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Nevertheless, the emergence of Ionia is a remarkable story. At some point in the 9th century the dozen primary Ionian city states, which included Miletus, Priene, Ephesus, and Chios among others, bound themselves together into a league.6 Smyrna, which according to Herodotus, was not initially part of this league,7 is the site that gives the best picture of what these cities looked like in their initial phases. Its heavily walled 8th-century settlement was densely packed with curvilinear houses, and by the late 7th century its core was still very much a fortified enclave (Figure 10.3).8 Such are the beginnings of the great cities that were to create the world in which Homer actually lived, give rise to the birth of philosophy, nourish the field of historical writing, and helped create the artistic and literary traditions that still shape the western world. This book closes with the arrival of the Persians in the mid-6th century BC, when the era in which the whole of Anatolia and much of the Near East became Hellenized still lay in the future.

THE PHRYGIANS

Herodotus claims that Phrygians migrated into Asia from Europe, having originally been neighbors of the Macedonians.9 There is usually assumed to be some truth to this statement, although specific confirmation of a link between Thrace and newcomers to central Anatolia in the early Iron Age cannot be demonstrated archaeologically.10 The linguistic evidence is not incompatible with a European origin, although does not prove it either. Phrygian is an

Figure 10.3 “Imaginative reconstruction” of Old Smyrna, 7th century BC (after Cook 1958–59: 15)

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Indo-European language, but it is not a member of the Anatolian family to which Hittite, Luwian, and indeed Lydian belong. It is more closely related to Greek, with which it may share descent from a common sub-branch of early Indo-European.11 There is no record of it prior to the Iron Age when the earliest inscriptions, recorded in a script that is closely related to the Greek alphabet appear in small numbers.12 Thus the presumption that the Phrygians came into Anatolia from the west as part of the large scale migrations that took place in the Bronze Age– Iron Age transition seems reasonable, but has not been conclusively demonstrated.

There is another complication in our identification of the Phrygians archaeologically and culturally that has to do with the different perspective offered by classical and Near Eastern historical sources. We are given the term Phrygia by the Greeks, as well as two royal names which may have repeated in dynastic succession: Gordius and Midas. The Assyrians, who offer the most specific of the cuneiform sources for the period in which Phrygia was flourishing, do not mention Phrygia by name, nor do their contemporaries, the Urartians. Instead, they speak of an Anatolian kingdom called Mushki, which the Greeks, in their turn, have never heard of. Are these two names for the same place, given in the way that Europeans on all sides of the Germans have completely different terms for them, like French “Allemand” and Russian “Nemets”? Or were there really two powerful kingdoms in central Anatolia in the Iron Age, each obscuring the other from the gaze of the peoples on opposite sides?

In favor of the second theory is a very clear division in pottery types between the eastern and western parts of central Anatolia. One, first identified at Alis¸ar is a painted pottery, with red/ brown painted stags and geometric patterns on a buff surface (Figure 10.4). To the west of this, in Gordion itself, there is a quite different burnished gray ware tradition.

Against it is the fact that the most famous individual associated with each seems to have the same personal name. Mita, king of Mushki, dominated the politics of interaction with Assyria in the late 8th century, and his name sounds very much like that of the most famous ruler of Phrygia, Midas. The balance of scholarly opinion generally favors regarding Mushki and Phrygia as different terms for the same kingdom, but there are dissenters.13 We will follow the more customary route of assuming that Phrygia and Mushki are one and the same, not least because the archaeological record is so dominated by a single site.

This key site for the archaeology of the Phrygians is Gordion, indisputably identified with Yassıhöyük, on the Sakarya River 80 km west southwest of Ankara. It is a vast archaeological complex, consisting of a citadel mound, a lower town beside it, a large and poorly defined outer town to the west, and a scattering of tumulus mounds to the north and east, the largest of which is the famous “Midas Mound.” The citadel provides one of the basic chronological sequences for this region of Anatolia, its phases relevant to the Iron Age designated YHSS14 7 to YHSS 5, with several subphases. These were defined by Rodney Young, who directed the University of Pennsylvania’s excavations here between 1950 and 1972, but refined by subsequent work of Kenneth Sams and Mary Voigt in a later phase of excavations that began in 1989. Most dramatically, in 2001, radiocarbon dates, dendrochronology, and stylistic analyses of pottery converged to push the end of YHSS 6A back to around 800 BC, more than a century earlier than Young had

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Table 10.1 Key factors in the Phrygian and Gordion periods

as we did at Bog˘ azköy and Kilise Tepe, but something new, quite apart from any Anatolian traditions. The architectural remains reinforce this conclusion. Small square rooms made of wattle and daub were adjoined to create domestic structures of no great elegance or sophistication. It is hard to argue with the idea that these reflect the intrusion of a new group of people.

