page_title: Gordion
section_title: Early Phrygian Destruction Level
hierarchical_section_title: Gordion / History of occupation / Early Phrygian period / Early Phrygian Destruction Level
caption_attribution_description: English: View of the Citadel Mound at Gordion, looking southeast. Early Phrygian Terrace Building Complex in the foreground with the East Citadel Gate behind it. Tumulus MM in the background to the left. 2015.
context_page_description: Gordion was the capital city of ancient Phrygia. It was located at the site of modern Yassıhüyük, about 70–80 km southwest of Ankara, in the immediate vicinity of Polatlı district. Gordion's location at the confluence of the Sakarya and Porsuk rivers gave it a strategic location with control over fertile land. Gordion lies where the ancient road between Lydia and Assyria/Babylonia crossed the Sangarius river. Occupation at the site is attested from the Early Bronze Age continuously until the 4th century CE and again in the 13th and 14th centuries CE. The Citadel Mound at Gordion is approximately 13.5 hectares in size, and at its height habitation extended beyond this in an area approximately 100 hectares in size. Gordion is the type site of Phrygian civilization, and its well-preserved destruction level of ca. 800 BCE is a chronological linchpin in the region. The long tradition of tumuli at the site is an important record of elite monumentality and burial practice during the Iron Age.
context_section_description: There is ample evidence of widespread burning of the eastern portion of the Citadel Mound of Gordion, in a level referred to by the initial excavator, Rodney S. Young, as the Destruction Level. This event, and the subsequent deposition of up to five meters of clay above the burnt level, sealed and preserved many buildings and hundreds of objects from the Early Phrygian phase, providing an astonishing insight into the character of the elite district of an Iron Age citadel, unique in Anatolian archaeology. As such, the Early Phrygian Destruction Level provides well-dated comparative material for other sites in the region and constitutes a key fixed point in Central Anatolian chronology.
  Archaeologists at first interpreted the Destruction Level as the remains of a Cimmerian attack, ca. 700 BCE, an event referred to much later by Strabo and Eusebius as resulting in the death of King Midas. Initial radiocarbon data analyzed by Young cast some doubt on this interpretation, but the date of 700 BCE was widely used. Beginning in 2000, a renewed program of radiocarbon dating, dendrochronological analysis, and a closer examination of the objects in the Destruction Level began. Three factors were of particular importance: the establishment of the date of Tumulus MM at ca. 740 BCE based on dendrochronology; the comparison of Destruction Level objects with those in Tumulus MM and other independently dated assemblages in the Gordion tumuli; and the study of well-known 8th century Greek ceramics in post-Destruction Level contexts. Taken altogether, this research indicated that the date of the conflagration was approximately one hundred years earlier than previously thought, ca. 800 BCE.
  Initial criticism of the radiocarbon analysis focused on the preliminary publication of five samples but was subsequently refuted by the publication of fifteen more short-lived samples, each the average of dozens of barley, lentil, and flax seeds from the Destruction Level. These all indicated a range ca. 840-795 BCE, most likely between 830/815 and 810/800 BCE, and were in no way compatible with a ca. 700 BCE date, even with extreme adjustments to the outliers within the data. Consequently, the fire can no longer be associated with a Cimmerian incursion and was probably accidental in nature, with no indications of a military attack. A date of ca. 800 BCE for the Early Phrygian Destruction Level has been widely accepted by scholars working throughout Central Anatolia, with objections voiced only by Muscarella and Keenan.
caption: View of the Citadel Mound at Gordion. Early Phrygian Terrace Building Complex in the foreground with the East Citadel Gate behind it. Tumulus MM in the background to the left.
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