Gordion is frequently remembered as the location of an intricate knot
ultimately cut by Alexander, but in antiquity it served as the center of
the Phrygian kingdom that ruled much of Asia Minor during the early
millennium B.C.E. The site lies approximately seventy kilometers
southeast of Ankara in central Turkey, at the intersection of the great
empires of the East (Assyrians, Babylonians, and Hittites) and the West
(Greeks and Romans). Consequently, it occupied a strategic position on
nearly all trade routes that linked the Mediterranean and the Near East.
The University of Pennsylvania has been excavating at Gordion since
1950, unearthing a wide range of discoveries that span nearly four
millennia. The vast majority of these artifacts attests to the city's
interactions with the other great kingdoms and city states of the Near
East during the Iron Age and Archaic periods (ca. 950-540 B.C.E.),
especially Assyria, Urartu, Persia, Lydia, Greece, and the Neo-Hittite
city-states of North Syria, among others. Gordion is thus the ideal
centerpiece of an exhibition dealing with Anatolia and its neighbors
during the first millennium B.C.E.
Through a special agreement signed between the Republic of Turkey and
the University of Pennsylvania, Turkey has loaned the Penn Museum more
than one hundred artifacts gathered from four museums in Turkey (Ankara,
Gordion, Istanbul, and Antalya) for an exhibition titled The Golden Age
of King Midas. The exhibition features most of the material recovered
in Tumulus MM, or the Midas Mound (ca. 740 B.C.E.), which was the burial
site of King Midas's father, as well as a number of objects found in a
series of Lydian tombs. The Turkish loan has made possible a uniquely
comprehensive and elaborate exhibition that also features a disparate
group of rarely seen objects from the Penn Museum's own collections,
particularly from sites in the Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Greece.
With the historic King Midas (ca. 740-700 B.C.E.) as its guiding theme,
the exhibition illuminates the relationships Phrygia maintained with
Lydia, Persia, Assyria, and Greece. The accompanying catalog includes
full-color illustrations and essays that expound on the sites and
objects of the exhibition.
