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Preface and Acknowledgments

This study continues the practice of earlier volumes in the Gordion Special Studies monograph series of publishing the material from Gordion uncovered in the excavations carried out at the site from 1950 to 1973 under the directorship of Rodney S. Young. The present body of material, the incised drawings from Early Phrygian Gordion, makes a good subject for the Special Studies series, since all of the material was uncovered in a single context, the Citadel area of the Early Phrygian settlement, with the majority of it coming from one building, Megaron 2. Megaron 2 was excavated in 1956 and 1957, and the original excavator, Rodney Young, recognized the potential value of the stones with incised drawings. Because of his interest in the material, many of the incised stones were catalogued and kept in a depot in the excavation house compound to await further study. Rubbings were made of the incised surface of every stone, and drawings were then developed from the rubbings. A selection of these drawings appeared in Young’s presentation of the incised stones in preliminary publications of the Gordion excavations (a fuller discussion of these circumstances is given in the Introduction). There were, however, a number of problems with the initial recording and publication of the incised stones. The quality and accuracy of the drawings made during the 1950s were very uneven, and several of the early excavation drawings show significant variance from the actual marks incised on the Phrygian stones, often to the point where these drawings form a misleading basis for study. The presentation of the stones in the preliminary publications is also fraught with problems. As discussed in the Introduction, Young initially interpreted the incised drawings as doodles made by casual loiterers in the Early Phrygian city, and he never wavered from this interpretation in subsequent publications. The incised stones that Young chose to illustrate in his published discussions of the material represent only a small sample of the total corpus of material, and these examples seem to have been selected for publication in part because they supported Young’s interpretation.

In the years since the original excavation of the incised stones, Young’s interpretation and the preliminary drawings of the stones have received considerable attention from scholars interested in the Anatolian Iron Age and in Phrygian culture, and several have offered alternative interpretive hypotheses.¹ Inevitably, though, the discussions of other scholars were limited to the material published by Young and their interpretations were constrained by Young’s choice of drawings. As the Catalogue and Commentary presented here show, the subject matter that appears on the stones is much wider than Young’s publications imply and several classes of material never appeared in the Gordion preliminary reports. This circumstance, coupled with the questionable accuracy of several of the original pencil drawings that appeared in preliminary publications, renders previous scholarly analysis of the stones and the meaning of the drawings problematic, since these analyses have inevitably been based on incomplete and inaccurate data. In addition, the discovery of a stone in the Early Phrygian Gate complex incised with a variety of subjects similar to those found in the Megaron 2 drawings suggests that such drawings may have been more widespread than originally thought and their meaning may be unrelated to the function of Megaron 2. For all these reasons, it was decided to start afresh with a new set of drawings of the incised stones and publish the whole corpus of the Early Phrygian incised stones together in one volume.

I first became acquainted with the potential value of the Early Phrygian incised stones while I was working on my study of the non-verbal graffiti from Gordion,² since I recognized that several of the patterns occurring on the incised stones offered good parallels to the non-verbal graffiti found on Gordion pottery. I began my study of the Early Phrygian incised stones in 1992, and I completed the majority of my drawings of the stones in 1992 and 1993. Various events, including the preparation of my book on the cult of the Phrygian Mother Goddess,³ resulted in a protracted delay before I was able to complete my work on the incised stones. The delay has been fruitful, however, since the intervening fifteen years have seen major strides in our understanding of Early Phrygian Gordion and more generally of the Anatolian Iron Age and Iron Age chronology. In particular, the major redating of the Early Phrygian Citadel through carbon 14 analysis of plant samples from this level of the site has considerably altered our picture of the cultural development of the Early Phrygian levels at Gordion and their relationship to contemporary cultures of western Asia during the early Iron Age.⁴ It is my hope that the full presentation of the Early Phrygian incised stone drawings will contribute to furthering the scholarly dialogue on this fascinating period in a constructive way.

