Great Myths and Legends: The Golden Age of King Midas

okay thanks to you all for coming out tonight could we have the lights down and tonight what I want to do is cover four distinct topics although of course all of them are related one of them is to tell you the story of King Midas both the legendary aspects and the historical aspects of his reign in the 8th century BC to tell you the story of Gordian the capital city of the Phrygian Empire which maitus ruled in the course of the second half of the 8th century and which Penn has excavated over the course of the last 65 years to tell you the story of Rodney Young who was an archaeologist working at Penn for over a quarter of a century who was the man who excavated nearly all of the material that you will see on display in the Golden Age of King Midas exhibit and to tell you the origins of the exhibit itself and titled the Golden Age of King Midas because this was hardly as straightforward as you might think so those are the issues that I want to deal with and I want to start with the arrival of the Phrygians from southeastern Europe into Asia Minor right after 1200 BC so we're starting at the end of the so-called Bronze Age the period roughly from 3,000 to 1200 BC and at the end of the Bronze Age around 1200 BC we get a series of destructions citadel after citadel Palace after Palace are destroyed so Troy is destroyed the capital city of the Hittite Empire Hato Shah in the center of Turkey is destroyed all the Mycenaean palaces in southern Greece are destroyed as are the palaces in Cyprus and the area of Ciro Palestine what caused all these destructions we don't entirely know some of them we have some textual evidence for it's clear that there was civil war at this period in many of the palaces it's clear that there were foreign invasions so a lot of foreigners a sort of motley crew of ethnicities banding together and sacking area after area it seems likely that there was some sort of environmental change at the same time which brought about famine which in turn promoted civil unrest and the Civil War as well as foreign attacks on cities that have been weakened by the famine that followed the environmental problems so it was a period this period from say 1202 1190 where much of the eastern Mediterranean sort of went up in smoke including the Hittite Empire that had controlled all of Turkey or Anatolia at that point people often say well how could this be how can you have all these cities destroyed in one fell swoop in such a short period of time but we've seen the same thing happen in 1911 in the so-called Arab Spring when we watch so much of North Africa and so much of the eastern Mediterranean destroyed in a single year 2011 as there was civil unrest in various cities and as there were foreign attackers in various cities so I often think of the Arab Spring of 2011 2010 as being not dissimilar from what happened to Asia Minor at the end of the Bronze Age just after 1200 BC but during this period the Hittite Empire has been destroyed and so what that does is open up a commercial corridor between South Eastern Europe and what is now Turkey that had never existed before and so we find movement of migrants from South Eastern Europe from the Balkans into Asia Minor so some moved across the Bosphorus into the center of Turkey and settled in Phrygia at the site of Gordian which had already been established others crossed the Dardanelles where the Hellespont and settle in and around Troy which of course has also been destroyed in these destructions around 1200 BC these are the fridges who will eventually build a great citadel and a great settlement at Gordian in the course of the ninth eighth and seventh centuries BC now the synodal of Gordian we know a great deal about Crimea only due to the excavations of Rodney Young who begins excavating here in 1950 and continued until his death in 1974 and subsequently there were a series of archaeologists who continued the project that he had inaugurated Keith DeVries who many of you knew Ken Sam's Mary Voight and now I am in the fortunate position of being director of excavations accordion the synodal itself is enormous four times the size of Troy 200 by 300 meters and like Troy we have a series of settlements one built on top of the other gradually creating a central mound that rises over 15 metres above the surrounding area so many of you are familiar with the Citadel mound of Troy in fact I've spoken to many of you on that subject in this room where you have nine cities or rather ten cities one built on top of the other over the course of 4,500 years and Gordian is very much that kind of site with nine or ten settlements one built on top of the other spanning a period of roughly four millennia so from the early Bronze Age from about 2400 2300 BC all the way up to about 1400 AD so very similar sites and you see here the extent of the area that was excavated by Rodney Young we're now digging in this area I'll say more about that later and here you see a color phase plan of all the so called Phrygian buildings walls and streets that have been found by all of us over the course of the last 65 years this was put together by our Gordian archivist Gareth Derbyshire and his colleague gate bazoer know and what we wanted was a single plan where all the settlements were color-coded by periods so that people could see at a single glance how complex this mound is and how many buildings there are to excavate