Beyond Midas: Towards an Archaeological History of Phrygia

This lecture is cosponsored by ISAW and The Archaeological Institute of America - New York Society. It will take place in person at ISAW.

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The site of Gordion in central Anatolia is best known as the seat of King Midas of Phrygia, of the legendary golden touch. Emerging as he does out of the world of Greek mythology, people are sometimes surprised to learn that Midas is considered to be an historical figure, attested primarily in Assyrian inscriptions dating to the late 8th century BCE. Excavations at Gordion, ongoing since the 1950s, have revealed a strongly fortified settlement mound surrounded by as many as one hundred (or more) monumental tumulus burials. Based on these archaeological marvels–most notably the spectacular ‘Midas Mound’ tumulus, dominating the landscape at over 50 m. high–scholars have long reconstructed Phrygia as a powerful territorial state, sometime rival to Assyria, ruled by Midas and his dynasty in the first centuries of the first millennium BCE. 

This ‘maximalist’ model has recently seen increasing pushback from scholars working elsewhere in Anatolia, who argue for a more ‘minimalist’ formulation of Phrygian political control. In it, Gordion figures as one of perhaps several culturally Phrygian city-states, akin to the many such polities that proliferated around the eastern Mediterranean of the early first millennium BCE, from the Levant and Syro-Anatolia to Greece. Midas in this context would represent not a dynasty but a short-lived phenomenon, his reign a temporary consolidation of power in response to some kind of stressor or threat. 

This presentation reviews the archaeological evidence for these two strongly divergent viewpoints, considering the scholarly traditions in which they are embedded and, importantly, what is at stake in each. Since the time of the Greek philosophers, Anatolia has served as the setting for metaphorical discourses on power, authority, legitimacy, and even human nature: how have these debates influenced archaeological interpretation? Drawing on material remains from within and outside Gordion, recently discovered Anatolian epigraphic sources, and evidence from both text-based and environmental histories, this presentation argues for Gordion as a valuable case study for exploring what we can and cannot know about ancient states and how they worked.

Kathryn R. Morgan is an archaeologist of the eastern Mediterranean, with a particular focus on Anatolia in the second and early first millennia BCE. Her current research is concerned with political organization in the ancient world: how ancient states gained constituencies and maintained power; how they worked, and/or represented themselves as working; and how they have been (mis)remembered, manipulated, and reinterpreted by historians of all stripes in the centuries and millennia since, as data, approaches, and contemporary attitudes toward power and governance have shifted. These questions served as the basis for a recent edited volume, Pomp, Circumstance, and the Performance of Politics: Acting Politically Correct in the Ancient World (ISAC Press, 2024), and underlie her monograph-in-progress, ideas from which are presented here. Her work has been supported by the Getty Foundation, the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, and the American Council for Learned Societies, among others. 

Morgan is an assistant professor of Classical Studies at Duke University, where she teaches courses on ancient Greek and Near Eastern history and material culture, as well as the cultural heritage of the Mediterranean world. She has extensive fieldwork experience in the Mediterranean and Middle East, especially in Türkiye, most recently as Assistant Director of the Chicago-Tübingen Expedition to Zincirli (2015–present; project member since 2008). 

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