Eberhard Zangger

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Eberhard Zangger (2018)

Eberhard Zangger (born April 9, 1958 in Kamen ) is a German geoarchaeologist , communications consultant and publicist. He explores the interrelationships between culture and landscape in the eastern Mediterranean. Since 1994 his theses have dealt with the Luwian culture in western Asia Minor in the 2nd millennium BC. In 2014 he founded the charitable foundation Luwian Studies , of which he is president.

Life

After secondary school, Zangger began training as a technical assistant at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt am Main in 1974 . In 1976 he trained as a geological taxidermist in Bochum. In Bochum he studied for the high school graduation while he worked during the day at the German Mining Museum in Bochum . He then studied geology / paleontology at the University of Kiel and acquired for a graduate studies from 1984 to 1988 at the Stanford University the doctoral degree ( PhD ). He was then a research fellow at the University of Cambridge . From 1991 to 1999 Zangger ran the Geoarcheology International consultancy in Zurich, which took part in around six archaeological field projects in the eastern Mediterranean every year.

From 1982 Zangger specialized in geoarchaeology. His early research subjects and discoveries included the coastal location of the Dimini Magoula in Neolithic central Greece, the extent of Lake Lernaean , the exact age and function of the Mycenaean river diversion in the area of ​​the lower town of Tiryns , the island character of Asine , the artificial harbor of Nestor near Pylos including a clean water flushing mechanism and an artificial dam at the Minoan Monastiraki in central Crete.

Became internationally known Zangger 1992 with his interpretation of Plato's Atlantis as Troy , which he in his first book The Flood from Heaven (dt. Atlantis A legend is deciphered.. The first time expounded): Plato have unwittingly an Egyptian version of the story of Troy end to processed his Atlantis myth. Zangger's argument was based on parallels between Plato's statements about the war between Greece and Atlantis and the Homeric account of the Trojan War . In an article in the Oxford Journal of Archeology in 1993, Zangger listed numerous similarities between Plato's description of Atlantis and various descriptions of Troy in the Late Bronze Age. In the professional world, however, these theses mostly met with rejection, as Zangger's text interpretation was accused of methodical deficiencies.

Another book followed in 1994 with A New Struggle for Troy , in which Zangger expanded his thesis and included the Egyptian temple inscriptions about the sea peoples' invasions around 1200 BC. Associated with the legend of the Trojan War. In this book he developed for the first time a chronological sequence of political and economic developments in the eastern Mediterranean in the 13th century BC. From his point of view. With this, Zangger made it clear that his real interest was not the search for Atlantis, but Troy and the end of the Bronze Age. He interpreted the legend of the Trojan War as a reminder of a Bronze Age "World War", during which the states of the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC. BC largely collapsed . In his presentation, Zangger attached greater importance to the states in western and north-western Anatolia - the small Luwian kingdoms known from Hittite documents such as Arzawa , Mira , Wilusa , Lukka and the Šeḫa river country - than was generally the case at the time. In his view, these small states were united in their economic and military importance with the Mycenaean Greece or the Minoan Crete comparable. They opposed the Hittite Empire and can be found as " sea ​​peoples " in the Egyptian sources from the time of Merenptah and Ramses III. again. Allies of this coalition were Assyria , the Kaškäer and Libyan tribes. Allies of the Hittites were (besides the vassals Amurru and Ugarit ) Egypt and Mycenaean Greece.

In a review of the books The Flood from Heaven and A New Battle for Troy in the Journal of Field Archeology , the American early historian Daniel Pullen of Florida State University highlighted Zangger's approach. Zangger, according to Pullen, used "the exactness of scientific methodology to explain the end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean".

In his third book The Future of the Past from 1998, Zangger finally outlined the development in the 12th century BC. After the Trojan War. According to Zangger's theory, scattered groups of survivors of the Sea Peoples' invasions and the Trojan War founded new settlements in Italy and Syria / Palestine and thus contributed to the emergence of the Etruscan and Phoenician cultures. He also cited arguments that the eruption of the Santorini volcano in the 17th century BC No caldera collapse and thus no tsunami can have occurred. Zangger considers natural disasters as the trigger for cultural upheavals to be overrated. Instead, he advocates greater involvement of the natural sciences and an increased inclusion of urban planning and hydraulic engineering in archeology.

Also in 1998, in cooperation with the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) in Hanover , Zangger prepared a helicopter-based exploration project in the Troas plain to find old settlement and port structures with the help of geomagnetic measurements. The news magazine Der Spiegel dedicated a cover story to this project. The Turkish Ministry of Culture did not issue a permit for this.

In April 2001, Zangger retired from research for several years. As early as 1999, he started working as a public relations consultant at Stöhlker AG in Zollikon near Zurich. In 2002 he started his own business and founded the PR agency for science communications zangger.org - science communications (today the agency for corporate communications science communications GmbH) .