as you move down through 10 or even 15 metres of earth now the area that I'm going to be where the period that I'm going to be discussing primarily tonight is the Phrygian Kingdom that is 9th through rooo sixth centuries BC in the middle of the sixth century the Persians sweep through Asia Minor and Gordian as well as frigate come under the control of the Persians but during the ninth and eighth centuries BC it was a formidable complex and feared by many powers throughout Asia Minor and the area that surrounded it and you get an idea of the power of the Citadel by looking at these slides this shows you what the entrance was like in the ninth century BC if you were coming into the city around 850 BC which is roughly when this Citadel gateway that you're seeing here and in reconstruction was built you would have seen a structure that probably rose as much as 16 metres above ground level so it was phenomenally strong and you can see as many as 10 meters of stone masonry still survived in place and that has been dislodged to an extent by the earthquake in Turkey in 1999 so we're spending a lot of our time conserving that so that the best preserved Iron Age gateway in all of Turkey remains a solid and as it has been for the last three thousand years when you came into the Citadel there would have been in many respects a blaze of color and a blaze of geometric designs so as you want as you walked into one of the administrative buildings the so-called second mega Ron built in again the ninth century BC you would have seen this magnificent pebble mosaic which looks as if you have a series of polychromatic throw rugs that had been laid on the floor each with a different kind of geometric design this mosaic encompasses the entire room which measures 10 by 11 meters so that's roughly 30 by 35 feet it was a gigantic room and it ranks as the earliest colored stone mosaic in the world and you see here some white dotted lines the area within those lines we conserved last summer and brought it here as one of the principal components of the Gordian exhibit that you can see upstairs this was tremendous influential this experimentation with stone mosaics and Gordian in the ninth century and from fridja it would travel to Assyria in the eighth century as they began to do colored stone mosaics and then in the following century to Greece and they would continue to make this kind of mosaic that's to say stone pebble mosaics pebbles gathered from the riverbeds now this is not the smartest way to construct a mosaic because the stones get dislodged very easily and they're not very gentle on your feet but nevertheless it would take them about 600 years to move from pebble mosaics to cube mosaics the kind of mosaics that we have now the earliest of which we find in central sicily in the middle of the 3rd century BC but you get an idea here as you look at these geometric designs on the mosaics of the kinds of textiles that would have been produced in the industrial quarter of the Citadel of Gordian in the 9th century BC and fortunately we have some of those textiles that still survive you see a few of them here and then the reconstruction of the overall design scheme this one by Mediterranean archaeology graduate student Sam Holtzman that give you an idea of what we think these enormous textiles some of which were tapestries would have looked like it's very interesting as we go through the frigate kingdom we find a disinclination to represent or to use figural decoration a much more much stronger preference for geometric decoration in virtually any media with which we're dealing now we know so much about the early Phrygian Citadel the buildings that were constructed the decorations that they construct that they included in the domestic administrative units because the entire complex was destroyed by a fire around 800 BC we have the charred wood from that destruction level and we can do we can determine the date by tree ring dating we're so called dendrochronology which tells us exactly when the fire occurred so sometime in late summer perhaps in August August 23rd 800 BC this fire sweeps through the area you can see this recreated in the Gordian exhibit just upstairs and seals in time an entire moment in the life of the late 9th century BC city now already before that moment they were planning to build up the mound were build up the city to a level that was 5 meters higher 17 feet higher than it had already been so they were beginning to pile rubble in the gateway of the city and as I say to completely obliterate the early Phrygian the 9th century settlement and build a completely new one on top of it and it was in the course of that construction that the fire occurs and you see the excavation of this destruction level here where all the pottery that had been used for processing food for cooking food is destroyed as the roof collapses on the vessels the textiles the loom weights that were used for an incredible series of looms with 500 or 600 loom weights in a single room all of those are preserved as well so a moment in time that's preserved we have other sites of course where these moments in time are preserved you can think perhaps of Hasan Liu in northwestern Iran excavated by this museum in the 1950s and 60s where they found again a phenomenal destruction level and again dating to 800 BC the same time in which early fridge and Gordian is destroyed although in this case it was clearly an attack we have the