New Discoveries in Ancient Turkey

hello good afternoon everyone welcome to the pen Museum my name is Kate Quinn and I'm the director of exhibitions and public programs here at the Museum thank you for joining us on this beautiful day for a fantastic collection it's my pleasure to introduce my colleague and curator of our major exhibition the Golden Age of King Midas which I hope you'll all take the time to see if you haven't already before it closes next week dr. Brian rose Brian is the co-director of the excavation of the site of Gordian and Turkey the head of the post Bronze Age excavations at Troy the immediate past president of the archaeological Institute of America a trustee of the American Academy in Rome and curator in charge of the Mediterranean section here at the Penn Museum his lecture today will reveal startling new archaeological discoveries that have been made in Turkey in the past 25 years after the lecture is completed you can join you can purchase a catalogue for the exhibition and Brian is going to be kind enough to sign publications for you and that will happen right outside of the door here so please join me in welcoming dr. Brian rose okay my thanks to Kate for introducing me and thanks to all of you for coming today all of you by now will be familiar with the archaeological discoveries the rich archaeological discoveries that the Penn Museum has been fortunate in making at Gordian over the course of the last sixty-six years but this is only one chapter in a very long history of archaeological discoveries that have been made in Turkey which is one of the richest archaeological areas of the world and if I were to present all of the archaeological discoveries made in Turkey those of considerable import the last 30 years we would be here all day so I have only singled out some of my favorites of the greatest hits of archaeological discoveries that one could have seen in Turkey starting in the 1980s and continuing up to the present so as we go through this material I'll take you on a temporal journey the 10th millennium BC at the beginning of the Neolithic period through the middle Byzantine period roughly the early 11th century AD and we start we start with a pointer that's not working we start with the site of gravity tap a which is a site known to many of you ger Beckley Tepe is located in southeastern Turkey very close to the city of Orpha and it was a discovery that was made only a few decades ago and if you would ask me let's if you would ask me 40 years ago I would have been 20 years old and I would have known what to say to you but if you had asked anyone any archaeologist 40 years ago 30 years ago whether or not something like this was there to find they would have told you it was impossible this is a site dating to the early Neolithic period a series of stone circles as you see here in actuality and here in a reconstruction all together 20 of these stone circles have been found circles that are demarcated with these enormous monolithic stone pillars that are about 5 and 1/2 meters high so roughly 17 feet high arranged in a circle like Stonehenge but seven thousand years earlier than Stonehenge a little more than seven thousand years earlier so about 20 of these in all the diameter measures between 10 and 30 meters and these pillars are five and a half meters high on their monolithic so they're weighing about 15 tons apiece they're incredible this is an incredible public works project ten of them have actually been excavated and another ten have been discovered with remote sensing the technique of magnetometry or magnetic perspective which is a technique that we all use with great frequency these days so the astonishing thing about these stone circles these 20 stone circles is that they're ornamented with reliefs and they seem to be anthropomorphic in that in that as you see you've got belts across some of them and hands that are carved in relief on some of them so they seem to stand for human figures and they contain the oldest stone relief sculpture that's ever been found that you can see some of it here there are headless humans birds of prey scorpions snakes there's even this very unusual corpse lacking its head but nevertheless having an erect phallus so the sexual features of some of these images are just as striking as the fact that we have stone relief sculpture for the first time in history how were these being used in all likelihood these were cult centers our earliest temples as people often say our earliest sanctuaries what people did in these sanctuaries is difficult to say but it's difficult to interpret them any other way and we just have these twenty or so stone circles no houses no settlement whatsoever just this isolated cult site at the beginning of the Neolithic period now as astonishing as this is what's even more astonishing for me is that some I don't want to say archeologists but some historians have looked at this site and have said well the site is located between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers and this represents the beginning of the Neolithic period the Neolithic period begins when we have a transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers and so in a number of Neolithic sites you'll have animal bones that will show that the animals have been domesticated and domesticated crop evidence as well what some historians have done is to point to this and say well should we be thinking of Genesis in the Bible when we think of this site because what happens with the story of Adam and Eve they're picking apples they're hunter-gatherers at the beginning of the story and they're farming at the end of the story so is that a microcosm for a symbol at the beginning of the Neolithic period and should we be viewing Rebecca Lee Teppei as a site that should somehow be linked to the Garden of Eden as I say this is one of the strangest interpretations I've seen but what we've witnessed are large groups of evangelical Christian tors who were coming to grab