Dirik Street was a storefront in a commercial district on the other side of town from where Mellaart claimed to have been. They do not seem to have put much effort into that search. A few years later two British reporters attempting to clear Mellaart’s name discovered that the streets of Izmir had been renamed and the houses renumbered numerous times in the 1950s and 1960s. They were able to find a former Kazim Dirik street in the right neighborhood, but even they could not find a house matching the one Mellaart claimed to have visited.

There had been a Papistrati family living in Izmir… but they had left the country in 1922 during the Turko-Greek War. As had the majority of the city’s Greek population. A Greek family living in Izmir would have stuck out like a sore thumb, and no one in Izmir knew or remembered a Papistrati family quite like the one Mellaart had described.

It was possible the name was a pseudonym. But if that were the case, who had written the October 1958 letter to Mellaart giving him permission to publish his drawings?

That was more easily solved. The typewritten letter had one notable oddity — the use of the Latin capital letter “I” instead of the Arabic numeral “1” in the date. That was a weird Oxbridge affectation, and sources inside the BIAA have suggested that it may have been typed on one of their own typewriters by Arlette Mellaart. She may have been transcribing a handwritten original for clarity’s sake… but if so, where did the original disappear to?

The Department of Antiquities was also worried that Mellaart had not told them about the treasure before publishing. It turns out Mellaart had… but not until April 1959, almost a year after he told Lloyd about the treasure and half a year after he had received permission to publish from Anna Papistrati. The delay was troubling, but it seemed to be simple case of everyone involved assuming that someone else had taken care of it.

Then again, the notice also flew under the department’s radar because all Mellaart said was that he had found some “Yortan metalwork” from Dorak. Which was a massive understatement.

Word also came from London that Seton Lloyd was trying to cover his tracks a bit. Lloyd claimed that the article appeared in the Illustrated London News because he felt it was not proper to write about a find like this in an academic journal due to its lack of clear provenance. The publishers of those academic journals told a different story, that Lloyd was happy to publish the story wherever, and that the academic journals were the only ones concerned by the lack of provenance.

As for the treasure itself… Mellaart was the only person who could claim to have seen it. It had not resurfaced at all in the subsequent decade.

That’s where the Turkish investigation petered out. They had unearthed troubling issues which they could not resolve, but which also did not seem to add up to much. Even so, they felt that something had to be done. And so in 1964 the Department of Antiquities refused to issue the BIAA’s golden boy a permit to dig.

British diplomats indignantly suggested that the whole affair was a matter of jealousy, that the Turks were striking out because they were upset that all the important archeological work in their country was being done by foreigners. (And also downplaying the idea that the Turks might not be happy that western Europeans had been stealing their cultural heritage for their stodgy overstuffed museums for hundreds of years.)

Mellaart agreed, suggesting that the whole affair had been drummed up by the “yellow press” as an excuse to target foreigners.

Other archaeologists were a bit more sanguine, suggesting that while Mellaart was no criminal he had been playing fast and loose with the rules for years and was finally suffering consequences for his misdeeds. BIAA fellow Charles Burney once vented…

He is unbelievably tactless… He’s never had to face up to life as 99.9% of the population has… He’s never had to come into contact with the realities. There is a delicate balance between proof and suspicion. He has been made a victim, it is true. But possibly he has provoked himself to be a victim… But there is no doubt about it, it is a tragedy. I find the whole thing distressing. I sincerely hope that one day Mellaart will be rehabilitated.

Eventually the archaeological community came up with its own theory: that an international ring of artifact smugglers had used Anna Papistrati as a honeypot to lure in Mellaart and trick him into authenticating looted treasures. Those treasures had been spirited out of the country shortly afterwards, and were doubtlessly in the hands of private collectors who would not be eager to publicize their purchases.

