Llhuros: The Lost Civilization that Can Never Be Found
We know a great deal about the lost civilization of Llhuros. You may not have heard of this Iron Age kingdom, but far from being obscure and forgotten it is among the better attested cultures of Asia Minor.
Situated in what is now Turkey, Llhuros was a neighbor of the more famous kingdom of Lydia before Lydia’s fall, first to the Achaemenids and then the Romans. The fate of Llhuros is more uncertain, and with good reason.
Much does survive to tell us about Llhuros. Many artifacts have been displayed, frescoes and jewelry, game boards and pieces and even musical instruments. It is unusual for so much to have survived from so long ago, and again that is with good reason.
Furthermore, there are artifacts of Llhuros whose survival seems almost miraculous. We have examples of Llhuros poetry, and even more strangely Llhuros music. For such things to survive amidst the remnants of a lost civilization of the Iron Age is rare indeed, and even that of the great cultures of the time is preserved as fragments, nothing more.
Artifacts survive in astonishing condition, and robbed of their settings some look decidedly prosaic to modern eyes. Amidst the strangely proportioned figures and the ornately decorated frescoes are what resembles a lemon juicer, thickly covered in a patina of age.
But such a wealth of information about this kingdom of course comes with no small amount of academic commentary, which is perhaps understandable given how much catching up they had to do. When the world was introduced to Llhuros at a 1972 exhibition it seemed a miracle, a newly discovered Iron Age kingdom about which nobody had heard.
And again, this was with good reason. For the 1972 exhibition, containing a wealth of Llhuros art, artifacts, music and poetry, all of which carefully documented in an exhibition catalogue, was hiding a secret.
Llhuros wasn’t real at all.
Iron Age Castles in the Sky
How could an Iron Age culture come from nowhere? Who would invent such a thing, and why?
The usual answer would of course be money, and were Llhuros to be invented for this reason nobody would be surprised. The trade in fakes from antiquity stretches all the way back to antiquity, and all a fake artifact needs is a genuine fool to buy it.
But Llhuros did not come from this. It was the brainchild of Norman Daly, an American artist who spent most of his life creating this Iron Age fantasy, working on it from the 1960s when he first started creating artifacts, all the way up until his death in 2008.
Daly’s fascination was not with Iron Age culture, per se, but rather with modern attempts to recreate lost civilizations, with the effort needed to reconstruct such a thing, and with the power of artifacts.
Daly’s first formative inspiration came from the Puebloans of New Mexico, a pre-Columbian culture of North America who effectively disappeared around the time of the arrival of the Spanish. The traces they left behind, the dry settlements and cities build into the windeaten desert landscape, intrigued him.
Initially a painter, he moved into sculpture in the early 1960s and many of his sculptures used found objects, everyday items presented and made strange by their setting. Put another way, there is a good reason why one of the Llhuros artifacts looks like a lemon squeezer, or another a grater.
Daly’s realization was that such familiar artifacts, when presented out of context in this way, gain a value by this presentation. This is, to broaden his point, true of all genuine artifacts to an extent: almost all are valuable not intrinsically but because they are part of a lost kingdom. The thousands of clay tablets found at Amarna tell us far more about Egypt than Tutankhamun’s solitary funerary mask.
When Norman Daly presented Llhuros to the world in 1972, it was as a real civilization. His art project extended to his performative role in it, and using all these modern items he created this world, in part to challenge his audience and in part to test them. Would they balk at seeing modern items in an ancient context, or would the context convince them to believe his lie?
The fiction he created, first in building this lost civilization and then in adding a layer of invented critical commentary, was designed to offer an entirely persuasive and po-faced depiction of a civilization. It is considered a founding example of fictive art, or superfiction: artfulness which does not own up to its own artfulness.
And it was an obsession which would last with him for the rest of his life. Almost all of Daly’s work on Llhuros has been preserved, building an irony: his original, valueless objects, which were presented as valuable as historical survivors, are now valuable for what they pretended to be, and for that pretense.
Header Image: The Lydian king Croesus: Lydia was supposedly a neighbor of Llhuros, but the artifacts of the latter kingdom were unsurprisingly very different. Source: Marco Prins / Public Domain.
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