Ecklie Teppei because oh thank you because they viewed it as the Garden of Eden now there is no connection between gubeck light MA and the Garden of Eden there's no reason to view it as the Garden of Eden but it gives you an idea of the unusual interpretations that have been brought to bear on striking archaeological discoveries that have been made in the course of the last few decades equally we have new information about the geography of Turkey and the area that surrounds it specifically the Black Sea so with recent work in underwater archaeology we've been able to determine that originally the Black Sea was a freshwater lake and became a saltwater lake only in the middle of the 6th millennium BC when water when when water from here I'm just going to use my hands when water from the Mediterranean push through what is now northwestern Turkey and turned the Black Sea from freshwater to saltwater thereby causing floods throughout the area so again some have pointed to this major change in environment and have said well is this the origin of the story of Noah and the flood no is the answer to that but it is a striking new discovery there were of course many floods in antiquity Leonard Woolley found evidence for a flooded or as you'll see in our Iraq's ancient past gallery and really almost anywhere one excavates and the ancient Near East one can find evidence for floods there were many floods no reason to link this to the flood story that was in the Bible and flood stories of course you find in almost every ancient culture but this is a major change in our understanding of the area the dramatic shift in the Black Sea and what that will have meant for habitation in the surrounding area now I've had the good fortune as some of you know to co-direct excavations at Troy for the last 25 years and here too in our excavations that began in 1988 we've been able to make some startling new discoveries and all of you were familiar I think with the monumental fortification walls of Troy Six Late Bronze Age Troy these walls were about between four and five metres thick and rose over ten metres high and you can see what they look like as you enter the site today and also what they look like in our recent reconstruction of the area here so you can see that we have limestone about eight or nine metres high with a mud brick capping directly above that recently we've done new G remote sensing geomagnetic sensing in the lower city of Troy so here you're seeing an aerial view of the mound of Troy and here the Lower City the residential district of Troy which was the residential district of the settlement from the 3rd millennium BC all the way through the 14th century AD nearly 4,000 years of residential activity and using a machine that looks like this which we've also used it ordiance some of you will recognize it from the Gordian exhibit on the other side of these walls we've been able to get an excellent idea of subsurface features what are the walls buildings and streets that lie beneath the surface of the city so here you're seeing the an aerial view of the mound of Troy this is also the mound of Troy this is the same photo and here the Lower City with the magnetic perspex and results superimposed upon it and so you can see the streets of the Roman residential district at right angles to each other what we call an orthogonal grid and you can even see the outlines of the houses that have been constructed between those streets and about 400 meters south of the Citadel so in this area we were fortunate in finding some very unusual ditches and you're seeing here in a plan the streets of the Roman residential district and the ditches that we found underlying those Roman houses now what are these ditches we did dig them you see our first trench when we were researching in this area again about 400 meters south of the Citadel we got some readings this was 1992 that indicated a major structure lay underneath the surface and this was a sort of embarrassing discovery because the journalist came to the site at the end of 1990 the 1992 season and said we understand that you've made a dramatic discovery and we said no we just know that 400 meters south of the mound there's something monumental and they said could it be a wall and we said yes of course it could be a wall but we haven't dug it yet all we know is that there's something monumental there and they said could it be of Bronze Age date and we said yeah of course it could be a Bronze Age date I mean it could be of any date remote-sensing won't give you the date of something it will only tell you that something is there you have to dig it to date it and so the New York Times did an article in September of 1992 saying Late Bronze Age fortification walls of the residential district of Troy have been found and Achilles into trophyless and Hector and Cassandra and everybody else ran around these walls at the end of the Bronze Age which is of course not what we found nor what we said to the journalists it's a lesson to archaeologists a lesson we have to tell ourselves about literally every year be careful when you talk to journalists I mean that's true for all of us because they need to develop a story and they'll take the kernel of what you tell them and fashion phenomenal discovery which we would never make because when we dug that area that looks so promising at the begin in the 1993 season we found a rock-cut ditch rather than a monumental fortification wall and so there was an article right after that in the New York Times saying their wall is a ditch which made us look ridiculous but it was nevertheless an incredibly important discovery because over the course of time oh thank you I now I now have three laser pointers over the course of Thank You Garrett over the course of time we were able to dig various places around the perimeter of the Lower City and we found evidence for a rock-cut ditch in each of the areas where we excavated and so you see one of those trenches here and our reconstruction of it