Bronze Age Collapse

In 1965 cooler heads prevailed, and the Turks allowed the BIAA to resume their work at Çatalhöyük under the watchful eye of officials who would make sure there was no funny business going on. In exchange the BIAA would remove Mellaart from his leadership role and only allow him to assist in a supervisory capacity.

In reality Mellaart was still in charge, both in Ankara and at the dig site. He did not like being watched by the security services, and became furious when they arrested four of his diggers who had been returning to the site during their off hours to do a bit of recreational looting. Progress was slow, the only discoveries were minor, and even those were few and far between. At the end of the season he fired all the dig’s local workers in a snit, accusing them of being spies.

There was some good news. In the fall of 1965 the Turkish parliament passed a general amnesty for any looting that had taken place before 1960. Since the alleged looting of the Dorak tombs had taken place in the 1920s and Mellaart’s involvement with the treasure had taken place in the 1950s, he was finally off the hook.

Except, of course, for that stupid newsletter.

The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada had been a big supporter of Mellart’s work at Çatalhöyük, and had asked him for an update about his progress that they could run in their monthly newsletter. Mellaart responded by dashing off a quick memo venting his frustrations…

A change of the Director General of Antiquities allowed certain xenophobic elements aided by the gutter press and the Cyprus crisis of 1965 to put strong pressure to bear on the Department and through envy and jealousy our application for a dig permit for Catal Huyuk was refused….[In 1965] we had not less than five people to spy on us; two servants planted on us as agents provocateurs [and] a museum guard on the site with the manners of the Gestapo man.

The Royal Ontario Museum printed the letter verbatim in the February 1966 issue of their newsletter. This time it did not take three years for the Turks to find out about something problematic Mellaart had written. The Turks went right to the BIAA and let them know that they need not bother applying for dig permits this year. Or any year in the foreseeable future.

Mellart was furious, claiming he had never intended his letter to be public and that this was all the museum’s fault for publishing it verbatim. Which was a stupid lie, because the Museum had specifically asked him to provide an update for publication. If he had thought that his impolitic comments would have been edited out, or maybe hoped that they wouldn’t get back to the Turks, that’s 100% on him.

Personally, I can’t help but think about what Charles Burney had said earlier about Jimmy finally having to face the consequences of his actions.

The BIAA cut their ties with Mellaart to save face, but it was too late. The Turks wound up booting most foreign archaeologists out of the country for an entire generation. Work at Çatalhöyük did not resume until 1993.

As for Mellaart himself, he returned to the United Kingdom and became a lecturer in archaeology at the University of London. He never went on another dig, but continued to publish and kept working on a massive 60,000 word monograph on the Dorak treasure. He retired from full-time teaching in 1991, retired completely in 2005, and passed away in 2012. Obituaries painted him as a great man laid low by Turkish xenophobia and intra-disciplinary rivalries.

Another Man’s Trash

But what of the Dorak treasure?

The treasure was problematic from the start; the lack of provenance and the sketchy dig notes made it almost completely useless archaeologically. Almost useless is not completely useless, though. If the artifacts themselves could be studied we could learn from them. Even photographs of the artifacts might be able to tell us something.

Of course, no one has seen the Dorak treasure in over sixty-five years. The artifacts have not materialized at auctions. No new photographs and drawings have emerged. Even international art smugglers seem to know nothing about it.

This is a huge problem. The treasure implies the existence of a hitherto-unknown massive sea-faring Bronze Age civilization with extensive trade routes. But what is one to make of such an implication with no corroborating evidence?

For the most part scholars ignored it. If it was mentioned at all it was mentioned in passing, with a footnote or two noting that any claims derived from it had to be taken with a grain of salt until they could be confirmed through other methods.

As decades passed and the treasure remained lost, those references and mentions became fewer and farther between. And during those decades, scholars also began to realize that the Dorak treasure was… weird.

It was strangely atypical for the Yortan culture. In the 1950s the only known Yortan artifacts were black clay pots and marble idols. In the ensuing decades more Yortan artifacts had been unearthed… but they were still only black clay pots and marble idols. And no Yortan artifacts had ever been found near Dorak.