In the late 10th or early 9th century BC the citadel mound was dramatically restructured. In place of the simple houses, open spaces were laid out buildings of a public character were constructed. These had stone foundations and mud brick walls. No large segment of the City Mound can be seen for any of these periods, however, because they were only investigated in small areas not covered by the elaborate architecture of YHSS 6, known as the “Early Phrygian” phase.

Sometime around the middle of the 9th century BC a central authority seems to have imposed a planned series of nearly identical buildings on the whole central and eastern sector of the City Mound (Figure 10.5). The basic structural unit has a plan that has been classed as a megaron, which is to say that it consisted of a rectangular rooms in a linear arrangement with direct access from front to back through centrally placed doorways. Rows of columns helped support the roof. This basic layout was to last throughout YHSS 6, although it was subject to modification. One particular building was a little larger than the others. It had a mosaic floor and two parallel rows of columns which appear to have supported a gallery. We are without documents to inform us of what these structures were for, or even who was ruling Gordion at this time. There is some indication of an awareness of Luwian art and hieroglyphic inscriptions, but the architecture and pottery speak for a quite different culture. The particular activity that appears to be associated with these megaron buildings is weaving.17 If these are textile factories, the industry must have organized under the auspices of the state, but we are at a loss to identify nearby trading partners who might have consumed theses products in the 9th century.

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This public architecture represents a kind of high-water mark for organization at Gordion. At the end of YHSS 6, while modest changes were being made in this area, there is a dramatic destruction level, after which much of the site was packed with a deliberate fill of debris. This seems to mark the end of a major phase of Phrygian history, but one must bear in mind that Gordion is the central and overwhelmingly dominant source of everything we know about Phrygians in this era. In order to put this destruction in context, however, we must digress to discuss some older ideas about it, which are recent enough that they are still widespread in the literature on Gordion.

Rodney Young, the excavator who did so much for the archaeology of Gordion and Phrygia generally, tied his chronological conclusions to the few known historical facts about Gordion. One of these was that the site was destroyed in the early 7th century by Kimmerians, a people we have already discussed in connection with the Urartians. There was also the prominence of Midas to contend with, in both the Greek and Assyrian traditions. Assyrian records show Mita to have been on the throne of Mushki as late as 709 BC, and, if the greatest of the tumuli around the area could not be associated with him personally, it should at least belong to the same era. Thus the destruction level of the early Phrygian city and the tumuli were all placed around the beginning of the 7th century to conform with the Kimmerian attack and the disappearance of Mushki from Assyrian records after its hours of greatness under Midas.

It should be noted that this is not an era in which radiocarbon dating could be of much help in resolving chronological issues. The span between the 8th and 4th centuries is one in which fluctuation in the amount of carbon 14 in the earth’s atmosphere cancels out the rate of radioactive decay in such a way that the calibration curves are flat. An organic object that ceased to live in 750 BC contains the same amount of radiocarbon as one that died in 350 BC. Under these circumstances, dendrochronology becomes the most important tool for establishing more precise year dates, and indeed it was at Gordion that the first steps were taken toward working out a master sequence of tree rings for Anatolia—work which we have had occasion to cite on many occasions in the previous chapters. In any case, until 2001 the chronology of Early Phrgyian

Gordion was discussed in late 8th-century terms, and because this was a key sequence tied, however tenuously, to historical records, much of Iron Age central and western Anatolia went with it.

Increasingly, however, there was unease about these dates. In 2000 a new set of radiocarbon samples was taken from grain in the destruction levels. Unlike wood, this would not be kept around and re-used. The upshot was that a series of reliable dates came back showing the destruction level of Early Phrygian citadel took place about a century earlier than had been thought, and is now put at ca. 800 BC.18 This has the dramatic consequence of separating the public buildings and other clear evidence of a powerful post-Hittite state in the Early Phrygian period from the historical Midas who interacted with the Assyrians. The tumulus mounds, whose chronological position in the 8th century is secured by dendrochronological dating, no longer have anything to do with the great capital of the Dark Age. The ca. 800 BC destruction level was followed by a reorganization of the central part of the citadel mound. Many of the

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early structures were packed with a clay fill to create a platform upon which to build anew. While it was once believed that there was a period of abandonment of more that a century between the destruction and the rebuilding, it now appears the rebuilding started immediately.19 The subsequent Middle Phrygian phase was a very long-lasting occupation and it, too, ended in a fire dating to around the time that the Persians came to Gordion in the mid-6th century BC. By this time Gordion had already come under the control of the other great Iron Age power of western Anatolia, Lydia.

