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Commentary on the Incised Drawings from Early Phrygian Gordion

Introduction

This study presents for publication a series of stone blocks with incised drawings recovered from the Early Phrygian Destruction Level at Gordion. The great majority of the incised stones come from a single building in the Destruction Level, Megaron 2. Most were recovered from Megaron 2 itself, either blocks still in place in the walls at the time of the megaron’s excavation or blocks found lying nearby, where they had fallen from the building’s walls. A few incised blocks found in the clay fill above Megaron 2 probably also came from this building. Two incised blocks formed part of the walls of House Y, one of a pair of small storage buildings behind Megaron 2. Two additional examples of incised drawings occur on stones built into the Early Phrygian Citadel Gateway complex.

The incised stones from Megaron 2 were first uncovered during the building’s excavation in 1956 and 1957. They were described in the excavation reports for those years and a sample of the stones were illustrated, both photographs of the actual stones and drawings of them.⁵ Rodney Young, their excavator, was fond of them; he included references to the incised stones in two general reviews of the Gordion excavations that appeared in the 1960s and devoted a special study to them in the journal Archaeology in 1969.⁶ Other than that, the incised stones have received comparatively little attention from scholars. It is not surprising that this should be so. The years 1956 and 1957 were exceptionally productive ones for the Gordion Excavation: two of the most spectacular Phrygian burial tumuli, Tumulus P and Tumulus MM, were opened during those seasons, both with their contents well preserved,⁷ and extensive excavation in the occupation levels on the Gordion Citadel mound during the same period was beginning to reveal the potential richness of the Early Phrygian Destruction Level. Compared with such striking material, a series of simple, rather crudely drawn pictures might seem to be of minimal interest. Another factor that surely contributed to the lack of interest in this material, however, is Young’s evaluation of the incised stones. He felt that the drawings were casual graffiti scratched onto Megaron 2 by a broad cross-section of the Phrygian population at Gordion, who scribbled onto the walls of the building to pass the time while waiting to conduct business in the Citadel quarter.⁸ Young formulated this explanatory hypothesis during the initial phase of the stones’ excavation; indeed, both this explanation and his nickname for the incised drawings, “doodles,” appear in the excavation notebook entry for the day when the first examples were uncovered. The term “doodles” was used to describe the incised stones in the excavation reports for those years and in virtually every subsequent mention of the stones. As a result, Young’s explanatory hypothesis was rarely examined by others.⁹ Indeed, Young’s characterization of the drawings as “doodles” tended to imply that the information to be gained from them was limited and discouraged further attention to them.

At first glance, Young’s label seems appropriate. The drawings on the stones have a very informal, even humorous character that is readily apparent. Many of the drawings are quite simplistic, almost crude, and were clearly not done by a skilled artist. In several cases it appears that one drawing was placed on top of another without any regard for the appearance of the final scene; stones 8, 10, 14, 71, and 82 offer representative examples. Other examples can be termed “drawings” only in a very loose sense of that term, since they seem to be little more than random lines and formless marks scratched onto the stones. Yet a closer analysis reveals that this material is of considerable interest. The drawings, while not of a high skill level, provide us with some of the earliest examples of representational art in Early Phrygian culture, including depictions of human figures (always rare in Phrygian art), animals, both wild and domestic, and architectural structures. Several of the drawings contain complex pictorial scenes that hint at a narrative function. In addition, at least some of the drawings appear to be imitating a more complex and sophisticated visual model. Some of the scenes show close affinities with contemporary examples of the art of Neo-Hittite cities in southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria, while others provide some of the earliest examples of patterns and symbols that are found in Phrygian religious iconography and Phrygian writing. Moreover, the circumstances under which the drawings were made need to be re-evaluated. Young’s hypothesis explaining their origin, as sketches made directly onto the standing walls of Megaron 2, does not stand up to closer inspection, and there is good reason to think that at least some of the drawings may have been incised onto the stones used in the Megaron 2 walls before the building’s construction. In addition, two drawings, 104 and 105, have more recently been noted on blocks from the Early Phrygian Citadel Gateway complex, one on the interior surface of the north court building and one on the wall of the south tower that formed the entrance to the Early Phrygian Citadel. Drawing 104 in the north gate court contains subject matter that is very similar to some of the drawings found on the Megaron 2 blocks, suggesting that the occurrence of the incised drawings may not be related to the function of Megaron 2.¹⁰

Other circumstances need to be taken into account in an evaluation of the incised drawings. The revised chronology for the Early Phrygian Destruction Level and a greater understanding of the relationship of this level to previous and subsequent occupation levels at Gordion shed a new perspective on the drawings and the information they can contribute to our understanding of Early Phrygian society. The drawings also offer information that helps us place Gordion within the context of other Anatolian cultures during the early Iron Age. For all of these reasons, it seems appropriate to present the incised stones in greater detail and offer an analysis of the drawings on them.

5. Young 1956b:263–64; Young 1957:323, figs. 10–12; Young 1958:142–43, fig. 3.

6. Young 1963:353; Young 1965a:482, fig. 3. For the Archaeology article, see Young 1969a.

7. Young 1981.

8. Young was unaware of the incised drawings on the Early Phrygian Citadel Gateway; these have never been discussed in print.

9. One exception is Mellink 1983; here Mellink offered the hypothesis that the incised drawings were connected with the cult of the Phrygian Mother goddess. While I disagree with Mellink’s interpretation, her study is noteworthy in being the first to recognize that the drawings were more than just casual graffiti.

10. There may have been more than the two examples of incised drawings on the Early Phrygian Citadel Gateway included in the catalogue here. Careful examination of the gate stones in 2004 revealed several additional stones with traces of incised lines that may be ancient. In each case, however, the incised marks were so faint that their nature could not be determined with certainty, and so I have decided to omit them from the catalogue.