Incised Drawings From Early Phrygian Gordion

In 1950, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology began excavations at the ancient Phrygian capital of Gordion in central Turkey. The Museum's Gordion Project continues today, with researchers from many disciplines and with many specializations contributing to a growing—and sometimes changing—body of information and understanding about this complex and multifaceted site, inhabited by peoples and diverse civilizations for millennia. In this volume of Gordion Special Studies, Lynn E. Roller focuses on a series of stone blocks with incised figural and abstract drawings recovered from early Phrygian structures at Gordion. The great majority of the incised stones come from a single structure within the Early Phrygian citadel at Gordion known as Megaron 2, a stone building with several remarkable features and a likely candidate for the citadel's temple. The volume begins with a description of the excavation of the stones and a discussion of Megaron 2. Next is an analysis of the subject matter of the drawings by type, describing scenes of human figures, animals, architectural drawings, geometric patterns, and formless marks. A discussion follows of the sources from which the drawings could have been taken and of parallels with similar scenes and designs on objects in other media from Gordion and other contemporary sites in Anatolia. The fourth section proposes an explanatory hypothesis on the origin of the drawings, and considers who could have made them and why. Parallels with comparable drawings from Anatolia and the Near East are discussed here. The final section summarizes the contribution of the drawings to our understanding of the development of the Early Phrygian material at Gordion. University Museum Monograph, 130

Some of the most dramatic new discoveries in Asia Minor have been made at Gordion, the Phrygian capital that controlled much of central Asia Minor for close to two centuries. The most famous ruler of the kingdom was Midas, who regularly negotiated with Greeks in the west and Assyrians in the east during his reign. Excavations have been conducted at Gordion over the course of the last 60 years, all under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In spite of the economic and political importance of Gordion and the Phrygians, the site is consistently omitted from courses in Old World archaeology, primarily because Gordion lies too far to the west for many Near Eastern archaeologists, and too far to the east for classical archaeologists. Moreover, there is no book that offers a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of the material culture of Gordion during the Phrygian period, a gap that will be filled by this volume. The chapters cover all aspects of Gordion's Phrygian settlement topography from the arrival of the Phrygians in the tenth century B.C. through the arrival of Alexander the Great in 333 B.C., focusing on the site's changing topography and the consistently fluctuating interaction between the inhabitants and the landscape. A reexamination of the material culture of Phrygian Gordion is particularly timely, given the dramatic recent changes in the site's chronology, wherein the dates of many discoveries have changed by as much as a century. The authors are among the leading experts in Near Eastern archaeology, historic preservation, paleobotany, and ancient furniture, and their articles highlight the interdisciplinary nature of the Gordion project. A significant component of the book is a new color phase plan of the site that succinctly presents the topography in diachronic perspective.

The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia is a unique blend of comprehensive overviews on archaeological, philological, linguistic, and historical issues at the forefront of Anatolian scholarship in the 21st century. Anatolia is home to early complex societies and great empires and was the destination of many migrants, visitors, and invaders. The offerings in this volume bring this reality to life as the chapters unfold nearly ten thousand years (ca. 10,000-323 BCE) of peoples, languages, and diverse cultures who lived in or traversed Anatolia over these millennia. The contributors combine descriptions of current scholarship on important discussion and debates in Anatolian studies with new and cutting edge research for future directions of study. The 54 chapters are presented in five separate sections that range in topic from chronological and geographical overviews to anthropologically-based issues of culture contact and imperial structures and from historical settings of entire millennia to crucial data from key sites across the region. The contributers to the volume represent the best scholars in the field from North America, Europe, Turkey, and Asia. The appearance of this volume offers the very latest collection of studies on the fascinating peninsula known as Anatolia.

"Religions" are always costly - one has to give offerings (with material value) to the gods, one has to provide the salary for religious specialists who offer their service for their clients, one has to arrange festivals and liturgies - and of course, one has to provide the material means for building temples or shrines. But these costs also repay - as the gods give health or well-being as reward for the offerings. Even if one can never be absolutely certain about such a reward, one at least might earn social reputation because of one's (financial) involvement in religion. But temples are also economic centres - "employing" (often in close relation to the palace) people as workers, craftsmen or "intellectuals" in different positions whose "costs of living" are supplied by the temple. Individual religious specialists receive payment for their service to cover their own costs of living. Although this might sound "modern", religion and economy were intertwined with each other in ancient society also. For this reason, the papers of this conference volume analyse and discuss how the cults, rituals and institutions in Anatolia in the 2nd and 1st millennium contribute to the economic process in those areas.

A Research Guide to the Ancient World: Print and Electronic Sources is a partially annotated bibliography that covers the study of the ancient world, and closes the traditional subject gap between the humanities and the social sciences in this area of study. This book is the only bibliographic resource available for such holistic coverage.

This book publishes the results of 220 botanical samples from the 1993-2002 Gordion excavations directed by Mary Voigt. Together with Naomi Miller's 2010 volume (Gordion Special Studies 5), this book completes the publication of botanical samples from Voigt's excavations. The book aims to reconstruct agricultural decision making using archaeological and paleoenvironmental data from Gordion to describe environmental and agricultural changes at the site. John M. Marston argues that different political and economic systems implemented over time at Gordion resulted in patterns of agricultural decision making that were well adapted to the social setting of farmers in each period, but that these practices had divergent environmental impacts, with some regimes sponsoring sustainable agricultural practices and others leading to significant environmental change. The implications of this book are twofold: Gordion will now be one of the best published agricultural datasets from the entire Near East and, thus, serve as a valuable comparable dataset for regional synthesis of agricultural and environmental change, and the methods the author developed to reconstruct agricultural change at Gordion serves as tools to engage questions about the relationship between social and environmental change at sites worldwide. Other books address similar themes but none in the Near East address these themes in diachronic perspective such as we have at Gordion. University Museum Monograph, 145

This volume brings together the latest reports on archaeological projects, including excavation and survey, from all periods and every region of Anatolia. It is a forum in which scholars present their most recent data to a global audience, allowing for productive engagement with others working in and near Anatolia regarding discoveries and interpretations. The series offers a venue where recently concluded projects may provide an overview of results, often years ahead of the final publication of complete site reports. Published every two years, The Archaeology of Anatolia: Recent Discoveries series is an invaluable vehicle through which working archaeologists may carry out their most critical task: the presentation of their fieldwork and laboratory research in a timely fashion.

The truss adopts the rational configuration of the non-deformable triangle, optimizing the exploitation of the wooden members’ resistance resources. It is an extremely efficient structural typology that has gone through the centuries in its almost primitive configuration without substantial modifications, for which finding comparisons in the history of construction is difficult. But when was the truss born? This is the first general-interest book to address this question. Using scant but precious ancient literary documentation, the archaeological finds and the iconography of the figurative products that reproduce roofs, the book traces the gradual evolution process of the roof carpentry that led to such an invention. New hypotheses are advanced on the technical achievements of the main Mediterranean civilizations – Egyptian, Minoan and Mycenaean, Phrygian, Etruscan, Greek and Roman – in a broad and ambitious excursion that crosses the whole of Antiquity. The book is accompanied by a rich illustrative apparatus that includes historical and original photographs as well as numerous explanatory drawings.