Diggers

The way for a nation to keep its memory bright, say archaeologists, is to write its records on durable material which will eventually be found. The Hittites of northeastern Asia Minor (2000-1200 B.C.) did the trick well. Their archives, written in cuneiform characters on baked clay bricks, were dug up in 1906. The records gave scholars the Hittite view of late Bronze Age politics. The Hittites, said the Hittites, were lords of all they surveyed.

As the scholars read more of the bricks, they found that the Hittite archives had not been thoroughly screened. In them were records of campaigns not convincingly triumphant. There were even official letters from a powerful nation, Arzawa, which had matched the Hittites blow for blow. Except for these few clues, however, Arzawa vanished from history.

Champagne Glass Trail. Archaeologist Seton Lloyd, director of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, tells in the Scientific American how British diggers uncovered Arzawa. First, Student James Mellaart reconnoitered southwestern Anatolia, looking for mounds, stones and bits of pottery. Some of the potsherds could be fitted together into graceful drinking vessels like champagne glasses. They led Mellaart, like bits of paper in a paper chase, to the centers of the long-forgotten culture, southeast of Istanbul.

A full-dress expedition followed and attacked a promising mound called Beycesultan on the headwaters of the Meander* River. First find was archaeological peanuts: a Byzantine town about 2,000 years younger than Arzawa. Under the Byzantine ruins, the diggers uncovered a row of small houses that had been destroyed by fire. Mixed in the ruins were the telltale "champagne glasses." The first bit of Arzawa had come into the sunlight.

As the diggers extended their trenches across the mound, they found an enormous mass of burned limestone and brickwork. It turned out to be a palace, whose plan suggested in some ways the sophisticated civilization of Knossos on the island of Crete. The diggers speculated that when Knossos was destroyed by the Mycenians (Homeric Greeks) about 1400 B.C., a Cretan architect may have escaped and plied his trade among the Arzawans.

In any case, the Arzawans were no barbarians. At one entrance of the palace was a kind of bathroom, where visitors washed themselves before making their bows at court. One odd feature of the inner chambers: floors raised about a yard above the ground. Beneath the floors were small passages. They suggest air ducts of a heating system, but nothing of the sort is known to have existed until 1,000 years later.

Bronze-Age Bar. The palace was well looted when it was burned, but smaller structures built on its ruins were destroyed without looting. Most interesting was a row of little shops. One was a Bronze Age pub with sunken vats for the wine supply and a lavish supply of glasses for serving the customers. It also had knucklebones, a gambling game that did the duty of a modern bar's chuck-a-luck.

Only a fraction of the Arzawan ruins have been dug up so far, and archaeologists are eagerly awaiting the final results. The Arzawans could write (on clay bricks), and presumably they had archives. If archives are found, scholars may learn what the Arzawans thought about the loudmouthed Hittites, who defamed them in cuneiform 3,100 years ago.

In Plateau, published by the Museum of Northern Arizona. William C. Miller of Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories reported a novel collaboration of astronomers and archaeologists. Miller's avocation is to look for Indian remains in Arizona, and he was immediately interested when a survey party from the Museum of Northern Arizona found two Indian rock drawings, each showing the crescent moon and near it a large round object. Crescents are rare in Indian drawings, and the round objects were hard to explain.

Miller discussed the drawings at his observatory, and visiting Cosmographer Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University, England had a bright idea. Maybe, suggested Hoyle, the large object in the drawings is the supernova* of A.D. 1054, the enormously brilliant "new" star that outshone all the other stars in the sky and was plainly visible in daytime. Europe was too backward in astronomy in 1054 to pay much scientific attention to the event, but Chinese and Japanese astronomers recorded it accurately. The supernova appeared over China on the morning of July 4, 1054, and its position was close to the bright star Zeta Tauri. The Indians of the U.S. southwest must have seen the supernova too, said Hoyle, and they may have recorded it in their rock inscription.

Right Answer. To check the theory, Miller got help from Astronomer Walter Baade of Mt. Wilson and Palomar, who computed the phase and position of the moon at the time when the supernova could first have been seen in Arizona. The answer came out right. The moon was a crescent, as drawn. In northern Arizona it would have risen shortly before dawn on July 5th, and the supernova would have been close to it. The sight must have been striking; the supernova was probably the brightest object, other than the sun, ever to be seen by historic man.

Miller's next step was to find out whether the sites could have been occupied by Indians in A.D. 1054. At one site (White Mesa) he found a few potsherds that probably date back 900 years. At the other site (Navaho Canyon), a deep cut in the canyon floor exposed a great number that are as old or older.

Properly cautious, Miller says: "The rather stringent conditions for a favorable answer seem to be met and strongly suggest the possibility that the two pictographs actually depict . . . the supernova of A.D. 1054."

*Now called Menderes, the winding Meander of Greek times was the origin of the modern word meander. *Massive stars that explode suddenly, turning most of their matter into a burst of radiation. In the Milky Way galaxy, they appear roughly once in 500 years.

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