Dominique Goerlitz

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Dominique Goerlitz

Dominique Görlitz (born June 15, 1966 in Gotha ) is a German vegetation geographer , author, filmmaker and speaker. He was best known as the "Stone Age sailors" by his reed boat expeditions ABORA over the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic to support the adoption of prehistoric marine and intercultural interactions between distant civilizations in the early days.

Life and work

Görlitz, who grew up in Hochheim (Nessetal) , has been interested in prehistoric reed boat building since his early youth , inspired by reports on Thor Heyerdahl . During his school days he and schoolmates built small test boats on the Thuringian river Nesse . He studied sport and biology for teaching at grammar schools at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (FSU Jena). Together with fellow students and his partner Cornelia Lorenz, he began to build sailed reed boats based on scientific models. After studying and training, he initially worked as a high school teacher in Borna from 1995 to 2003. As part of Jugend forscht , he worked with students on the reconstruction of ancient watercraft. To this end, he also founded the “Experimental Archeology and Research Chemnitz eV” association. During this time, the reed boats ABORA I & II and sailed dugouts were built.

As a student at the FSU Jena, Görlitz had already devoted himself to studying the long-range spread of cultivated plants distributed overseas. In doing so, he established close contacts to the Leibniz Institute for Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Gatersleben in order to empirically substantiate his theoretical approaches through large-scale experiments on the seas. In summer 2012 he obtained a doctorate in natural sciences in this area of ​​his studies with his dissertation on "Prehistoric mechanisms of spread of cultivated plants spread across the Atlantic" at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg .

With his first experiments with smaller reed boats from the DILMUN I – III series as well as physical experiments at the Kiel University of Applied Sciences and at the Stevens Institute of Technology , New Jersey , he tried to prove his hypothesis before and during the ABORA experiments.

Dominique Görlitz has been a member of the Explorers Club since 2003 . Since then he has already carried out two flag expeditions for the club. During his expedition breaks he gives lectures on the topics of working together in teams and dealing with crisis situations. In addition, he organizes exhibitions on his research results and also produces his own expedition documentation for domestic and foreign television stations.

Science-philosophical and historical background

ABORA I at sunset on the Mediterranean

A central starting point for Görlitz is the maritime history of mankind against the background of the hypothesis that prehistoric and early seafarers caused intercontinental cultural diffusion processes . That is why - and also about the philosophical consideration that our modern society can learn a lot from cultural history and the countless cultural "crashes" of earlier societies - his ABORA experiments are also part of a long-term scientific program . The Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl, who died in 2002, is repeatedly cited as Görlitz's role model. Heyerdahl, who could only sail before the wind with his reconstructions, however, mainly used ancient sources from Egypt. As a plant geographer, Görlitz takes a different approach. In his opinion, the technical problem of sailing against the wind must have been solved as early as the Neolithic. In his opinion, colonization and cultural exchange across the Mediterranean would not have been possible otherwise. For this reason, he turned to the prehistoric rock art stations of Upper Egypt, where he discovered several clues for the use of swords on rock art of the Negade culture (3900-3100 BC).

Another topic of Dominique Görlitz's work concerns the reconstruction of early historical trade routes, especially for metals. Görlitz advocates the thesis that tools made of iron were used very early in Egypt. In addition to his own Cheops project in 2013 (alleged finds of iron residues in the Cheops pyramid), Görlitz also cites further evidence. The Hittites were therefore not the first "iron producers"; Long before them, iron had been produced and used in northern Mesopotamia , the Transcaucasus and Anatolia . The lack of production sites or slag specifically in Egypt would mean that the Egyptians must have imported the iron in question, if they actually used it. Already Herodotus had mentioned very early trade contacts of the Egyptians to eastern Black Sea region into it.

Projects and Expeditions

Project group “Experimental Archeology” Borna

During his activity at the grammar school "Am Breiten Teich" from 1995, Görlitz organized a project group "Experimental Archeology" at this school. As part of Jugend forscht , he worked with students on the reconstruction of ancient watercraft. In 1995 and 1996 the “Experimental Archeology” project group tested two six-meter-long dugouts made of poplar wood with sails on the Wangenheim reservoir and on the Baltic Sea . The ABORA I (see ABORA expeditions) also emerged from this project group.

Reed boats

Dominique Görlitz carried out a total of 4 reed boat expeditions in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic between 1999 and 2019, see the page on the ABORA expeditions. In addition, from 1990 to 1994 smaller reed boats were built under the names DILMUN I-III , only suitable for day test drives , in 2009 the DILMUN IV and 2015 the DILMUN S ; these are also described there .

Cheops project

In April 2013, Görlitz and Stefan Erdmann , an amateur archaeologist and author of conspiracy-theoretical books, took samples from the ceiling of the King's Chamber during a visit to the Egyptian pyramid of Cheops and brought them to the Fresenius laboratory in Dresden for analysis . In addition, they are said to have scraped off color pigments from the painting on the wall of the uppermost relief chamber above, whereby the pharaoh's hieroglyphic cartridge was damaged. In autumn 2014 there was a trial in Cairo in which Görlitz was sentenced to five years imprisonment in absentia.

