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From: University of Chicago > News
Oriental Institute archaeologists help discover lost kingdom in ancient Turkey
Tip from local farmer helps uncover ancient Bronze and Iron Age city
Archaeologists from the Oriental Institute have helped discover a lost ancient kingdom dating to the ninth to seventh centuries B.C., which may have defeated Phrygia, the kingdom once ruled by King Midas, in battle.
In summer 2019, University of Chicago scholars and students joined an international survey team in southern Turkey to investigate Türkmen-Karahöyük, a large Bronze and Iron Age mounded settlement that was occupied between about 3500 and 100 B.C. The Konya Regional Archaeological Survey Project, directed by Michele Massa with the British Institute at Ankara, Christoph Bachhuber with Oxford University and Fatma Şahin with Çukurova University, had identified the settlement as a major archaeological site in 2017.
Last summer, a local farmer told them he’d seen a big stone with strange inscriptions while dredging a nearby irrigation canal the previous winter. ...
Translated by OI scholars, the pronouncement boasted of defeating Phrygia, the kingdom ruled by King Midas, legendary ancient ruler said to have a golden touch.
(Asst. Prof. James) Osborne said it appears the city at its height covered about 300 acres, which would make it one of the largest ancient cities of Bronze and Iron Age Turkey. They don’t yet know what the kingdom was called, but Osborne said its discovery is revolutionary news in the field. ...
Read more at: Oriental Institute archaeologists help discover lost kingdom in ancient Turkey