this is actually what we found and here at the left or reconstruction of what we think that area looked like 3,000 years ago so here we have evidence for a gatehouse and then the ditch continuing around and also continuing over here completely encircling the residential district of Troy and so it's clearly intended for fortifications although what's perplexing is that we don't have good evidence for a wall on the interior side of the fortification ditch which is something that one typically does find here in the reconstruction we've used a wooden palisade with an earthen embankment behind it and that may well be the case although we can't prove it conclusively but in any event we found evidence for a two-tiered defensive system at Troy in the Late Bronze Age the 14th and 13th centuries BC the period during which Western Asia Minor was experiencing armed conflict between the Mycenaean Greeks and the Hittites and the Ali's allies of the Hittites over the course of about two centuries now if we move from the Late Bronze Age into the Iron Age there have been additional dramatic discoveries made even more recently and I take you to this area along the Euphrates River which is the area where one would now find the border between Turkey and Syria and to the site of tell taya not which is a site excavated by Tim Harrison of the University of Toronto one of the most important what we call neo-hittite city-states in the area while digging in the vicinity of a monumental building they found an equally monumental statue which fortunately had an inscription on the back of the statue that enables us to identify and now this statue was about four meters high that's between 13 and 14 feet high a gigantic statue of one of the kings of Tel taya not one of these strong Citadel's lying along the banks of the Euphrates and the King's name was Shu Palelei OMA not the famous Shu pallulah Yuma that some of you may be thinking of from the Hittite Kingdom in the 4th 14th century BC but another shoe paloma from the ninth century BC probably a contemporary of the Assyrian King shall manie's or the third and you can see you get an idea of how monumental this was simply by looking at Tim Harris and the excavator and the former Minister of Culture and Tourism of Turkey standing on either side of it and also looking at the excavator himself next to the newly discovered statue this was fairly common for neo-hittite kingdoms but rarely do we find statues like this completely intact and he's holding in his hands a spear and sheaths of wheat which is often what one finds with these monumental statues some attribute of war and some attribute of fertility I mean that's true for honorific statues across the board even if you look at 20th century statues the wife of Giuseppe Garibaldi in the middle of Rome you have Anita Garibaldi during the war for the unification of Italy and she's got a baby in one hand and a pistol pistol in the other or you look at images of Athena with the spear in one hand and a distaff were a spindle for weaving in the other so some mark of fertility or the home in one hand and a mark of war and the other that's the standard now Gordian is a site with which you're all is a consequence of the exhibit in the two rooms on either side of this auditorium and as you know the site has been excavated by the University of Pennsylvania for the last 66 years and I only single out two discoveries fairly recent discoveries of the many that have been made at Gordian one involves the ivory lion-tamer which is on display in the exhibit and it was my colleague my recently deceased colleague Keith DeVries who proposed that we should view this as one of the components of the wood and ivory thrown that Midas dedicated to the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi being the first foreign King according to the Greek historian Herodotus to make such a dedication and if you look at Thrones in Assyrian reliefs such as the one you see here or in our to the kingdom to the east of Phrygia you get an idea of how figural elements could be incorporated into the overall design now this remains a theory but a very compelling one and in any event this is in an Anatolian style dateable to the late 8th century and found in front of the Treasury of the Corinthians which is where Herodotus says the throne of Midas was visible the other discovery of course is connected to tumulus mmm the so called Midas mound excavated by Rodney Young in 1957 and containing the oldest standing wooden building in the world the assemblage of which you can see of course in the middle of the exhibit it's only recently that the shroud that covered the body found in tumulus mmm has been analyzed and we found that it was treated with an inorganic pigment and iron oxide called ger tite named after the German poet Goethe which gave it a strong golden color and this developed into one of our new theories only four years old wherein we proposed that the story of the golden touch is related to the unusual treatment applied to the clothing of the elite of the city and so the golden touch would therefore be applied to my and the Gordian and de frigate not because they used a lot of gold implements indeed from what we can see they didn't but rather because the people themselves looked golden as they walked through the streets of the city in formal processions these two members in Gordian and in fridja in general were wooden and that would last for several centuries until there would be a move to stone to muley as for stone tomb chambers in monumental burial mounds in western Turkey and southern Turkey but in a few cases the wooden tomb chambers continued even into the fifth century BC the ones that had first been designed in frigid and a case in point is the site of Tatar 'la near the modern Turkish city of affion where a wonderful wooden tomb chamber has been excavated dating to the first half of the fifth century BC now unfortunately as with many tombs in Turkey this one had been plundered and this