In 2016, Zangger's book The Luwian Civilization - The Missing Link in the Aegean Bronze Age was published , which was followed in 2017 by The Luwian and the Trojan War - A History of Discovery (dt. Die Luwische Kultur - The Missing Element in the Aegean Bronze Age ) . In both books, Zangger deals with the Bronze Age cultures of Western Asia Minor, their relationships with the neighboring high cultures and the related research.

In 2019, together with the archaeologist and astronomer Rita Gautschy from the University of Basel , Zangger published a new interpretation of the Hittite rock sanctuary Yazılıkaya near Ḫattuša , according to which the sequence of rock reliefs in Chamber A is a lunisolar calendar .

Luwian Studies Foundation

Zangger has been President of the Board of Trustees of the international non-profit foundation Luwian Studies since April 2014 . In the commercial register of the Canton of Zurich, its purpose is stated as "researching the second millennium BC in western Asia Minor and disseminating knowledge about it". Ivo Hajnal , Jorrit Kelder , Matthias Oertle and Jeffrey Spier are members of the Board of Trustees .

As part of its research work, the foundation systematically recorded over 340 extensive settlement areas from the Middle and Late Bronze Ages in western Asia Minor. These sites are presented in a public database on the website. The foundation provides financial support for archaeological excavations and surveys as well as for linguistic studies that are dedicated to the cultures of the Middle and Late Bronze Age in western Asia Minor.

James Mellaart's estate

In June 2017, Zangger received unpublished documents from the estate of the British prehistorian James Mellaart , which the latter had marked as particularly important. The writings in Mellaart's estate related to two sets of documents, both of which were allegedly found in 1878 in a village called Beyköy 34 kilometers north of Afyonkarahisar in what is now western Turkey. On the one hand, there was a Luwian hieroglyphic inscription (" HL Beyköy 2 ") almost 30 meters long on limestone from around 1180 BC. BC, of ​​which Mellaart only owned one drawing. On the other hand, according to Mellaart's statements, bronze tablets with Hittite texts in Akkadian cuneiform script (" cuneiform Beyköy texts ") were found, which described the political events during almost the entire Bronze Age from a Western Asia Minor perspective. These texts were only available in the form of English translations.

In December 2017, Zangger and the Dutch linguist Fred Woudhuizen published the hieroglyphic Luwian part of the estate (including texts from Edremit, Yazılıtaş, Dağardı and Şahankaya) in the Dutch archeology journal Talanta . Zangger distanced himself from Mellaart at the beginning of 2018 and accused him of forging documents. Further research by Zangger in Mellaart's former study in London in February 2018 would have shown that Mellaart had completely invented the "cuneiform Beyköy texts". Zangger had previously described these texts as a discovery that "sheds a new light on Luwian culture - and the Trojan War ". On the other hand, studies by Woudhuizen, which he published together with Zangger, showed that the Luwian hieroglyphic inscription HL Beyköy 2 is probably real and at least Mellaart could not have forged.

Trivia

In his 1997 novel Troja Zangger, the German writer Gisbert Haefs set a small literary monument in the figure of "Tsanghar". Haefs processed the Troy-Atlantis thesis for his novel.

Fonts

  • The Landscape Evolution of the Argive Plain (Greece). Paleo-Ecology, Holocene Depositional History and Coastline Changes. PhD dissertation at Stanford University, University Microfilm International, Ann Arbor, Michigan 1988.
  • Prehistoric Coastal Environments in Greece: The Vanished Landscapes of Dimini Bay and Lake Lerna. In: Journal of Field Archeology . 18 (1), 1991, pp. 1-15.
  • The Flood from Heaven - Deciphering the Atlantis Legend. Sidgwick & Jackson, London 1992, ISBN 0-283-06084-0 .
    • German edition as Atlantis. A legend is being deciphered. Translated by Ulrike Wesel and Klaus Timmermann. Droemer Knaur, Munich 1992, ISBN 978-3-426-26591-8 .
    • Most recently as a licensed edition: Bechtermünz, Augsburg 1996, ISBN 978-3-86047-171-5 .
  • The Geoarchaeology of the Argolid. (Ed. By the German Archaeological Institute, Athens), Mann, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-7861-1700-4 .
  • Plato's Atlantis Account: A distorted recollection of the Trojan War. In: Oxford Journal of Archeology . 18 (1), 1993, pp. 77-87.
  • The Island of Asine: A paleogeographic reconstruction. In: Opuscula Atheniensa . XX.15, 1994, pp. 221-239.
  • Another battle for Troy. Archeology in Crisis. Droemer Knaur, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-426-26682-2 .
  • With Michael Timpson, Sergei Yazvenko, Falko Kuhnke and Jost Knauss: The Pylos Regional Archaeological Project; Landscape Evolution and Site Preservation. In: Hesperia . 66 (4), 1997, pp. 549-641.
  • The Atlantis = Troy concept - on the trail of a lost culture in western Asia Minor. In: Quarterly journal of the Natural Research Society in Zurich . 143 (1), 1998, pp. 13-23.
  • The future of the past. Archeology in the 21st Century. Schneekluth, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-7951-1652-X .
  • With Michael Timpson, Sergei Yazvenko and Horst Leiermann: Searching for the Ports of Troy. In: Philippe Leveau (Ed.): Environmental Reconstruction in Mediterranean Landscape Archeology (= Graeme Barker (series editor): The archeology of the Mediterranean landscape . Vol. 2.). Oxbow, Oxford 1999, ISBN 1-900188-63-5 .
  • Some Open Questions About the Plain of Troia. In: Troia and the Troad - Scientific Approaches. Springer, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-540-43711-8 , pp. 317-324.
  • The Luwian Civilization. The Missing Link in the Aegean Bronze Age. Ege Yayınları, Istanbul 2016, ISBN 978-605-9680-11-0 .
  • The Luwian culture. The missing element in the Aegean Bronze Age. Ege Yayınları, Istanbul 2016, ISBN 978-605-9680-21-9
  • The Luwians and the Trojan War. Orell Füssli, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-280-05647-9