bodies of the residents of Hasan loo and some of the attackers preserved on the steps of the buildings which they were either trying to enter or get away from in 800 BC and of course we have a similar kind of moment preserved in pompeii and herculaneum after the destruction of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD the difference between those examples and Gordian is that nobody died in the attack in the destruction of Gordian again not an attack just a fire that gets out of control 800 BC somehow everybody got away only two animals died in that attack no animals were harmed in this destruction but there were two who obviously were tethered to a building and couldn't get away nevertheless this has given us a phenomenal amount of information and enables us to reconstruct the settlement during all the periods of its existence now what prompted them to build such an enormous settlement completely obliterating what they had built over the course of a century and build a new city five meters higher and how big was that city that they had built after the destruction we knew how many buildings were on the Citadel and these so-called middle frisian buildings were eighth century buildings you see here on the color phase plan in blue built directly over the early frisian buildings in red but how big was this settlement that was something we wanted to determine using remote sensing which is a technique that virtually every archaeologist uses today at his or her site different kinds of remote sensing work better in different areas sometimes radar works better sometimes magnetic perspective which is what we use works better sometimes a technique called electric resistivity works better you can think of these along the lines of x-ray or MRIs in a hospital it's telling you what lies beneath the surface of the earth as long as whatever it is is about three meters deep so perhaps ten feet deep then the machine will pick it up so the technique that works best at Gordian is magnetometry we use a machine that looks like this we walk over the area that we're interested in knowing more about and plotting the subsurface features so here you're seeing the Citadel mound of Gordian and the area that we prospected using this machine it will measure magnetic anomalies so variations in the magnetic fields of buried objects and we walked over this entire area and as you see we got a kind of x-ray of what lies beneath the surface of the earth and found new buildings on the citadel mound the center of the settlement the residential district to the north one part of the so-called Lower Town residential district at the South another part of the Lower Town and then a new residential district at the West the so called outer town and we have evidence now for three mud brick forts that would have protected the settlement during the so-called middle Phrygian period 8th 7th and early 6th centuries BC which you see in these blue squares one up here at the north one at the south wet as a theast the so-called kukuku u k-- or little mound and then one we found just last summer a fort on the far western edge of the city so it's considerably larger than we had originally thought and this gives you a kind of axonometric view of what we think the settlement was like you had a citadel wall a very high set of the wall around the most important buildings at the center of the site another citadel wall with defensive ditch around the Lower Town and yet another fortification wall with defensive ditch around the outer town incredibly well fortified and with one of these forts the so-called ku ku ku uke you see how enormous it was a platform made out of mud brick that's 12 meters high supporting a four-story wooden barracks a four-story wooden building in which the defenders of Gordian were positioned when the Persians attacked the city now again why are they going out of their way to build such incredibly large settlements when what they had was perfectly sufficient you have to view it in the context of what's happening at the other capitals of Near Eastern empires so if you were to go to the kingdom of r2 in northeastern Turkey you would see these gigantic fortifications and gigantic Citadel's this one built near Lake Van in eastern Turkey the Aurora ins were an empire that was active from about 8:30 to 6:30 DC and alternately a friend or foe of the Phrygian Kingdom remember this is the time where monumental Assyrian palaces are being built Nym rude Khorsabad incredibly large throne rooms without internal supports some of the most majestic buildings the world had seen up to that point many of which of course now regrettably have been destroyed by Isis and even in southeastern Turkey at the area of so many refugees from Isis you would see a whole series of what we call sea row Hittite were Nero Hittite settlements they also with these incredibly large fortifications to protect the residents of the city so there was a kind of aristocratic competition or royal competition among the kings of the ancient Near East to see who could build the better bigger stronger citadel and that Inn is undoubtedly one of the reasons behind such monumental constructions of gore at board Ian now these this monumental rebuilding of the city takes place in the early 8th century BC it's before Midas comes to the throne - will arrive on the throne at some point after 740 BC roughly in 740 BC and he would rule until the end of the 8th century so the dates