Former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, used this case for Egyptian domestic politics, claiming that the Germans were working for Robert Bauval , who allegedly advocated the theory that "the pyramids were built by Jews 15,000 years ago." Monica Hanna von of the American University of Cairo , founder of the “Egypt's Heritage Task Force”, confirmed the damage to the cartridge, accused Görlitz and Erdmann of the crime, and filed criminal charges against them in Germany. In addition, the six companions living in Egypt were arrested. They were also sentenced to five years in prison and imprisoned immediately after the verdict was pronounced. Robert Schoch from Boston University published exonerating pictures on February 19, 2014, which u. a. show that the chisel marks in question were already present on the cartridge in 2006.

In December 2015, the decision was overturned by the responsible district court in Cairo, which granted the lawyers' request for an appeal. The court came to the conclusion that the allegations that had led to the conviction of the accused in the first trial could not be upheld. Therefore the case has to be renegotiated. The arrested Egyptians were then released from custody. In Germany, at the beginning of 2015, based on information from Egypt at the time, the Chemnitz District Court sentenced Görlitz to a fine for theft and property damage.

In Egypt, two separate appeal procedures were then scheduled. In 2016, a new criminal trial took place against the Egyptian citizens, who in 2013 were responsible as supervisors for the two German researchers and their cameraman. You have been acquitted of all charges. In 2018, the appeal proceedings against the three Germans were carried out at the Criminal Court in Cairo. Based on the ruling of 2016, the allegations of willful damage to the antiquities against them were dropped by a resolution of May 9, 2018. This decision was accepted in principle by all parties, but Dominique Görlitz retained legal action against the antiquities authority, Dr. Zahi Hawass and Dr. Monica Hanna for defamation and defamation .

Works

  • Prehistoric mechanisms of spread of cultivated plants spread across the Atlantic. Dissertation. Gotha, 2012, ISBN 978-3-939182-46-7 .
  • The unsolved mystery of the history of discovery: Did Columbus arrive 1500 years too late? 2011, ISBN 978-3-939182-34-4 .
  • The beginnings of seafaring / The origins of seafaring. The double ancestry of the first sailing boat. (= Series of publications by the State Museum for Nature and Man . 49). Verlag Isensee, 2007, ISBN 978-3-89995-420-3 .
  • With the reed boat through the sea of ​​stars. The reed boat Abora II cruises along ancient sky routes through the Mediterranean. 2006, ISBN 3-00-021270-1 .
  • Reed boat ABORA. Sailing against the wind in the Mediterranean. DSV-Verlag, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-88412-329-7 .

Movies

Web links

Egypt scandal

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stone Age Sailors. “Sorry, Columbus!” , Spiegel Online , July 12, 2007.
  2. ↑ Ursula Wirth: Dominique Görlitz 'doctoral thesis published as a book. ( Memento from February 12, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) at: wochenspiegel-sachsen.de , August 1, 2012 (accessed on October 23, 2012)
  3. ↑ a b c speaker page by Dominique Görlitz
  4. ↑ Dominique Görlitz: With the reed boat through the sea of ​​stars. The reed boat ABORA II cruises along ancient routes through the Mediterranean Sea. 2006.
  5. ↑ Dunham, D. & Young, W.-J. (1942): An Occurrence of Iron in the Fourth Dynasty. In: The Journal of Egyptian Anthropology. Vol. 28, pp. 58ff.
  6. ^ Pleiner, R. (2000): Iron in Archeology. The European bloomery smelters. Archaeologicky ustav AVCR, Phraha.
  7. ↑ Lychatz, B. (2013): The metallurgy of the racing process. Tech. Univ. Bergakademie Freiberg.
  8. ↑ Nakai I., Abe Y ,. Tantrakarn K., Omura S. & Erkut S. (2018): Preliminary report on the Analysis of an Early Bronze Age Iron Dagger Excavated from Alacahöyük. AAS XVII, p. 321ff.
  9. ↑ Herodotus, Book of Histories, Volumes 1 and 2
  10. ↑ Einbaum - 1994/95. Retrieved on May 25, 2020 (German).
  11. ↑ Liza Ulitzka: " Riskantes Pyramidenspiel " August 14, 2014, at: wienerzeitung.at p. 2 of 3.
  12. ^ Anna-Katharina Blaß: Protest from Egypt - German hobby researchers scratch samples from the Cheops pyramid. In: Spiegel online. November 21, 2013, accessed November 21, 2013 .
  13. ^ Pyramid expert from Gotha in Egypt sentenced to five years in prison. In: Thuringian General. (accessed August 14, 2014)
  14. ↑ to the person Monica Hanna engl. Article @ dailynewsegypt.com (accessed September 8, 2014)
  15. ↑ Liza Ulitzka: " Risky Pyramid Game " August 14, 2014, at: wienerzeitung.at
  16. ↑ Stephan Schön: Accused in Egypt. In: Saxon newspaper. 6./7. September 2014, p. 3.
  17. ↑ Statement from Dominique Görlitz (February 17, 2014)
  18. ^ Steffen Könau: Egypt releases all helpers from Saxony's Indiana Jones. December 17, 2015 (accessed: March 17, 2016)
  19. ^ Criminal proceedings against experimental archaeologists concluded. at Freie Presse.de , March 5, 2015 (accessed May 17, 2015)
  20. ↑ Digital copy of the judgment of the Cairo Criminal Court of May 9, 2018 in the appeal proceedings against Dominique Görlitz et al.
personal data
SURNAME Goerlitz, Dominique
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German hobby archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 15, 1966
PLACE OF BIRTH Gotha