How one archaeologist’s drawings became an over 100 million dollar smuggling scandal

In May 1962, the Turkish daily Milliyet ran a three day campaign against the British archaeologist James Mellaart. Its charge: that he had carried valuable artworks out of the country, worth an estimated one billion Turkish lira ($110.8 million as in 1962 the exchange rate was nearly 9.02 Turkish lira per 1 US dollar). The treasure has never turned up. No museum, private collector or auction house has ever shown a piece of it, and Mellaart is the only person known to have claimed he saw it. Archaeologist David Stronach noted in a 2020 essay that none of the objects has ever appeared in a collection or on the art market.

A bracelet, a train and a stranger

Mellaart was making his name at the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara at the time. In November 1958 he told his colleague David Stronach, and his superior Seton Lloyd, that he had come across an extraordinary Bronze Age collection in a private house in Izmir.

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In the version he gave Stronach, it started on a train in 1951. A young woman was wearing an ancient gold bracelet, and she said her name was Anna Papastrati. She took him to her home, where he says he spent several days with the objects. No photographs were allowed, so he drew them. Her family, she reportedly told him, had dug them out of graves near the village of Dorak during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22.

A throne that exists only on paper

Since no photographs existed, Lloyd ruled out a conventional scholarly paper. In November 1959, the Illustrated London News carried a four-page illustrated report. The list of finds was long: weapons, gold and silver vessels, jewelry, five female statuettes, textile remains, two wooden tables and a dismantled throne covered in gold. Published drawings showed sheets of gold that purportedly had an inscription that named the Egyptian pharaoh Sahure. A royal title not otherwise attested raised questions that attracted scholarly scrutiny of the inscription.

Papastrati was nowhere to be found. Kenneth Pearson and Patricia Connor, journalists who investigated the affair for a 1967 book, wrote that Mellaart’s address was in a commercial area with no houses. Later scholars add a cautionary note: “Izmir had several streets of the same name, renamed over the years, so the address cannot be ruled out with certainty. What is certain is that nothing he describes has ever appeared in a collection or on the art market.

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And then the bill arrives

The affair had consequences for Mellaart’s work in Turkey. In 1964, Turkish authorities refused him permission to excavate at Çatalhöyük, although he returned to the site in 1965 under a permit issued to Ian Todd. Further work was subsequently stopped. The restrictions did not, by themselves, establish that the treasure was fabricated or that Mellaart had smuggled antiquities.

In 1968, a committee established by the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara concluded that Mellaart’s drawings were genuine records of a collection that had existed at the time and that allegations of his involvement in illegal activity were unfounded. That finding did not settle the question of whether the objects themselves were authentic. Later researchers continued to challenge Mellaart’s account, and no independently documented collection has emerged.

A story that would not stay still

His account did not hold steady either. In the version he gave Stronach, the train journey was in 1951. Talking to Pearson and Connor in 1966, he placed it in the early summer of 1958. The reasons he gave for having no photographs also varied. When Lloyd asked for the original sketches, Mellaart said he had thrown them away. They were found among his papers after his death in 2012.

What his study revealed

In February 2018, Swiss geoarchaeologist Eberhard Zangger examined papers from Mellaart’s former London study with permission from his son, Alan. According to Luwian Studies, the examination revealed evidence that Mellaart had invented translations of documents he presented as ancient. The papers also included sketches associated with Çatalhöyük and a lengthy manuscript on the so-called Dorak treasure.

These findings added to doubts about Mellaart’s reliability, although they did not independently establish the fate or authenticity of every object he claimed to have seen. There were also slates scratched with sketches of Çatalhöyük murals. Among the papers was a manuscript on the Dorak treasure, as long as a doctoral thesis.

Why would a celebrated archaeologist do this? Scholars do not agree. Stronach, in a 2020 essay, argued that Mellaart invented the treasure after a disappointing 1958 dig season, to show that western Anatolia once had a powerful Bronze Age kingdom worth funding. Others have suggested a prank, or a cover story for the real owners of looted objects.

A price with nothing to hold

Antiquities disputes today usually involve objects that exist, but whose past cannot be proved. The Guennol Stargazer, a marble idol from Anatolia, sold at Christie’s in 2017 for $12.7 million, and US courts later rejected Turkey’s claim to it, finding that it had waited too long to act. Dorak is the reverse case: a pharaoh’s name, a gilded throne, a headline price and nothing to hold.

The objects were never weighed, photographed or catalogued in such a way that other researchers would have been able to verify Mellaart’s story. The billion lira ($110.8 million) figure became part of the scandal, but was never a verified valuation of an authenticated hoard. Over six decades later, the Dorak case is one where the drawings survived, the objects never surfaced and the evidence never resolved the central question.