Word: mellaart
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...revelations may seriously undermine confidence in the use of recently bought antiquities to describe past civilizations. In particular, the forgeries could lead to distrust of current archaeological concepts about ancient Anatolian culture. The Hacilar deposit was uncovered by British Archaeologist James Mellaart after he had been led to the spot by a Turkish farmer in 1956. Mellaart's find reversed the long-held belief that Anatolia, the area that is now Turkey, was only peripheral to the advanced Neolithic culture of Mesopotamia. So great was the wealth of the material found at Hacilar that some historians concluded that Anatolia...
...After Mellaart's discoveries in the late 1950s, there was a surge into the market of "Hacilar" artifacts that some archaeologists attributed to illicit excavating in the area. But doubts about the authenticity of some of the "Hacilar" material began to crop up in 1965, when the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford bought a two-headed ceramic vase on the London antiquities market. The style was distinctively that of Hacilar; but at the same time, at least three similar vases were sold for as much as $7,200 to collections in Europe and America. This coincidence, combined with several...
...agree with Berve's thesis that Homer's poems are far from literal truth. But few are quite so willing to reject Homer entirely. Simply because Troy seems to have been much smaller than Homer's description of it in the Iliad, says British Archaeologist James Mellaart, does not preclude the possibility that Homer may have patterned his story on an actual event. Because Homer wrote 400 years after the war, adds U.S. Archaeologist Rhys Carpenter, he probably could be forgiven lapses on particulars. Berve does not think that Homer should be treated so charitably...
...Mother with Navel. Life in Çatal Hiiyiik centered around religious ceremonials. The largest rooms in the city were windowless shrines furnished with a wide assortment of idols and symbols. The center of attraction was usually a chunky goddess modeled of clay in a spread-legged attitude that Dr. Mellaart calls the "giving birth" position. She is, he thinks, an early representative of the Great Mother cult that dominated the Mediterranean world for many thousand years...
Other goddesses are slimmer, and some have prominent navels. One is spraddled against the wall with her navel painted in concentric circles like a target-a treatment that Dr. Mellaart thinks shows concern with the continuity of life. Male gods are not common in the Çatal Hiiyuk pantheon, and those that have survived are generally shown riding on a small creature that Dr. Mellaart says is a bull...