are roughly 742 700 BC and he was the strongest of the Phrygian kings and the wandering whose reign the frigid kingdom reached its greatest extent stretching almost as far west as the Aegean Sea stretching as far east probably as the Euphrates River so a phenomenally large kingdom and you get an idea of his power by looking at some of the monuments that were intended to glorify Him one of which is Midas city which you see on the screen at the left this enormous facade 18 meters high that's elaborately decorated with the same kind of geometric decoration that you find in the textiles mosaic floor and pottery of Gordian all of which you can see on display in the exhibit upstairs but you can see by looking at the man here standing in front of the facade how gigantic these facades were and there's an inscription to Midas up here who was called Mita so we know the frigid word for Midas is Meeta mi ta the same word that was used to describe him by the Assyrians who mentioned Midas repeatedly as one of their principal foes someone who was repeatedly encouraging the city-state's in what is now southeastern Turkey to revolt against a Syrian control it was during this period that the Iliad the great epic in describing the wars between the Greeks and the Trojans was written down for the first time end of the eighth century BC and if you look at the description of Phrygia in the pages of the Iliad you see how what a strong Kingdom it's presented as being this is a lustrated of the nature of the Phrygian Kingdom during the reign of Midas it's not describing the situation at the end of the Bronze Age when the Trojan War allegedly occurred this is a contemporary reference to what - had created now what do we know of - we know that he was a king reaching out both east and west so his wife was Greek the daughter of the Greek ruler of the city of keemei on the northwestern coast of Asia Minor he was reportedly the first of the foreign kings to make a dedication to the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi in central Greece a wood and ivory throne that was seen in the Treasury of the Corinthians one of the club houses at Delphi and you're seeing here the location of Delphi on a map in upper left and an aerial view of the temple of apollo of Delphi on lower left in front of the Treasury of the Corinthians where this wooden and ivory throne was supposed to have been ensconced the French excavators working there in the 1920s found an ivory lion-tamer the figure of a standing man with a standing lion next to him which is clearly part of a piece of furniture so it's an ivory attachment for a piece of wooden furniture in frigid style dateable stylistically to the late 8th century BC and found in front of the clubhouse where Herodotus says - his throne was exhibited we're virtually certain that this ivory lion-tamer was originally the figural decoration of Midas's throne something like this which I show you on the right which is the reconstruction of a throne from the kingdom of r2 in northeastern Turkey which I mentioned before this too is on display in the Golden Age of King Midas exhibit through the courtesy of the Delphi Archaeological Museum one of the few things that we can be sure Midas himself would have touched now - his first major activity as builder upon assuming the throne was to complete the so called Midas mount tumulus mm which Rodney Young had excavated in 1957 you see the Midas mound here as it looks today and then a cross-section of the Midas mound showing the tomb chamber in the center of it this was the largest burial mound in all of Asia Minor for nearly 200 years from the time in which it was built in 740 BC until about 560 BC when the Lydian King Croesus you know the expression rich as Croesus he builds an even bigger tomb for his father a Leontes but for 200 years this is the biggest 153 meters in height a hundred seventy four feet in height so high and so monumental that even the looters weren't successful in getting to the tomb chamber either in antiquity or in the modern period this was excavated by Penn and within it they found the oldest standing wooden building in the world now you see a video of the construction of that tomb chamber on the screen this is a building that measures 6 by 7 meters with the ceiling height just under 4 meters so roughly a little over 12 feet high it didn't have any doors or windows of course because there was never the expectation that anyone would ever go in the tomb again following the internment of the dead King and we assume that that king was - his father a man named gordias who appears to have died around 74 BBC and his skeleton was found inside the tomb chamber as was as were all of the vessels that were used by mortars during the funeral of the dead King in 740 BC so these are the people that maitus would have invited to the funeral each one had his or her own bowl some of those bowls were inscribed with their names and so we know roughly how many people were there slightly over a hundred we have all the vessels that they used for the funeral meal on the occasion of the funeral and fortunately the sediment remained in the bottom of those vessels and Rodney young in 1957 was prescient enough to say let's take the sediment from the vessels we could have it analyzed in the archaeological laboratories of the pen Museum and ultimately determine what kind of meal was served at the funeral and what they drank and so in these enormous