Archaeology, and the publication of archaeological data, is by its very nature a group activity, and so it is a special pleasure to record my thanks to many friends and colleagues who have contributed to my study of this material. The Gordion Excavation has long enjoyed the support of the General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums of Turkey, and the Directorate’s representatives at the site during the summer seasons of my work on the incised stones have aided significantly in its completion. At Gordion I owe an immeasurable debt to the Excavation Director, G. Kenneth Sams, and to many Gordion colleagues, including Brendan Burke, Gareth Darbyshire, Matthew Glendinning, Andrew Goldman, Mark Goodman (now deceased), Robert Henrickson, Richard Liebhart, Naomi Miller, William Remsen, Elizabeth Simpson, Maya Vassileva, Mary Voigt, and Cuyler Young (now deceased), all of whom helped critique my interpretive ideas in their formative stages. Preliminary reports on the incised stone drawings were presented at several colloquia on the Anatolian Iron Ages, in Van, Mersin, Eskişehir, and Izmir. These colloquia, arranged at regular intervals by Professor Altan Çilingiroglu, professor of Anatolian Archaeology at Aegean University in Izmir, have proved to be a fertile and rewarding forum for discussion of a wide variety of problems on the Anatolian Iron Ages, and I owe a special debt of gratitude to Professor Çilingiroglu and the many scholars who attended them and gave me the benefit of their criticisms there. I would also like to thank other colleagues for helpful comments: Dietrich Berndt, Susanne Berndt-Ersöz, Toni Cross, Crawford H. Greenewalt, Jr., Peter Kuniholm, Taciser Sivas, and Caillouette Thorman. In Davis I owe generous thanks to my student research assistants Anna Kazdaglis Trent, Stephanie Norris, and Melanie Saeck. I am also very grateful to Megan Lancaster and Judit Sawangwan for their help in completing my pencil drawings of the stones. Mediaworks, the center for instructional technology at the University of California, Davis, provided valuable technical assistance in preparing the drawings for publication and improving the photographs to the best quality possible.

My work at Gordion during the preparation of this manuscript has been supported by several faculty research grants from the Office of Research, University of California, Davis, for which I am very grateful. I am also pleased to acknowledge a generous and much appreciated grant from the Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies and the Office of Research at University of California, Davis, to support the preparation and publication of this volume; I owe further thanks to an anonymous donor for additional publication support. Throughout my work on this project, the Gordion Archives Office at the University of Pennsylvania Museum has offered unfailing support in providing access to the records of the Gordion Excavation; I would especially like to acknowledge the help of Gareth Darbyshire, Walda Metcalf, and Jennifer Quick. G. Kenneth Sams read an earlier draft of this manuscript and made numerous suggestions for its improvement; I am grateful to him and to the two anonymous readers for their many helpful comments and corrections. All of the above have helped improve this study immensely; the faults that remain are mine alone.

Finally, I would like to emphasize the special debts I owe to three key members of the Gordion Excavation team, none of whom lived to see my study of the Early Phrygian incised stones brought to completion. The careful records kept by Ellen Kohler, Registrar of the Gordion Excavation during the period of Rodney Young’s tenure as Excavation Director, are essential to the study of every aspect of the early Gordion excavations, and her many years of work at the site gave her an unparalleled wealth of knowledge about the Gordion excavations that contributed greatly to making my study of the incised stones possible. My special thanks go to my former teacher and mentor, Keith DeVries, who first invited me to participate in the Gordion project and always encouraged my work at the site and my interest in the Early Phrygian incised stones. My greatest debt is to Rodney Young, who had the wisdom and the foresight to recognize the value of this material and to save it for posterity, even if he did not always read it aright. This volume is dedicated to the memory of these three pioneering scholars of ancient Phrygia.

DECEMBER 2008

1. See especially Mellink 1983, Prayon 1987 and 2004.

2. Roller 1987.

3. Roller 1999b.

4. DeVries, Kuniholm, Sams and Voigt 2003; DeVries 2007.