Remarks

  1. ^ Eberhard Zangger: Prehistoric Coastal Environments in Greece: The Vanished Landscapes of Dimini Bay and Lake Lerna. In: Journal of Field Archeology. 18, 1991, pp. 1-15 abstract
  2. ^ Eberhard Zangger: Landscape Changes around Tiryns during the Bronze Age In: American Journal of Archeology. 98 (2), 1994, pp. 189-212.
  3. ^ Eberhard Zangger: The island of Asine: A palaeogeographic reconstruction. In: Opuscula Atheniensia. XX: 15, 1994, pp. 221-239.
  4. ^ The Pylos Regional Archaeological Project. Retrieved January 21, 2015 .
  5. ^ Plato's Atlantis account - a distorted recollection of the Trojan War . In: Oxford Journal of Archeology . Volume 12, No. 1 , March 1993, p. 77-87 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1468-0092.1993.tb00283.x ( abstract [accessed September 5, 2014]).
  6. ↑ Who Were the Sea People? In: Saudi Aramco World . Volume 46, 3 (May / June), 1995 ( saudiaramcoworld.com [accessed August 5, 2013]).
  7. ^ Review by Daniel Pullen In: Journal of Field Archeology. Vol. 21, No. 4 (Winter, 1994), pp. 522-525.
  8. ↑ The Philosopher's Puzzle . In: Der Spiegel . No. 53 , 1998 ( online ).
  9. ↑ Unit B 3.14: airborne geophysics ( Memento of 21 November 2002 in the Internet Archive ), BGR , July 20th 2,001th
  10. ^ Thomas Ribi: Controversy in the archeology: decisive battle for Troy. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Retrieved June 15, 2016 .
  11. ↑ Cornelia Eisenach: The secret of the rocks of Yazilikaya. In: Higgs.ch. June 20, 2019, accessed on June 28, 2019 (German).
  12. ↑ Yazılıkaya: A 3000-year-old Hittite mystery may finally be solved. In: New Scientist. June 19, 2019, accessed June 28, 2019 .
  13. ^ Entry of the Luwian Studies Foundation in the commercial register of the Canton of Zurich
  14. ^ Thomas Ribi: Controversy in the archeology: decisive battle for Troy. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Retrieved June 15, 2016 .
  15. ^ Mattias Schulz: The Zero World War. Archeology. Paid online . Spiegel 28, July 9, 2016, p. 102
  16. ^ Reference database of Luwian Studies. Luwian Studies, accessed May 14, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Frank Thadeusz: The Revenge of the Sonnyboy. In: Der Spiegel. October 7, 2017, accessed May 14, 2019 .
  18. ^ A b Eberhard Zangger, Fred Woudhuizen: Rediscovered Luwian Hieroglyphic Inscriptions from Western Asia Minor . In: Jan P. Stronk, Maarten D. de Weerd (eds.): TALANTA. Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society . tape 50 (2018) . Wolters-Noordhoff, 2017, ISSN  0165-2486 , p. 9–56 (English, digitized version [PDF; 5.0 MB ; accessed on May 14, 2019]).
  19. ↑ Owen Jarus: Famed Archaeologist 'Discovered' His Own Fakes at 9,000-Year-Old Settlement. In: Live Science. March 12, 2018, accessed May 6, 2019 .
  20. ↑ British prehistorian forged documents all his life. In: Luwian Studies. March 1, 2018, accessed May 3, 2019 .
  21. ↑ Eberhard Zangger: The Luwians and the Trojan War . Orell Füssli, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-280-05647-9 , The texts from Beyköy emerge again, p. 299 .
  22. ↑ Fred Woudhuizen, Eberhard Zangger: Arguments for the Authenticity of the Luwian Hieroglyphic Texts from the Mellaart Files . In: Jan Stronk, Maarten de Weerd (ed.): TALANTA. Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society . tape 50 (2018) . Wolters-Noordhoff, 2017, ISSN  0165-2486 , p. 183-212 (English).

Web links
personal data
SURNAME Zangger, Eberhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German geoarchaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Came