was especially tragic because the tomb chamber contained our best wooden tomb paintings that have ever been found you can see them here in this recreation and so the decedent's activities in war were rendered on the sides of the tomb chamber you see a detail here which seems to show a combat between Persians and Scythian and then a funeral service here presumably with the decedent in a biga a two wheeled chariot being led in procession through the city and gradually out to the tumulus now this is extraordinary we don't have anything this good anywhere and when it was plundered some of the painted wooden beams were stolen from the tomb chamber and showed up in Munich and were recognized by a Turkish archeologist Lahti fey sommer who convinced the Germans in tandem of course with the officials of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Turkey that these would painting should be repatriated to Turkey she was able to prove that they had to have been looted from this particular tomb chamber and so they have been repatriated and that the newly reconstituted tomb will soon be on display in the affion Archaeological Museum now some of our most exciting tombs have been found in and around the Granicus River which is where Alexander had the first of his major battle with the Persians in 334 BC this was a survey that I was lucky enough to direct between 2004 and 2007 so just to orient you this is a space-shuttle photograph Troy would be here the Dardanelles or Hellespont here leading into the Sea of Marmara and then Istanbul and the Bosphorus here and the Black Sea of course up here the Granicus river you see here and a new map that we prepare charting the location of the new were newly explored to melee or monumental burial mounds along the sides of the river the most exciting of these is a burial mound that contained two sarcophagi one that you sarcophagus is of course a stone box that contained the body of the dead person sarcophagus is just a Greek word meaning in essence flesh-eater because the lime in the stone would cause the body to disintegrate at a more rapid pace and so you see one of these stone sarcophagi here surrounded by roof tiles and then another sarcophagus here now this sarcophagus which we call the Pollux in a sarcophagus dating to 500 BC had been robbed in antiquity you can see the hole cut through the side of the sarcophagus but all of the reliefs around the sarcophagus were intact and had not been damaged by the looters and those looters were ancient looters there was just as much of a tomb robbing problem in antiquity as there is in the modern period so the earliest stone sarcophagus with figural scenes ever to have been discovered 500 BC reliefs on all four our sides of the sarcophagus the principal side or the mythological side showed scenes from the Trojan War from the end of the Trojan War which is understandable because Troy lies about an hour and a half's drive west of this area by car and as many of you know the Trojan War is flanked by the sacrifice of two women the sacrifice of a Greek woman Iphigenia at the beginning of the Trojan War the sacrifice of a Trojan woman at the end of the war and that would be Pollux Anna daughter of King Priam the king of Troy and you see here they autonomous the son of Achilles plunging a dagger into her neck slicing the carotid artery this is a detail of this as the Greek Associates of neh autonomous hold the body of Xena who almost looks as if she's kicking as she sacrificed to the gods when you're slaying a woman on the battlefield the knife would go into the chest when you were sacrificing a woman as a gift to the gods or to deceased heroes such as Achilles you slice the carotid artery of the neck that signifies sacrifice and she is being sacrificed to his father Achilles whose tomb lies directly behind the body of his son so here's the tomb of Achilles with a terminal stone on top that would mark it as an artificial tomb not a natural feature of the landscape on the opposite side of this you had women engaged in lively conversation at a kind of drinking party not as symposium per se but a party on and around a clean a a banqueting couch so you see that these are all women what's interesting about the sarcophagus is 75% of the figures around the sarcophagus are female which is extraordinarily rare in ancient funerary iconography and you can see they're engaged in elaborate conversation by virtue of the position of the hands and the size of the hands these are the largest hands that we have in ancient art as a way of indicating the animated conversation that is in process and just around the corner you have a series of musicians here is one of them playing the castanets the crow Tala in Greek and there's a lyre player a flute player etc as armed warriors are dancing to the music made by the women an extraordinary discovery and next to it was this sarcophagus which had no reliefs around the body of the sarcophagus but which had never been robbed and it's about fifty years later than the so called Pollux in a sarcophagus so this is about 450 it contained the body of a child who suffered from crib row or Battaglia a disease that can be caused by malnutrition by anaemia or by malaria and when this happens you often find a skull with what almost looked like pin pricks in the skull and in this case the body was that of a child between the ages of 8 and 10 almost certainly a girl based on the discoveries inside the sarcophagus there was a great deal of gold eight identical gold earrings two gold bracelets with antelope head terminals and then two necklaces a mixture of gold and glass so the red is glass these discoveries are now in the china clay museum in north western Turkey which is the museum closest to the site of Troy and they will be on display in the new Troy Museum the construction of which is nearly complete so some of our best jewelry from northwestern Turkey that's ever been found and then just to the south of this was a sarcophagus dating to the first