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
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 claimed to have access to an unpublished cuneiform text which gives a list of synchronisms between Lydia (a kingdom in western Turkey in classical times) and Assyria, running back 21 generations from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.