Ancient World

Eberhard Zangger

Eberhard Zangger (born 9 April 1958, in Kamen, North Rhine-Westphalia, as Eberhard Finke) is a German geoarchaeologist, public relations consultant, and author who is best known for speculative theories about the Bronze Age history of the eastern Mediterranean that have frequently been regarded in the scholarly community as methodologically problematic. He initially attracted considerable attention with his claim that Plato's Atlantis narrative was based on the history of Bronze Age Troy and preserved memories handed down over centuries. This interpretation met with widespread and emphatic rejection among scholars of antiquity and was at times classified within the sphere of parascience. His far-reaching speculations concerning the historical significance of the speakers of Luwian languages in the second millennium BCE have proved scarcely less controversial. Following a scholarly dispute with Manfred Korfmann, the archaeologist who had excavated Troy—a dispute that Zangger had brought into the public eye and that ultimately became the subject of a court case—Zangger largely withdrew from academia in the late 1990s and turned to management consulting. After Korfmann's death, he returned from the private sector to research in the 2010s and soon found himself once again at the centre of heated scholarly controversy. Zangger is the founder and president of the Luwian Studies Foundation, established in 2014, which is dedicated to the study of the Bronze Age cultures of Western Anatolia.

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See also

• ▸Ankara
• ▸Erik the Red
• ▸Hebraization of Palestinian place names

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