quarter of the 4th century BC that unfortunately was found by the looters before we worked on it with the chinoco lay Museum so the looters approached the burial mound with a front-end loader and clawed away at the tomb chamber knowing that eventually they would hear the sound of metal striking stone and so they clawed away a part of the sarcophagus right here nevertheless there was a great deal still surviving and during a rescue excavation by the Janaka lay Archaeological Museum they were able to rescue to reconstruct the tomb chamber that had been destroyed by the looters and also to rescue the sarcophagus which has much of its original paint still surviving and which seems to show a sequential narrative so the decedent victorious and the boar hunt so originally spearing a boar between the eyes as his hunting dogs attack it and another stag hunting scene was over here to the left of the tree you see one of those stags and then the same gentleman on the opposite are on the adjacent side with this very unusual Persian inspired armour spearing a fallen foe in the eye who has fallen against this very rocky and tree-covered landscape it's difficult to say whether this is a Greek as evinced by the Greek Filat that he's wearing on his head or some other kind of opponent but the point is that we have the decedent shown victorious in the hunt and victorious on the field of battle with the spear dye motif used to unite the two foes of the decedent one human and one animal and we can tell from his skeleton all these blackened sections we actually discovered in the sarcophagus that he suffered a fall from a considerable height when he was about twenty-five years old and his bones healed but badly and so he walked with a limp for about five years I mean it's almost as if we knew this guy given what I'm telling you now but he was in considerable pain during that five-year period because the bones did not heal properly and he died at the age of about thirty and so it's not unlikely that at the age of 25 after this accident his sarcophagus was commissioned and it would have been ready by the time he died five years later many striking tombs have been found in southern Turkey over the last few decades this is one of the most impressive the site of caribou rune and in what is now southwestern Turkey the area of Lycia dating to about 470 BC and excavated by Bryn Mawr College in the early 1970s showing the decedent on his banqueting couch with his attendants bringing him a variety of gifts you see how well-preserved those paintings are and I'm showing it to you even though was found 45 years ago because recently it has been plundered so the looters got into the tomb and managed to take the wall paintings off the walls of the tomb now this is extraordinarily disturbing in and of itself but these are famous paintings there's no way these can be sold on the art market they've been published over and over again if they came up for sale at Sotheby's or Christie's everyone would say these have been stolen from Turkey so why would anyone do this why would looters go into a tomb with conservators because there's no other way you could safely get the painting off the stone wall how could this happen it must be because they already had a buyer in mind or as I often say it looks as if it must have been a looting to order an ordered plundering so these paintings are somewhere now in someone's basement recreation room where they can be enjoyed by the looter over by the man or woman who paid for the looting and the Friends of those looters and someday hopefully they will come to light again but for now it's an example of how tragic these lootings are even in sites and with monuments that are extraordinarily well published one of the most interesting new discoveries was also associated with looting this is the site of Milazzo in ancient karya in southwestern Turkey beneath a temple of zeus zeus carios so the region of Karia this is the region also where Halicarnassus is located the site of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world the mausoleum of Halicarnassus which would have been here Halicarnassus was was the later capital of the kingdom of Karia the earlier capital was Milazzo modern-day MELAS and you see this very picturesque column with the storks nest on top storks loved to nest on top of standing ancient columns which is one of the most charming things in the world but in this case the looters had bought a house adjacent to the temple and they had drilled tunneled vertically through the floor 12 meters so they had very sophisticated equipment to tunnel down through 12 meters and at the bottom of that tunnel that vertical shaft they came into a burial chamber which you can see here which has a kind of barrel vaulted appearance and within it they found a phenomenal sarcophagus which you see here and here nine feet long one of the longest stone sarcophagi that ever been found even longer than the Pollux in a sarcophagus which is giant and nearly as long as the Alexander sarcophagus showing the decedent on a banqueting couch holding fee a lei or a bowl in his hands again with servants were conceivably his wife this is probably his wife but servants on the other side bringing gifts to him as you saw in that tomb at Kara beroun excavated by Bryn Mawr College this is one of the most extraordinary discoveries that has been made and it's not unlikely that this is one of the carrion he's been identified as Hecate omnis the founder of the dynasty that yielded missoula sand Artemisia the husband-and-wife brother and sister who were responsible for the mausoleum of Halicarnassus now eventually we move into the Roman period and out of the Hellenistic period as you know Octavian later to be Augustus fought a climactic war with Mark Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BC at the Battle of Actium in what is now North Western Greece and emerged victorious he was the son adopted son of Julius Caesar who was the first deified ruler in the Roman