According to legend, everything he touched turned to gold. But fate eventually overtook the legendary King Midas, and the long-lost chronicle of his empire's fall seems to have literally surfaced in Turkey.
Last year, archaeologists explored an ancient mound in central Turkey called Turkmen-Karahoyuk. A large region, the Konya Plain, is teeming with ancient metropolises, but even so, explorers couldn't be prepared for what they found.
A local farmer told a group of archaeologists that while digging a canal, a large strange stone was found, with some unknown inscription.
“We saw that he was still sticking out of the water, so we jumped right into the canal,” says archaeologist James Osborne of the University of Chicago.
“It was immediately clear that it was ancient, and we learned: the Luwian language used in the Bronze and Iron Ages in the area.”
With the help of translators, the researchers discovered that the hieroglyphs on this ancient block of stone, called a stele, were dedicated to military victory. And not just a military victory, a victory over Phrygia, the kingdom of Anatolia, which existed about 3000 years ago.
Archaeological mound in Turkmen-Karahoyuk. (James Osborne)
The royal house of Phrygia was ruled by several different people named Midas, but the dating of the stele, based on linguistic analysis, suggests that the block hieroglyphs may have referred to King Midas – from the famous myth of the 'golden touch'.
The stone marks also contained a special hieroglyph, symbolizing that the message of victory came from another king, a man named Hartapu. The hieroglyphs suggest that Midas was captured by the troops of Hartapu.
“The storm gods handed over [the opposing] kings to his majesty,” says the stone.
Luwian inscriptions were found on a stone from a nearby excavation site. (Oriental Institute)
What's important about this is that almost nothing is known about either King Hartapu or the kingdom he ruled. However, the stele suggests that the giant Türkmen-Karahoyuk mound may have been the capital of Hartapu, spanning some 300 acres in its heyday, the heart of the ancient conquest of Midas and Phrygia.
“We had no idea about this kingdom,” Osborne says. “In an instant, we had new information about the Iron Age Middle East.”
An international team of archaeologists is keen to visit the site this year to learn as much as possible about this kingdom seemingly lost in history.
“Inside this mound there will be palaces, monuments, houses,” Osborne says. “This stele was an amazing, incredibly successful find – but this is just the beginning.”
You can read more about the study here and here.
Sources: Photo: James Osborne