cauldrons you see where there was a fermented beverage that they drank in the course of the funeral service which was later much later actually analyzed by Penn Museum scientist Pat McGovern and he was able to reconstruct what it was they were drinking during that service in 740 BC makes a very unusual mix of wine beer honey and saffron which Pat McGovern then communicated to dogfish Head brewery and they produced Midas touch golden elixir which you can buy at your local Brewers Outlet based on the original recipe of 740 BC patented by the phrygian kings so we can all count ourselves lucky that nobody washed the dishes at the end of this funeral service nor was there any need to watch those dishes everybody was dead who would have cared and the tomb was being sealed for the next twenty seven hundred years within the tomb and I should add we of course also have the meal which is not nearly as exciting as the drink so the meal was a barbecued goat or sheep mixed with lentils and spices in a stew and these vessels used for dining were placed around the body of the dead king who was presumably might as his father Gore Dias so the skeleton survived intact the body of a man between the ages of 60 and 65 and what was interesting is that his body had been covered by a shroud that had been coated with a very unusual pigment which we've analyzed only recently in the last five years this pigment is called ger tight named after the German poet Goethe and it gives off a golden Sheen we've got some of it in the exhibit upstairs we found that and you see some examples of it here a detail here and an even closer detail here we found this Gert I treatment on other textiles and garments from the citadel of Gordian and the tomb so it looks as if the aristocracy of the city were wearing golden gowns what I often call Neola megan's were faux la megan's sort of like the Golden Globe Awards and so as they were going through the city the elite of the settlement would have looked like a kind of golden race thanks to this iron oxide coating this special pigment that was used for the garments and so this may have been the origin of the story of the golden touch that is associated with Midas we don't find any gold in tumulus mm and this is top of the line this is a Roy an intact royal burial from the ancient Near East one of the very few that's ever been found not a stick of gold anywhere in the tomb nor in many of the other any of the other contemporary tombs at Gordian so we have to look for the origin of the story of the golden touch somewhere else and we may find it in this unique treatment of the fabrics or the costumes of the city now you see here a reconstruction of the head of the man who was buried in the tomb and you see his skull is skull here John Prag at the University of Manchester is the man that you see on the right he specializes in reconstructions of the skulls from ancient burials so he will study the skull read up on the man or woman who was buried in the tomb and assemble a reconstructed head so this gives you an idea of what he's doing he's moving as you see on the left from the skull to the reconstructed head you see it in three-quarter view and then nearly in profile on the right so this is again presumed to be - his father gore Dias now at the time in which this scientist was doing the reconstruction this was assumed to be the tomb of Midas not his father hence the name midas mound so when he was doing the reconstruction he thought that he should make it conform to the story of Midas as presented in the writings of the Roman historian Strabo who wrote in the late 1st century BC Strabo - site that describes Midas as dying by drinking Bulls blood committing suicide deliberately by drinking Bulls blood following an invasion of his kingdom by the Khmer Ian's a nomadic group from southwestern Russia that swept through Asia Minor in the 7th century BC now we now know that this isn't true there is no evidence that the Khmer ian's destroyed Gordian although they destroyed plenty of other sites in Asia Minor in the 7th century BC there is no evidence that might has committed suicide and there is no evidence none whatsoever that drinking Bulls blood will kill you and in fact as I've said several times once when I gave this lecture there was a man from Argentina who told me that they drank Bulls blood as a kind of energy drink sort of like Red Bull which also doubled as an aphrodisiac so in any event whatever it will do to you it won't kill you so this story is suspect but when he was doing the reconstruction he thought he was reconstructing the head of a man who was about to commit suicide and was eyeing a glass of bulls blood on the windowsill so he gave him the marks of anxiety he made him look like someone who's about to commit suicide but what's especially unusual is this regular head it looks as if the cranium has been artificially were deliberately elongated this is a technique that you sometimes find for the elite members of a society especially royalty in a society where the head of the child of the baby would be bandaged or boarded in such a way that the skull would be elongated as you see here so as to make it look so as to distinguish this man from all others in society by virtue of this forgiveme peanut-shaped head so this was a mark of august status who were almost superhuman power and you find it as well used in the Indiana Jones aliens in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull