Beycesultan
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Beycesultan is a tell in western Anatolia, on the border of classical Phrygia, excavated 1954-9 CE.
In the 1950s, Seton Lloyd's student James Mellaart found "champagne-glass" style pottery in a Late Bronze context in western Anatolia. A search identified the tell Beycesultan upstream of the Maeander River (possibly the Astarpa known from Mursilis II's annals).
Lloyd began excavations in 1954. First was found a Byzantine town. Soon after, the excavators uncovered initial finds of such interest that they notified the popular media.
The excavators reported "a row of small houses that had been destroyed by fire", with the champagne-glass pottery. There was also a palace "whose plan suggested ... Knossos", which was "well-looted" on its destruction:
- 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.
Outside the palace,
- 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.[1]
Insufficient Mycenaean culture was found to assign its layers to the Aegean chronology directly, but there was sufficient Anatolian material culture to assign them to events elsewhere in Anatolia. No archive was found in six seasons of work.
Lloyd abandoned the site in 1959. [2]
