The subject of this book is the archaeology of Gordion, modern Yassıhöyük, located in Polatlı province in Türkiye, roughly 100 km west of the modern Turkish capital of Ankara. Gordion’s heyday was in the Middle Iron Age, ca. 900–600 BCE, when it was the seat of the mytho-historical King Midas of Phrygia, generally thought to have ruled in the latter half of the eighth century BCE (a date based on a concordance of Greco-Roman and Assyrian historical sources). Much like the stories of Midas’s golden touch, however, the term “Phrygia” appears only in later Greek and Roman sources. We do not know how the Phrygians identified themselves—if indeed by “Phrygians” we mean the people responsible for the material culture we associate with Iron Age Gordion, rather than speakers of the Phrygian language or members of an ethnic group mentioned briefly by Herodotus (Historiae 7.73). Some might go so far...
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