The individual artifacts in the treasure were supposed to have been exquisite, which implied a highly advanced culture with manufacturing techniques rivaling those of its contemporaries. Why, then, had all evidence of this culture vanished? Surely at the very least someone, somewhere back in the day would have been gloating about grinding these guys into dust.

Many of the artifacts were made of materials that were not local — lapis lazuli, rock crystal, carnelian, amber, ivory, and more. That might mean the Yortans had an extensive empire. It might mean they were raiders or pirates who had plundered the eastern Mediterranean. Or it could mean they were master traders conducting commerce far beyond their borders.

Or it could imply that the treasure was not a contiguous find as Mellaart had assumed, but a collection of unrelated artifacts thrown together at some later date, possibly even in the modern era.

Then there was the Egyptian throne. To Mellaart, this was the key to the entire treasure, because the cartouche containing the name of the Pharaoh Sahure enabled him to provide a date for the other artifacts. But why was the throne even there? Was it plunder? Was it a gift? Had it been planted to throw Mellaart off the track, to make the other artifacts more salable by making them seem older than they actually were?

Once you saw one anachronism, you couldn’t help but notice a half a dozen more. Sahure’s cartouche is surprisingly verbose, including a number of titles that are not found in other inscriptions, not even those found at his own temple. The Egyptian barques depicted on the “silver sword of state” seem to come from a later era than the throne. The use of amber in the jewelry is atypical for the era.

At first scholars shrugged their shoulders and sighed, “Dorak is Dorak.” But as the observations compounded opinion began to shift. Some began to wonder if the Dorak treasure was not a contiguous hoard but a “dealer’s bag” of assorted unrelated artifacts.

Of course, the dig notes Mellaart had tried to translate claimed otherwise. They had also been singed — was that because they had been in a fire? Dorak had been close to the front lines during the Turko-Greek War. Of course, that same proximity to the front lines would have made it a terrible place for a clandestine dig… and why had the looters made extensive dig notes in the first place? Were the notes fake? Had they been artificially aged like a treasure map you make for a child’s scavenger hunt?

Others began to think that the treasure had never existed in the first place, that it was a flight of fancy, something James Mellaart had invented in a “dreamlike episode” and passed off as real. That did not go over well with Mellaart’s powerful and influential friends, who saw the ugly hand of jealousy at work again. After all, their colleague was one of the most famous living archaeologists in the world. What motive would he possibly have for lying?

But what if James Mellaart had always been a liar?

You’re Making Things Up Again, Jimmy

Mellaart always insisted that he was Scottish, not Dutch; that “Mellaart” was a corruption of “MacLarty,” supposedly a sub-clan of the MacDonalds that had moved to Holland at one point. He stopped making this claim in the early 2000s, not coincidentally about the time that online archives made it easier than ever to do genealogical research. You can’t get too angry at someone for repeating the dubious family histories they were told as a child.

When Mellaart talked about his experience in World War II, he tended to erase his well-connected and well-to-do father from the story, replacing him with an unnamed Swiss diplomat who had been bowled over by Mellaart’s potential and landed him the job at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. Okay, so he liked to punch up his stories. That seems pretty harmless. It doesn’t prove anything.

It’s also hard to get worked up by the idea that Mellaart was somehow unearthing completely unknown archaeological sites during his time in Türkiye. Most of the these sites he “discovered” were in fact quite well-known to the locals, who had the unfortunate handicaps of being not British and not white. That’s barely a fib, it’s just colonialism. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

But when we get to Dorak these lies start to become less harmless and more “part of a pattern.”

When and how did James Mellaart meet Anna Papistrati? Had he approached her, or did she approach him? Where was her house, really? How long had he spent with her? Had she really given him permission to publish his notes? Why had he delayed informing Turkish authorities? Why did the treasure bear only the most superficial resemblance to existing Yortan artifacts?