as well as a whole host of figures it's often used as a mark of superhuman status and you can see again the unusual shaping of the skull as we look at the head in profile which is featured in the Gordian exhibit upstairs now throughout this tomb we have a number of objects some of which may well have been diplomatic gifts that includes these wonderful bronze wine or wine buckets or sigil eye one of which you see here at a reconstruction by archeological illustrator pete de yong these would have been used to dip the two you would have dipped them into the wine cauldrons brought out the wine and then you could have poured the wine into the bowls for drinking now as I say some of these bowls were inscribed with the names of the users this is one with a rectangular wax film on the side of the bowl and seats Eidos you see his name here that's been incised into the side of the bowl keep that name cg dos in mind because we were fortunate enough a few years ago to be inspecting the ceiling beams of the tomb and we found in size on one of the ceiling beams of the tomb the name si si dose along with three others two of which you see here nah-nah and XOS and cg doses you see frigid is a language very close to Greek very very close to Greek using essentially the same alphabet and so cg dotes on the bowl seats Eidos on the beam of the tomb what does that mean surely this is not graffiti since Eidos is someone of an august status and so why are these names on the beam of the ceiling we don't know for sure it may be that these are the people who oversaw the funeral's activities members of the aristocracy who were in charge of the funeral and who signed the beam before it's placed at the top of the tomb chamber in 740 BC and a few years ago we went up to the top of the tomb chamber you see me here and moved we cut we actually the Ministry of Culture and Tourism was being very kind to us they gave us permission to cut with a saw one of the ceiling beams of the oldest standing wooden structure in the world and so we moved it to see if we could find any more inscriptions and we didn't I was hoping this would be like a memory book that you find at funerals today where all of the mourners would have signed it so that I could get an idea of the CREM de la CREM in Near Eastern society in Asia Minor in the middle of the 8th century BC but I was unlucky in doing that in any event you get an idea of the magnificence of some of these buildings and monuments for which - was responsible in the second half of the 8th century now as we move into the 7th century beyond - we find a much lower level of prosperity at Gordian toward the end of the 7th century there are major changes the Assyrian Empire collapses the RTN Empire collapses the Khmer ian's this nomadic band from southwestern Russia they disappear Linnea this kingdom in west central Turkey assumes control of Phrygia Croesus builds the the largest tumulus in Asia Minor for his father Ali Otteson 560 the world is completely changed and would change even more significantly in the 5 40s when the Persians take over all of Asia Minor and construct an empire stretching from what is now southeastern Europe all the way to Afghanistan after this we get some new buildings during the Persian period at Gordian but not very many and then a much lower level of activity during the Hellenistic period the Roman period and the medieval period were seljuq period at Gordian and so why did anyone decide to excavate this Mound like many discoveries this one was accidental it is sense there was a construction of the Berlin Baghdad railroad in the late 19th century so this was intended to unite the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century and to give the Germans ready access to the oil fields of Mesopotamia and you see a sketch map of the the Berlin Baghdad railroad starting in Constantinople here although it would have gone all the way to Berlin and continuing all the way to southern Iraq and when the engineers were building this they noticed a suspicious-looking potential Citadel mound filled with pottery they alerted the German officials who sent a German classicist Alfred kurta to the site who with his brother conducted excavations at the site for three months and they found some wonderful things and identified it as the Phrygian capital of Gordian but that was all the work they did and for 50 years it simply sat there until rotten eyoung comes on the scene now Rodney Young was a very colorful character larger than life as you can see with this photograph of him in 1950 this is what archeologists used to look like and you can look at me now and see there's been a radical change in the appearance of archaeologists but the swagger is right there and you almost need that kind of bravado to do what he did which is to bring an entire ancient kingdom to life between 1950 and 1973 he had had a colorful life even before he started at Gordian having worked for the OSS the Office of Special Services and antecedent of the later CIA many academics worked as spies for the American government during World War two because they knew the topography they knew the language of the area they knew what areas were safe and what areas were not in the first five years of the 1950's he focused his attention on the Citadel mound of Gordian so all of the buildings that I've just shown you but there was a change in the middle of the 1950's Froelich Rainey who at that time was