world and so Augustus called himself son of a deified human son of a D whoo so D was Julius Julius Caesar my father is a God and D we feel II use I am the son of a god and here is the comet symbolizing the rising of the soul of Caesar into the heavens Augustus was also a man who would show the weapons of war often used by the goddess of love and by Cupid her son so the weapons are war are played with by love and the associates of love because there's no need for them anymore the world has been conquered by Augustus and as a consequence there's prosperity through the Roman world so you see on his coinage Augustus with his zodiac sign the Capricorn half goat half fish holding the globe of the world in its hooves and balancing a cornucopia of prosperity on its back so what Gustus has conquered the world and as a result there is prosperity everywhere now people responded with great monuments in honor of Augustus and his descendants all over Asia Minor but the most extraordinary of these monuments dating to the early empires been found at aphrodisias in southwestern Turkey and I was lucky enough to dig this complex as a graduate student it's really one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life aphrodisias you see an aerial view here and in the vicinity of these poplar trees was discovered a phenomenal complex intended to venerate Augustus and the successors within his dynasty these would be the people some of you know of from I Claudius Augustus Tiberius Caligula Claudius and Nero the so called Giulio Claudian dynasty many significant archaeological discoveries are made by accident and this was a case in point it was known that there was a so-called Sebastiaan a building in honour of the ruler cult at aphrodisias and dating to the early empire it was known that it was somewhere many thought that it was located near the temple of Aphrodite which was the primary temple of the site Aphrodite were Venus was the divine matriarch of the family of Augustus and Julius Caesar they traced their descent from Aeneas the noble trojan who escaped the burning city of Troy prior to its destruction made his way to Italy and emerged as the founder of the Roman people no one thought to look here under the toilets of the excavation house which is where the Sebastiaan was ultimately found and found only because in 1979 when the phone broke one day the telephone repair person repairman came and in digging a hole for the new telephone pole began to find fragments of life-size marble reliefs dating to the early 1st century AD subsequently expanding that area which required the removal of our toilets we found the SEVIS stay on this building that was known to existed aphrodisias but no one was quite sure where Sebastiaan simply means a building in honor of sebast os-- which is the Greek word for Augustus and so here you see the reconstruction of this phenomenal complex a gateway and a temple to the early Roman emperors with a processional court flanked by porticoes on either side that were three storied Doric ionic and Corinthian and between the columns were life-size marble marble reliefs on both sides so 200 life-sized marble reliefs dating to the early empire most of which survived and parts of this building have been reacted by the current archaeological team so you get an idea of this three-storied format Doric ionic and Corinthian this is what you would see now if you go to aphrodisias and there are copies of the reliefs that have been set up on the facade so you get an idea of what these inter Colombians would look like when they were filled with the figural decoration and we can reconstruct yes here are the Three Graces in the middle the Three Graces are often attendants of the goddess Aphrodite she is the principal goddess of Aphrodisias and the matriarch of the dynasty is genealogical tree so she and her attendants are frequent inhabitants of the relief of this complex so you have a mythological cycle that shows Aphrodite as mother you can see here she's just given birth to Cupid here are the wings of Cupid sweeping down here this is probably anti-seize the father of Aeneas who mated with Venus and produced Aeneas and probably the personification of the area where that mating occurred and then you have a trojan cycle that culminates in Aeneas with his father on his shoulders leaving Troy with Aphrodite's protection and with his son Ascanius by his side and they're conceived of as Easterners so they wore trap at least Ascanius wore trousers they can't put trousers on Aeneas because trousers were warned by the Parthian 'he's the successors to the Persians and the Parthian were the fiercest enemies of the Romans so it was sort of a touchy situation because the Trojans wore trousers the Trojans of the founders of the Romans and the Parthian 's wore trousers they're the fiercest enemies of the Romans so who wears the pants in ancient iconography they give pants to the Sun so that everyone knows that they're coming from the east but they dress the father as a contemporary Roman general so that no one would think of mixing him up with the Parthian then you have the Emperor's themselves who are aggrandized and venerated with Augustus with this wonderful arcuated mantle or drapery holding a rudder in one hand he's guiding the Roman ship of state through troubled waters into prosperity here's another cornucopia and the land offers him fruits and the sea you can see she's a mermaid holds up the rudder so you have Augustus as commander of land and sea guiding the Roman ship through troubled waters into a realm of prosperity this is fairly standard full-blown iconography for the early Roman emperors and their military victories were honored as well so here you see the Emperor Claudius vanquishing the personification of Britain who was represented as an Amazon this was his primary military triumph and the good thing about the aphrodisias is they wrote down everything so there was no guesswork so you can see Claudius name here and Britannia just