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The site of Gordion, the capital of the Phrygian kingdom that flourished in west-central Anatolia between the twelfth and the seventh century b.c., is most notably associated with the legendary King Midas, he of the "golden touch." The ancient city is surrounded by as many as 85 burial mounds, the largest of which is thought to have once housed the remains of the king's father and the site's namesake, King Gordias. However, according to a report in Türkiye Today, archaeologists excavating another nearby mound believe they have uncovered the 1,200-year-old tomb of someone else belonging to that famous dynasty. The...

...the account may best be understood as a form of conjectural history. This genre is a particular kind of narrative strategy which, as Christopher Pelling suggests, '[analyzes] the logical presuppositions of a functioning system and transposing them, for expositional clarity, into a historicist register.' Herodotus' narrative strategies interrogate the very same presuppositions on which Psammetichus' experiment is built: the primacy of language in human development, and the analogy between childhood and the world's first humans.Reading Herodotus' passage alongside Lucretius' De rerum natura and Plato's Cratylus, I argue that Herodotus exploits an ambiguity in terms φωνή and ἔπος in order to...

A researcher says he has deciphered an ancient, heavily damaged inscription carved on a 2,600-year-old monument in Turkey.The monument, which is engraved with images of lions and sphinxes, is known as Arslan Kaya (also spelled Aslan Kaya), which means "lion rock" in Turkish. The inscription spells out the name "Materan," a goddess of the Phrygians, who flourished in what is now Turkey from roughly 1200 to 600 B.C. They knew her "simply as the Mother," Mark Munn, a professor of ancient Greek history and archaeology at Pennsylvania State University who wrote a paper about the inscription, told Live Science in...

Bulgarian archeologists uncover treasure of thousands of golden ornaments Canadian Press Wednesday, August 17, 2005 SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) - Archeologists working a dig in central Bulgaria have unearthed some 15,000 miniature rings and other gold ornaments that date to the end of the third millennium BC - a find they say matches the famous treasure of Troy, scholars announced Wednesday. The 4,100- to 4,200-year-old golden ornaments have been gradually unearthed over the past year from an ancient tomb near the central village of Dabene, 120 kilometres east of the capital, Sofia, according to Prof. Vasil Nikolov, the consultant on the...

Armenians, a population in Western Asia historically inhabiting the Armenian highlands, were long believed to be descendants of Phrygian settlers from the Balkans. This theory originated largely from the accounts of the Greek historian Herodotus, who observed that Armenians were armed in Phrygian fashion when serving in the Persian army. Linguists further supported this theory, suggesting that the Armenian language shares ties with the Thraco-Phrygian subgroup of Indo-European languages.But the first whole-genome study challenges this long-held belief, revealing no significant genetic link between Armenians and the populations in the Balkan region. The study compares newly generated modern Armenian genomes and...

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...

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...

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...

A sculpture found in Greece in 1939 may have been part of King Midas' lost throne, an archaeologist has said. The 23cm-tall ivory sculpture, known to scholars as The Lion Tamer, has puzzled historians of classical Greece since its discovery... Keith DeVries, of the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, said there are signs that it once adorned Midas' royal throne... Mr DeVries said the sculpture appears to be Phrygian and to have been produced around the time that Midas was alive... According to Mr DeVries, Midas donated his throne as a gift to Delphi, where it was...

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 ...

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.

Archaeologists rewrite timeline of Bronze and Iron Ages, including early appearance of alphabet FOR RELEASE: Dec. 19, 2001 Contact: Blaine P. Friedlander Jr. Office: 607-255-3290 E-Mail: bpf2@cornell.edu ITHACA, N.Y. -- Using information gleaned from the sun's solar cycles and tree rings, archaeologists are rewriting the timeline of the Bronze and Iron Ages. The research dates certain artifacts of the ancient eastern Mediterranean decades earlier than previously thought. And it places an early appearance of the alphabet outside Phoenicia at around 740 B.C. Writing in two articles in the forthcoming issue of the journal Science (Dec. 21), archaeologists from Cornell University ...

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...

Istanbul's Yapi Kredi Vedat Nedim Tor Museum is hosting an archaeology exhibition called "Phrygia," showcasing a selection of major Phrygian artifacts on loan from various museums in Turkey, including the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara and the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. The exhibit, held under scientific advice from archaeologist Taciser Sivas, will run until April 13.

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

A linguistics researcher at the Macquarie University in Australia has discovered that the language, known as Burushaski, which is spoken by about 90,000 people who reside in a remote area of Pakistan, is Indo-European in origin. Prof Ilija Casule’s discovery, which has now been verified by a number of the world’s top linguists, has excited linguistics experts around the world. An entire issue of the eminent international linguistics journal the Journal of Indo-European Studies is devoted to a discussion of his findings later this month. More than fifty eminent linguists have tried over many years to determine the genetic relationship...

Refinements of radiocarbon dates appear to rob the monumental tomb at Gordion of its claim to having been the final resting place of the illustrious King Midas, researchers reported last week in the journal Science. American and European scientists analyzed the effects of the sun's cycles on amounts of radioactivity absorbed from year to year, as recorded in tree rings. They said the research had given archaeologists and historians a more precise chronology for the Middle East and Aegean regions in the Bronze and Iron Ages. One of the researchers, Dr. Peter I. Kuniholm, an archaeologist at Cornell University, said ...