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Archaeologists have unearthed a bone workshop and an oil lamp shop in an ancient city in western Turkey. The excavations at Aizanoi, known as the "Second Ephesus" and home to the best-preserved Zeus Temple in Anatolia, are being carried out by the Kütahya Museum Directorate. Gökhan Coşkun, the excavation coordinator from Kütahya Dumlupinar University, told Anadolu Agency that they are working in areas that have never been excavated before. Coşkun said they have carried out work in two different wings of the agora (a public open space used for assemblies and markets in ancient Greece), and made important findings that...

The ancient city of Aizanoi was founded as a Phrygian city on the western end of the Phrygia kingdom, in the present-day Çavdarhisar district of the western Anatolian province of Kütahya in Turkey. Aizanoi was home to the Aizanitisians, Phrygians, Greeks, Romans and Byzantines and the site was rediscovered by European travelers in 1824. The German Archaeological Institute began excavating in 1926 and works resumed in 1970, with them having accelerated significantly over the last two years. At this site, that’s listed on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List , over the years archaeologists have unearthed ancient stone heads and...

An inscription bearing the name of the ancient city was found at the excavation site in Gordion, the capital of the Phrygians.In 1900, a 3-month excavation was carried out in the ancient city, which was discovered by the brothers Alfred and Gustav Körte during the construction of the Berlin-Istanbul-Baghdad railway line in the Polatlı district of Ankara.Although the Körte brothers determined that the capital of the ancient city of Phrygian was Gordion, no information confirming this could be found so far.The excavations, which were restarted in 1950 after a long break, are now being carried out by the team led...

Turkish archaeologists will be working in Denizli’s ancient city of Hierapolis 12 months a year while Italians, who have been working there for 56 years, will be working two months only annually... Pamukkale University will be working with the Italian team of archaeologists that has been working in the ancient city of Hierapolis in the Aegean province of Denizli. The Italian team has been at the focus of discussions for two years because of claims that excavations were moving too slowly in the area... Maor Demir said excavations would start at once in Hierapolis, which is home to some 2,000...

A newly translated inscription, dating back about 1,800 years, reveals that Oinoanda, a Roman city in southwest Turkey, turned to a mixed martial art champion to recruit for the Roman army and bring the new soldiers to a city named Hierapolis, located hundreds of miles to the east, in Syria. His name was Lucius Septimius Flavianus Flavillianus and he was a champion at wrestling and pankration, the latter a bloody, and at times lethal, mixed martial art where contestants would try to pound each other unconscious or into submission. Flavillianus proved to be so successful as a military recruiter that...

Amid the remains of a fourth or fifth century church at Hierapolis, one of the most significant Christian sites in Turkey, Francesco D’Andria found this first-century Roman tomb that he believes once held the remains of the apostle Philip. At about the same time as the July/August 2011 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review was hitting the newsstands, containing an article about St. Philip’s Martyrium,* author and excavation director Francesco D’Andria was making an exciting new discovery in the field at Hierapolis, one of the most significant sites in Christian Turkey. A month later he announced it: They had finally found...

A cave ancient Romans believed to be a gate to the underworld was so deadly that it killed all animals who entered its proximity, while not harming the human priests who led them. Millennia later, scientists believe they have figured out why - a concentrated cloud of carbon dioxide that suffocated those who breathed it. Dating back 2,200 years, the cave was rediscovered by archaeologists from the University of Salento back in 2011. It was located in a city called Hierapolis in ancient Phrygia, now Turkey, and it was used for animal sacrifices of bulls led through the Plutonium -...

In "A New Historical Inscription of Sargon II from Karkemish," published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Gianni Marchesi translates a recently discovered inscription of the Assyrian King Sargon II found at the ruins of the ancient city of Karkemish. The inscription, which dates to around 713 B.C., details Sargon's conquest, occupation, and reorganization of Karkemish, including his rebuilding the city with ritual ceremonies usually reserved for royal palaces in capital cities. The text implies that Sargon may have been planning to make Karkemish a western capital of Assyria, from which he could administer and control his empire's western...

Phrygians were brewing with barley before it was cool. Resurrecting ancient beers and wines is a subtle alchemy, but Patrick McGovern knows all the tricks. He directs the Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Many of his ancient brews are sold by Dogfish Head brewery in Delaware. How did you start making ancient drinks? One of the first we made was the Midas beverage, based on residues in bronze vessels recovered from the Midas tomb in Turkey, which dates from 700 B.C. These pointed to an unusual drink combining wine, barley...

Scholars have always suspected that the ancients had odd tastes. If you believe Homer, wise old Nestor, veteran of the Trojan War, enjoyed a few scrapings of goat's cheese and a dollop of honey in his wine. And Homer might have been right: archaeologists often find little bronze cheese graters in later Greek graves which they think were part of a drinking kit. But until now there has been no good evidence that the Minoans and their mainland neighbours the Mycenaeans knew how to brew beer or mead, let alone mixed them into cocktails. After painstaking chemical analysis of cups,...