barely visible here when they would represent conquered personifications of regions they would represent them as looking either like Amazons or athina or minerva a powerful figure from classical mythology or religion this was the first relief I found Prometheus and Heracles what they wanted to convey was that the Emperor's were just as strong just as good just as magnificent as the greatest heroes of Greek and Roman mythology and so Heracles appears frequently because of course Heracles was a more immortal who dies and then goes to Olympus just like the Emperor's were expected to do so here you see Heracles this was taken by a National Geographic photographer who said I want to make it an artistic image and I said after I saw it well what you've done is glorify the buttocks of Heracles this really isn't what you should be aiming for but you know so it goes you can see him wearing the lion skin helmet freeing Prometheus who looks aggrieved from the Caucasus Mountains where he had been chained and the Eagle that had been eating his liver daily lies dead having been killed by Heracles so you can see it here just as this emerging from the ground Heracles Prometheus the eagle and the personification presumably of the Caucasus Mountains where the scene took place and then if you want to show how big the Roman Empire is one of the easiest ways is to give a physical form to each of the areas that has been conquered by the Romans and then line them all up as they have done here so originally there were 50 women each representing a different conquered area of the Roman Empire and so here you see and they've labeled them all there by taking the guesswork out of the equation for us so the porosity which I used to say was Yugoslavia but Yugoslavia doesn't exist anymore so Montenegro Dasia ancient Romania Thrace this the Bessy that would be Bulgaria and then Crete over here this one as you see looks just like Minerva or Athena even though it represents the subjugated group of Montenegrins and that's because they needed marshal women to use in their iconography and there were only so many models that they had available to them these sorts of imperial cult complexes you find all over Turkey during the Roman Empire and a number of them from the second century AD have recently been found at the site of saga lassos so you see the portrait of Heracles just beginning to emerge from the soil this portrait is this portrait once it was cleaned and next to it were found portraits of Marcus Aurelius and FAL Steiner the elder the wife of Antoninus Pius so it looks as if there was a statue gallery of all of the second century emperors that were part of yet another complex that was intended for the Imperial cult or the ruler cult now in the domestic realm there have also been striking discoveries many of you are familiar with the apartment houses or the residential complex at the site of Ephesus in the middle of the ancient city where we have wall paintings and marble revetment marble wall decoration surviving astoundingly well this dates to the late 1st 2nd and early 3rd centuries ad and you see it as you would see it now if you were to go to the site and the exciting thing is that here we have such well-preserved paintings that we can get an idea of how people were living in the 3rd century AD we already knew it from Rome and from Pompeii in the 1st century AD but now we have a kind of later Roman Imperial Pompeii that no one ever expected to find so in terms of the paintings on the walls these are extraordinary discoveries and recently extraordinary floor mosaics have been found at the site of Zeugma near Gaziantep now this was an area where a monumental dam has recently been constructed and before the dam was constructed there was intensive excavation at the site of Zeugma and the waters of the dam only cover part of the ancient site so excavations there continued and some of our most impressive floor mosaics ever found have been discovered in the late Roman houses there many of these are 2nd or 3rd century AD so you see one of them being cleaned here the Nine Muses here Poseidon or Neptune and his consort Amphitrite and then here the Ghazi Antep Museum which displays all of these mosaics once conservation was completed so one of the greatest museums not just in Turkey but throughout the world perhaps the most impressive discovery of recent years this is 2004 was made at Guinea coppa in Istanbul where the port of the Byzantine city was found as new as a new transportation hub was being constructed so excavation began here for a tunnel for a train that would go under the Bosphorus and unite Europe and Asia and as the developers began to dig you see the excavation site here they were lucky enough to find the ancient harbour one of the ancient harbors of the city the harbour of Theodosius and this yielded over 35 wooden boats that had collapsed or sunk in a storm dating to about a thousand AD these are incredibly well-preserved wooden ships so you see them being excavated here and you see how well-preserved they are here the harbor of course had silted up over time but when the ships sank they sank with their cargo still in place so in terms of ceramic studies this is a bonanza because we know exactly what was loaded on the boats when they sank in this storm of a thousand AD so really one of the most remarkable discoveries anywhere in the world and this one within the last twenty years these two will also be the focus of a new museum as you go throughout Turkey what really strikes you is how many buildings how many ancient structures have recently been reconstructed so you see here four of many examples the Gateway to the sanctuary of Aphrodite at aphrodisias first built in the second century AD the temple of Athena at Assos first built around 5:30 BC which has recently been reconstructed the sanctuary of Trajan another one of these ruler cult sanctuaries at the site of Pergamon in northeastern Turkey and one of the monumental fountains at saga lassos which I