director of the pen museum wrote a letter to one of the members of the Board of Overseers and you can read it he advises a change in excavation strategy to wit digging the Midas mound which was so monumental that initially Rodney Young hadn't been planning to tackle it not once in all of our imaginate in all of our excavations have we made a dramatic discovery which fires the imagination of the average man discoveries such as woolly made at or for us in the 20s this will make archaeology and we've got to make such a discovery again if we're going to do our job for the whole science of archaeology the Midas tomb maybe just that discovery which would reverberate throughout the world this written in 1955 and so Rodney Young takes this to heart deciding to locate the tomb chamber and to excavate it in the 1950s now this is not easy to do now we can use remote sensing and we can find where the tomb chamber is but it was almost never dead center in the mound in the burial mound in antiquity if you put a dead center then it would be easy for the looters to find it so in essence with a mound this big in the 1950s you have to look for the proverbial needle in a haystack and Rodney Young did it by drilling taking a drill as if you were drilling for oil and drilling 96 times in the mound knowing that eventually he would hear sense the sound of the drill coming up against the rubble packing that he knew would surround the wooden tomb chamber that would presumably contain the body of Midas or as we now think his father so really it is like looking for a needle in a haystack but he was successful he found the tomb chamber through the drilling and then needed to dig it so in order to dig it he obviously had to dig a very long tunnel 70 meters long because you see that the tomb chamber is very close to the center of the mound and so to do it he brought in coal miners from the Black Sea coal mining town of Zonguldak to Gordian 12 of them whom you see here building a tunnel that was about two and a half meters wide and about 2 meters 20 in height and they dug this working all day long 24 hour shifts three shifts working around the clock over the course of nearly a month and they made it to the tomb chamber they had to dig or they had to cut a hole in the side of the tomb chamber because there were no doors or windows as far as the Phrygians in the 8th century knew no one would ever come in that tomb again they knew nothing of Rodney Young and so they had to cut a hole in the side in order to gain access which they did successfully now why was there the zeal to dig a tumulus this big why did Rainey write that letter you have to imagine what the 1950s were like at the pen Museum everyone wanted to make a discovery as magnificent as possible that would guarantee the museum as much publicity as possible things have been rather slow during World War two you couldn't dig in the Mediterranean or in the Near East it was too dangerous so there had been a kind of cessation of archaeological activity but now in the wake of World War two it was possible so there were excavations all over the Near East and the Mediterranean many of you know Robert Dyson on the Left former director of the pen museum his excavations at Hassan loo that began in 1956 a year later were two years later he discovers a lie a wonderful gold bowl the so called Hassan mughal bowl you see his university museum jeep one of which we still have at gordon Iain nicknamed arias so he was making wonderful discoveries there his own destruction level of 800 BC as I mentioned before excavations start in 1956 also at Tikal in Guatemala which yields a phenomenal pre-columbian settlement and at the same time Froelich Rainey is pushing forward the collections of the Penn Museum with the TV show that everyone loves what in the world which you can still find on YouTube and you see an image of Froelich Rainey here the museum and Penn in general were in great competition with the other elite universities of the northeastern part of the United States so you have Princeton working in the Athenian Agora with the assistance of John Rockefeller jr. building up the so-called stoa of Attalus again in 1955 this is all happening in the mid-50s one of the as it were competitors for Rodney Young was George Hoffman at Harvard University who was digging at Sardis excavations are starting there in 1958 and a whole series of tablets are being unearthed at Pylos the Mycenaean Palace of Pylos by the University of Cincinnati between 1952 and 1966 that's Carl Blanken of the University of Cincinnati who had earlier excavated at Troy so there was phenomenal competition but phenomenal discoveries in retrospect the 50s was one of the most important decades of archaeological discoveries of which we know now I mentioned that Carl bloggin had earlier excavated at Troy and there are a lot of connections between Troy and Gordian as you remember as I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture you have migrants from South Eastern Europe going to Gordian and de Troy in the 12th century BC the king of Troy's wife Priam's wife was Hecuba who was a friction and I found Troy and Gordian coming together in a very unusual way in 2009 when I asked the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Turkey for permission to put on an exhibit focused on Gordian - and the work of the pen Museum accordion over the last 65 years I wasn't expecting that if that request would become