Everyone knows the story of King Midas and his golden touch. In Greco-Roman mythology, the Phrygian king Midas was offered anything he wished from Bacchus, the god of wine, for showing kindness to Bacchus's teacher, Silenus. Midas wished that everything he touched would turn to gold. While it amazed Midas that everything he then touched became gold -- from a twig to a husk of corn -- he soon discovered just how reckless his request was, for he could not eat or drink anything but gold (Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI:85-145). The historical King Midas inspired this character in Classical mythology. King...

In storybook histories, the ancient city of Gordion is remembered only as the seat of King Midas, he of the golden touch, and the place where Alexander the Great struck a famous blow in legend and metaphor. Challenged to separate the strands of an impossible knot, the Gordion knot, the conqueror cut through the problem, in the manner of conquerors, with one authoritative swing of his sword. After Midas and Alexander, Gordion languished on the fringes of history, and until recently archaeologists had taken little notice of its Celtic past. Yes, European Celts — the Gauls of Roman times and ...

Patrick McGovern "The site is very rich archeologically, has been excavated for the last 50 years by the University of Pennsylvania Museum. It has a large palace area with rooms, some of which are thought to have been kitchens for making the food for the palace, with jars of barley and other goods. Also, it has a whole series of tombs in which the burial was done in a special wooden chamber beneath a very large mound. It's almost as if you cut it yesterday and put the structure together. It is the earliest intact human building made of...

The modern diners sitting before Sams were about to eat the first reconstruction of that feast—a celebration that had remained undiscovered for decades after archaeologist Rodney S. Young first excavated Midas' tomb in 1957. Ancient Roman, Greek, or even Maya banquets had been re-created previously, but generally from texts and ancient recipes. Not so with the Midas feast. "It's the first time that somebody tried to do it working just from the chemical evidence," says Patrick E. McGovern, the museum's molecular archaeologist who led the analyses. In other words, from the pan scrapings.

In storybook histories, the ancient city of Gordion is remembered only as the seat of King Midas, he of the golden touch, and the place where Alexander the Great struck a famous blow in legend and metaphor. Challenged to separate the strands of an impossible knot, the Gordion knot, the conqueror cut through the problem, in the manner of conquerors, with one authoritative swing of his sword. After Midas and Alexander, Gordion languished on the fringes of history, and until recently archaeologists had taken little notice of its Celtic past. Yes, European Celts — the Gauls of Roman times and ...

Amazon Warrior WomenThis painting on a Greek vase depicts an Amazon woman warrior on horseback engaged in battle.Amazons in myth: History's first mention of a race of warrior women comes in Homer's ILIAD, an account of the Trojan War, probably written in the 8th to the 7th century B.C. Homer's Amazons, a race of fierce women who mated with vanquished male foes and kept only the female children they bore, were believed to occupy the area around the Black Sea. Amazon women also crop up in other Greek myths. One of the labors of Hercules, for example, required him to...

The first character is the sampi, as it was used (briefly) in the Ionic alphabet as a sibilant. The first question to answer is whether it should be separated from the numerical sampi at all... The second question is what the phonetic value of sampi was... Jeffery (1990:39)... also suspects that sampi was originally borrowed from Carian, and used to express the Carian sibilant in loanwords... In the pre-Hellenic language of Lemnos (possibly related to Etruscan), it is used, but Jeffery has no idea what it sounded like. In the older inscriptions of the non-Hellenic language of Phrygia (related...

A team of archaeologists have unearthed new evidence of massive, monumental defensive works at the Citadel Mound site of ancient Gordion in Turkey. Excavations have also revealed ancient industrial activity dating back to the 11th century BCE... Brian Rose of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues have uncovered massive defensive walls, part of a road, and industrial work spaces dated back to some of the earliest periods of the site... "Gordion’s historical significance derives from its very long and complex sequence of occupation, with seven successive settlements spanning a period of nearly 4500 years," says Rose. "What we discovered was...

Burushaski is a language spoken in northern Pakistan and Kashmir. It is spoken by 40,000 to 50,000 people. It has no known relatives and some believe it maybe a remnant of a prehistoric language. Burushaski is like Ainu and Basque, language isolate with no known relatives. Language Museum Burushaski: An Extraordinary Language in the Karakoram MountainsWikipedia-Burushaski

Archaeologists digging in Turkey have found the guardians of the "Gate to Hell" -- two unique marble statues which once warned of a deadly cave in the ancient Phrygian city of Hierapolis, near Pamukkale. Known as Pluto's Gate -- Ploutonion in Greek, Plutonium in Latin -- the cave was celebrated as the portal to the underworld in Greco-Roman mythology and tradition. It was discovered in March by a team led by Francesco D'Andria, professor of classic archaeology at the University of Salento.