showed you a few slides ago in southwestern Turkey which now operates again as a fountain these are only a few of the phenomenally rich treasures that have been made in Turkey over the course of the last use of the last few decades and so while I would love it if you were all to come to Gordian to visit this coming summer and to see the University of Pennsylvania's fieldwork project in operation even more I'd be grateful if you would take time out during that trip to begin to explore the wonders of Turkey where you'll find 12,000 years of ancient history laid out before you and many of those monuments newly reconstructed so with that I will close and thank you for listening to me today and thank you for your support of the museum and the midis exhibit thank you [Applause] so I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have again I've only touched on some of the phenomenally rich archaeological discoveries made at Turkey and made in Turkey in the course of the last few decades yes the reliefs yeah yeah yes yes the originals are in the aphrodisias Museum they're all there well we didn't find all 200 I mean rarely do you find all of them but there are a hundred of them many of which are complete and those are in the museum so you'll be in a new extension to the museum so that is truly one of the wonders of ancient and modern Turkey to get the chance to see all these phenomenally well-preserved reliefs there are a number of sculptures in museums in different parts of the world and Turkey has asked those museums to consider repatriating those sculptures to Turkey this is something that we've seen as a phenomenon that has gathered greater energy within the last two decades not just Turkey but also Italy Greece and other Mediterranean countries that have asked for components of their cultural heritage to be sent back many of these objects or archaeological discoveries have been plundered in earlier periods so yes yes yes there was the province of Asia the province of Asia ultimately comes from the kingdom of Pergamon which occupied much of western Turkey during the third and second centuries BC and the last king of Pergamon annalists the third willed his kingdom to Rome when he died in 133 BC and that developed into the province of Asia yes right mm-hmm yeah no thank you some of the greatest new discoveries that have been made and will continue to be made are made by underwater archaeologists underwater archeology is a lot more difficult than land archaeology because you can only stay underwater for 20 minutes at a time to dig to record and to dig and to rescue what you found being careful of the conservation of the objects and bringing it to the surface but more and more shipwrecks have been found I mean there was a great one that was found several decades ago in fact I should have included it here the Lubar une shipwreck which was excavated by george bass who used to be a curator at this museum in the 1960s and then he went to Texas A&M University and founded the Institute for nautical archaeology that's a shipwreck dating to the end of the 14th century BC so just before 1300 BC and still has its cargo and so that has completely changed our understanding of what Bronze Age trade was like in the eastern Mediterranean yes the yeah the ephesus excavations were closed two months in advance of the anticipated end of the season it remains to be seen what will happen I hope that an arrangement can be made we're in the Ephesus excavations will open again next summer but it's not clear what will happen with that I can certainly say that with Gordian we've been very fortunate in working hand-in-hand with the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism for 66 years and we enjoy very close relations with them so my hope is that the rich archaeological discoveries that I presented to you today will continue to be made in the subsequent seasons yes this is a man named coot Amish Gork I who is a wonderful archeologist teaching at our University and he has made some startling discoveries in an earlier period just before the dam was constructed there was a rescue excavation by the oxford archaeological unit funded by David Packard of Hewlett Packard the son of the founder of Hewlett Packard a David Packard is the world's leading expert in linear a the language used on Crete before the Mycenaean conquest so 15th century BC 16th century BC it's never been translated he knows more about it than anybody else and he founded an institute called the Packard humanities Institute and contributed between five and ten million dollars toward the excavation of parts of Zeugma that would be covered by the water and the conservation of the mosaics that were found in the course of that rescue excavation it's an international group of Turkish archaeologists working with American and British archaeologists okay if there are no additional questions you are welcome to buy a catalogue of the midas exhibit just outside this room as you know it was edited by me and by the Gordian archivist Gareth Derbyshire who was here today and will be happy to sign any copies you care to buy so thank you again for coming for your support of the exhibit and of course for your support of this museum thank you

Channel: Penn Museum

Views: 342,848

Rating: 4.5438595 out of 5

Keywords: Brian Rose, Turkey, Golden Age of King Midas, Roman Sebasteion, Aphrodisias, Goebeklitepe, Istanbul

Id: qF8vjpc1oQk

Length: 58min 35sec (3515 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2016

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This lecture reviews the startling new archaeological discoveries that have been made in Turkey during the last 25 years, including the Roman Sebasteion at Aphrodisias, the early Neolithic cult circles at Goebeklitepe, and the Middle Byzantine shipwrecks in Istanbul. The lecture is intended as a special concluding component of the Golden Age of King Midas exhibit. Dr. C. Brian Rose, Curator of the Golden Age of King Midas , will speak.