intertwined with a hoard of early bronze age roughly 2400 BC early Bronze Age gold jewelry that the museum this museum had acquired in 1966 subsequently published by George bass the so-called father of underwater archaeology you see the gold here it's very similar to the treasure of Priam that Heinrich Schliemann had found at Troy in 1873 and there was some suspicion that this gold acquired in 1966 had been looted from Troy although it was very close to jewelry gold jewelry from the Bronze Age discovered at Lemnos the Greek island of Lemnos also dating to about 2400 BC so you can see in these slides the gold of the pen museum compared to the gold of Troy compared to the gold of Lemnos these are earrings these are of course bracelets they're all nearly identical so it was virtually impossible to know if this jewelry had come from what is now Greece or what is now Turkey in 2009 I brought my colleague from Troy arts Karnataka whom you see here and his colleague Herman born to analyze this gold to determine whether or not it was all genuine in one of the pendants he found a grain of sand extraordinarily high in arsenic matching the high arsenic content of the soil of Troy this was a kind of smoking gun that suggested that this jewelry was probably looted from Troy and thus from Turkey we of course publicized our discovery you see it here in a page from the Philadelphia Enquirer of 2010 with the headline good museums that's our museum could museums gold be from ancient Troy this was read by Philadelphia and by everyone at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Ankara shortly thereafter a request was made for the repatriation of the Troy gold they had been investigate our museum because I had written them a letter asking them for permission to put on an exhibit focused on Midas Gordian and the Phrygians to make a long story short after 11 months of negotiation we reached an agreement we're in the gold would go to Turkey on indefinite loan and in return for that indefinite loan over a hundred twenty objects from Gordian and a series of museums in Turkey would come to Penn for an exhibit of a years duration focused on Midas Gordian and the frictions and that is the exhibit that you can now see upstairs so as you see it's a very long and labyrinthine journey to this exhibit which brings together Troy and Gordian in a way I could never have expected I want to close by making a few comments on the impact of the story of Midas which means the impact of the name of Midas over time that name has come to be associated with power with prominence with prosperity on an unusually high level much higher than any of the achievements that Midas himself was responsible for in the 8th century BC it's become a kind of symbol of prosperity and quality simultaneously and you see one case in point on the screen these are coins struck by the mint of Kazakhstan the Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan in 2003 2004 and as you see they show king midas on the left and Croesus king of the Lydians in the center the two wealthiest men in ancient asia so they wanted to signal the people of you know I didn't talk on the phone to anyone from Kazakhstan but I can imagine that they wanted to signal the power and prominence of Kazakhstan in the early 2000s and they conceived of the use of types of Midas increases on gold coinage as a way of communicating that notion in effect presenting themselves as successors of the wealthiest men of Asia Minor in antiquity these are for sale by the way on the Kazakhstan coin website just in case you would want to see it in time the name of Midas has also been linked to awards especially awards associated with finance and technology investing and you see this especially in the pages of Forbes magazine the - 100 or even the - 200 at the same time the name of Midas has come to be viewed as a guarantee of quality of a wide and disparate array of products such as flour furniture and of course automobile parts and this applies not just in North America but also in Europe and in the Near East so this Midas office furniture store is for example in Dubai and you can find the same thing in Abu Dhabi or Qatar any of the Emirates so it's a name that literally spans the world and recently we've seen it in a more prominent light in that it has come to be used to indicate prosperity and political power in a way that I for one wasn't expecting so many of you are familiar with the book published by Donald Trump called the Midas touch where he is in effect comparing his political and economic prosperity to that of Midas in eighth century BC fridja and of course Donald Trump is a panel um and so how could he not know the story of Midas and Gordian and the fridges and so in summary I suppose you could say that the power of the name of Midas transcends all spatial temporal and conceptual boundaries and in a very real sense just as Froelich Rainey had once predicted it is a name that now resonates throughout the world thank you for listening to me tonight and thank you for your sort of the museum

Channel: Penn Museum

Views: 35,555

Rating: 4.7765956 out of 5

Keywords: University of Pennsylvania Musuem of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, Science, History, Archaeology, King Midas, Phrygian, Greek, Golden Age, Assyrians, Philadelphia museum, Dr. C. Brian Rose

Id: NPgZhBagmbk

Length: 51min 9sec (3069 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 07 2016