Mellaart’s initial answers to these questions were vague and clearly misleading, and when pressed for more details he would not or could not provide them because he knew inconsistencies would paint him into a corner. Instead he hemmed and hawed and attacked the motives of those who were asking the questions.

Mellaart’s friends insisted that he had no reason to lie because he was already at the top of his field. That is a very naive understanding of human nature. For some people there’s no such thing as enough.

The world’s most famous living archaeologist is still not all that famous in the grand scheme of things. To be truly famous you would have to be the next Champollion, the next Heinrich Schliemann, the next Howard Carter. For Mellaart to reach those heights he would need to make a discovery that changed everything we knew about history and captured the attention of the entire world.

Wouldn’t it just be easier to make one up?

The discovery of the Dorak treasure is starting to seem a little too convenient, isn’t it?

The dramatic story of how it was secretly dug up during wartime, and the even more dramatic story of how Mellaart stumbled across it, both of which were conveniently unverifiable. The artifacts which seem out of place given everything we know about the culture and era, but which seem to perfectly align with Mellaart’s hypotheses about the Sea Peoples. The out-of-place Egyptian artifact that can conveniently date everything else. The way it had subsequently disappeared, requiring everyone else to take Mellaart’s word about everything.

Are we really supposed to believe Mellaart was able to draft a 60,000 word monograph about artifacts which he handled for only a few days, decades earlier? Did he have the world’s greatest memory? What could he have possibly said that had not already been said?

Why would anyone have a reason to believe a single word of it?

There’s also the matter of how he responded to any questions about the treasure by equivocating and attempting to redirect blame. At the time these just seemed like the frustrations of a man pushed to the breaking point, but in retrospect he seemed to reach that breaking point awfully quickly. And now, of course, we can recognize these ad hominem attacks and attempts to divert blame to others as the defense mechanisms used by habitual liars when they’ve been caught dead to rights.

Filling in the Gaps

And Mellaart didn’t stop there.

After being expelled from Türkiye, Mellaart kept his head down for about two decades, focusing most of his energies on teaching. In the early 1980s he developed a new hypothesis that the ancient Anatolians had a complex and rich religion centered around the worship of a Mother Goddess which he later expounded on in four volumes of The Goddess from Anatolia.

With no new work then being done at Çatalhöyük, Mellaart had to support his hypothesis by analyzing and interpreting work that had already been done. Many scholars did not agree with those analyses and interpretations, but that’s cool! This sort of debate is exactly what scholarship is about.

What’s not cool is that when Mellaart could not find evidence that supported his hypothesis, he resorted to making it up.

Large parts of The Goddess of Anatolia are devoted to Mellaart’s analyses of objects that perfectly support his argument. Textiles. Murals and mosaics. Figurines and shrines.

The problem was that these artifacts did not exist.

They had never been reported to Turkish authorities; no other archaeologist at Çatalhöyük had ever seen them; Mellaart himself made no mention of their existence while he was working at the site, and in fact he had explicitly noted that such artifacts did not exist.

But now that Mellaart needed evidence to bolster his arguments, they had very conveniently appeared.

The massive murals, in particular, had purportedly been found in situ but had started crumbling into dust as soon as they had been exposed to air and before they could be photographed. That meant Mellaart had to reconstruct them from teeny tiny plaster fragments. Except there were no plaster fragments to be analyzed, so Mellaart was working off his notes. When other scholars asked to see those notes, Mellasrt told them they had been destroyed by a fire at his in-laws’ vacation home in 1976.

Which is to say that the murals were not merely reconstructions. They were reconstructions from notes, which were themselves reconstructions from memory since the originals had been destroyed, made about tiny fragments of artifacts Mellaart (and no one else) had seen only fleetingly a few decades earlier.

