Beyond Midas
From The Observatory
Date
February 17, 2026
Location
ISAW Lecture Hall
Area
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This presentation reviews the archaeological evidence for 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.Key Speaker: Kathryn R. Morgan
Participants
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
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ISAW is a center for advanced scholarly research and graduate education, which aims to encourage particularly the study of the economic, religious, political and cultural connections between ancient civilizations. It offers both doctoral and postdoctoral programs, with the aim of training a new generation of scholars who will enter the global academic community and become intellectual leaders.
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.