The landscape to the east of the City Mound is dotted with burial mounds of various sizes. Altogether about eighty tumuli have been identified, most of which were constructed during the Middle Phrygian phase and a few even later. The most prominent of these tumuli have been designated with letters, and the three most prominent in terms of excavated materials are designated P, W, and MM (for Midas Mound). Each contained a single burial in a wooden tomb—in the case of P a 5-year-old child.20

The Midas Mound, as it is popularly known, is the site of one of the most celebrated archaeological discoveries of the 20th century. Royal tombs are almost invariably robbed, long before archaeologists can get to them. In those rare cases where they have escaped this fate, like the Royal Cemetery at Ur in Mesopotamia or the tomb of Tutankhamen in the Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, it is because the very existence of the royal burials has been obscured. The Midas Mound is hardly a subtle feature in the landscape. Rising 53 m above the plain and with a base diameter of a little less than 300 m,21 it is by far the largest of the tumuli at Gordion. Its bulk is composed of packed clay which has eroded to some extent over the centuries, so it must once have formed a taller and steeper cone, with the base having a somewhat smaller diameter than it does today. It was an obvious target for anyone who dreamed of tapping into the wealth of the king with the golden touch, and not a few people tried digging into it, only to be defeated by its mass. All this makes it remarkable that the burial chamber of this great tumulus remained undiscovered until 1957.

The burial chamber was constructed of wood in several phases (Figure 10.6). Outermost was an enclosure formed of whole logs on which the bark is still preserved, some of them more than 700 years old when they were cut. Within this chamber, a more elegant wooden chamber was made of finished planks. The body of a single individual was placed inside this room on a wooden bier. The anaerobic conditions created by packing the earth on top of this burial chamber led to excellent preservation, both of the structure and the materials that it contained. In particular the room was filled with wooden furniture carved with geometric designs of considerable delicacy (Figure 10.7). Another indicator of the stable conditions so far underground is the preservation of lumps of wax on three bronze bowls, into which alphabetic inscriptions had been incised.22

The lone occupant of this tomb, a man of average stature aged 61–65,23 was clearly a person of great importance. It would appear that the funeral rites were performed elsewhere and the body was then brought here for interment along with an extraordinary inventory of grave goods. These included elaborately carved wooden screens and tables, a large number of metal vessels, the most spectacular of which were three large bronze cauldrons. The latter had attachments for

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holding carrying rings on them in the form of bulls’ heads, daemons, and sirens. The bulls’ head type of cauldron was already known from an Urartian tomb excavated at Altıntepe, with which the Gordion burial is nearly contemporary. There were scores of smaller bronze vessels of various shapes: trefoil (pinched rim) pitchers, omphalos bowls,24 rounded bowls with ring attachments, and animal-headed drinking vessels (rhyta). There were nearly 200 fibulae—elab- orate safety pins for securing garments—145 of which had been wrapped together and put on a table at the foot of the bier on which the deceased lay. However, whatever textiles were included with the burial goods—and they must have been important—disintegrated before the chamber was excavated. Significantly for a royal tomb that was associated with Midas of the golden touch, there was no gold.

Who was this individual really? From the time of discovery professional opinion was that it could probably not be the Midas of Greek legend. That king was said to have died from drinking bull’s blood in the wake of the Kimmerian attack (ca. 689 BC), and Rodney Young believed that a people who had just suffered a catastrophe would not have been able to build such an enormous tumulus.25 The date of the burial chamber, which was sealed at the time of interment, has now been pushed back well into the 8th century by a combination of tree ring and radiocarbon dating. As we have noted, the latter is difficult to use in this period, but carbon samples can be taken from individual rings of 700-year sequence in the logs of the outer tomb chamber of the Midas mound. The carbon of these dates to time the living tree added the ring in its annual growth cycle. The long sequence of fluctuation can then be “wiggle-matched”—correlated with fluctuations in a master set of radiocarbon dates for the Old World generally—to match the treerings to the modern calendar. The technique is not perfect, and in 2001 researchers made the newspapers by making the Iron Age dates 22 years older than the dates they had given just a few years before.26 The construction date is now 740 BC. This is too early for Mita of Mushki, whom we have seen was active at the end of the 8th century according to Assyrian sources. The simple fact is that we do not know who the important occupant of this tomb was, and he may not be mentioned in any historical sources.

Midas is intimately associated with another site of a quite different character. West of Gordion between the modern cities of Eskis¸ehir and Afyon, is an area known as the Highlands of Phrygia. There are settlement mounds here which were occupied over many periods, including the periods at Gordion we have been discussing. There are also scores of tombs, shrines, and architectural facades carved into projecting rock outcrops. The grandest of these is the Midas Monument (Figure 10.8), overlooking a village with the same name as the shrine outside of Bog˘ azköy, Yazılıkaya. The carved area is meters high and almost as wide presenting, in relief, an architectural enclosing a huge, geometric pattern of framed crosses. The design is reminiscent of some of the wooden furniture in the MM tumulus burial chamber. At the lower center is a false door and a niche. Above the roof to the left as one faces the relief, there is an inscription in large, Old Phrygian alphabetic characters. Running up the right edge of the monument is another, in somewhat smaller characters. These are not entirely intelligible, given our impoverished understanding of the Phrygian language, but it is clear that the top one mentions a dedication to

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Figure 10.8 Midas Monument in the Highlands of Phrygia (Photo: courtesy Christopher Roosevelt)

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