This was not like using generative fill in Photoshop to cover up cracks and creases in a photograph. This was asking Adobe Firefly AI to create a brand new photograph from a few pixels. Not even that. A rough description of those pixels.

No one bought it.

Nor did anyone buy it when Mellaart unearthed “inscribed pebbles” while walking the beach at Beldibi, which he then claimed were twelve thousand years old. This one elicited a particularly savage comment from forgery and fraud expert Oscar Muscarella…

It would be a bad joke to say that we eagerly await the next archaeological discovery of J. Mellaart, simply because he has caused too much damage by exposing archaeology’s soft underbelly: any archaeologist can publish what he wishes.

Mellaart even kept it up after death.

In 2017, Mellaart’s son Alan invited Swiss archaeologist Eberhard Zangger to help him organize his father’s study to see if there was anything in there worth publishing.

Mellaart had liked Zangger because they both believed that the Sea Peoples were Anatolian in origin. At one point he had even offered to provide Zangger with translations of Bronze Age inscriptions that would back up their claims, but Zangger had been advised by senior colleagues to ignore Mellaart. He had apparently forgotten that advice in the intervening years.

While Zangger was going through the study he came across the translations that Mellaart had offered him earlier, including messages from Assyrian king Ashurbanipal to the Lydians; some inscriptions from monuments of the Luwian culture; and “the Beyköy text” which translated a 3,000-year-old epic poem about a hitherto-unknown Trojan prince. Zangger took those notes and published them.

And then got smacked down. Hard. Because it once again turned out, these very convenient inscriptions which so perfectly proved James Mellaart’s hypotheses had never been seen by anyone else.

Diving back into the papers Zangger uncovered evidence he missed the first time, evidence which suggested that Mellaart had not been translating inscriptions but composing them from scratch. He published a mea culpa retracting the initial paper, and then several more papers exposing the depths to which Mellaart had sunk to perpetuate his fraud. Which included creating fake stories about how the inscriptions had been discovered in the first place. (For instance, one set of inscriptions were supposed to have been seen by French archaeologist Georges Perrott only to have vanished later, but Perrott does not seem to have actually made the trip Mellaart references.)

It was now clear to just about everyone that Mellaart had a bad and long-standing habit of fabricating evidence to support his half-baked ideas. It was also clear that the Dorak treasure was only the first link in a long chain of fraud and deception.

Now, you may be wondering how James Mellaart got away with it for so long, and the simple answer is… he didn’t?

Dorak was his first real fabrication and it was a disaster.

Other archaeologists were willing to take Mellaart’s word that the treasure existed, but that was about it. No one was willing to back his extravagant claims about what it implied until such time as it became available for study, which of course could not happen.

Meanwhile, Mellaart had executed the hoax in such a clumsy way that he became the subject of an international criminal investigation that could only conclude he was lying about something even if they weren’t sure what that something was. Mellaart’s previous good work and influential patrons shielded him from the worst of the consequences but he was still permanently removed from fieldwork, which more or less ended his career and influence. His later ideas about matriarchy and Mother Goddesses were branded as highly speculative and largely ignored.

The sad thing is, it wasn’t necessary! Had Mellaart been willing to rest on his actual accomplishments he would still be remembered as one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest archaeologists.

But for James Mellaart, that was never going to be enough. Fortunately, the only person he destroyed in his attempt to fake his way to glory was himself.

Not So Fast, Mr. Sabata

Oh, and just in case anyone is wondering how things ended up in “The Adventure of the Golden Bracelet”: It turns out it was all a trap for Simon Sabata, arranged by a former rival wh ose career he had casually destroyed. In the end Solar Pons satisfies both his contract and justice by returning the treasure to Sabata in a way that makes the archaeologist seem guilty of smuggling, which effectively destroys his career.

“Seldom is revenge so sweet,” said Pons at our next meeting… “Nathanial Corum must be hugging himself with glee! Sabata’s ruin was inherent in his nature, and Corum knew how to draw it out.”