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RESEARCH
New Treasures From King Midas‘ Tomb
He
didn‘t enjoy it much himself, but recent research
from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has
revealed that Phrygian mourners gave King Midas quite a send-off, partying down
with gallons of grog and feasting on a savory lamb-and-lentil stew.
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Researchers
from the museum have unearthed much of what we know about the real King Midas,
who ruled Phrygia around 700 B.C. and was immortalized in mythology as being
cursed with a touch that turned everything, including food and drink, into gold.
Since 1950, they have been working on a dig in Gordion, the capital of the Phrygian
Empire, located about 100 km west of Ankara, Turkey, on the edge of the Central
Anatolian steppe.
In
1957, archaeologists under the direction of Rodney S. Young excavated the largest
mound in Gordion, known as “tumulus MM” or the “Midas Mound.”
While there was no trace of gold, they did discover a remarkably preserved wooden
tomb, the earliest known intact wooden structure in the world, believed to be
the royal tomb of Midas. Inside, together with a log coffin containing the skeleton
of the king, aged 60 to 65, they found elaborately inlaid wooden furniture—some
of the earliest and best preserved wooden furniture in the world—whose
design suggested that they were used as serving and dining tables for food and
drink. They also discovered the most comprehensive Iron Age drinking set ever
found—dozens of bronze vessels of various sizes. These included some large
125-liter caldrons and smaller five-liter caldrons set into a special serving
table, along with bronze ladles used for serving. Mourners drank from one- or
two-liter bowls, of which exactly 100 were unearthed.
Fast-forward
40 years. That‘s when technology and Dr. Patrick E. McGovern, senior research
scientist and an archaeochemist at the Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology
(MASCA) finally caught up to the Phrygian funerary feast. McGovern and two colleagues,
Dr. Donald L. Glusker and Lawrence J. Exner, became involved at the suggestion
of Dr. Elizabeth Simpson, director of the museum‘s Gordion Furniture Project.
“The
archaeologists brought the food and drink samples back to Penn in 1957,”
McGovern recalls. “They went into the Gordion archive room, right above
me in the museum, and had been there ever since.”
McGovern
is one of the world‘s leading molecular archaeologists. Instead of a pickaxe
and sifter, he employs the tools of modern science: infrared spectrometry, high-performance
liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry
and wet chemical methods. Using these same techniques, McGovern and his team
have published research in the British science journal Nature on the
earliest known barley beer and the earliest known wine.
The
food samples were spongiform masses that had once filled the pottery jars found
in the Midas Mound. “We had five pounds of this brownish material available
for study, much more than any we‘ve ever seen from ancient vessels,”
McGovern says. Archaeologists also found large clumps of this material around
the pottery jars, leading McGovern to speculate that the mourners perhaps ate
the food off pieces of cloth, which disintegrated over the course of centuries.
Chemical
analysis revealed fatty acids and triglycerides characteristic of sheep or goat,
together with cholesterol. A particular phytosterol indicated that edible legume
seeds—most likely lentils—had been added, along with olive oil, honey
and wine. Other compounds suggest that the meat was first barbecued, and Mediterranean
herbs such as anise or fennel flavored the stew.
To
determine what the mourners drank, McGovern and his colleagues conducted tests
on residue flakes taken from two situlas (small vats used in serving)—one
adorned with a bronze ram‘s head, the other with a lion‘s head; nine
small drinking bowls with omphalos or “belly-button” bases; and four
larger bowls for those with greater thirsts.
Analysis
of the feast beverage has led McGovern to conclude that the Phrygians probably
migrated to Turkey from Europe—not, as others have suggested, from Asia.
Among the tell-tale ingredients that showed up in tests were beeswax, left over
from honey used in mead; tartaric acid, which occurs in large amounts only in
grapes and indicates the presence of wine in the concoction; and calcium oxalate,
a simple acid which is the chemical fingerprint of beer.
Tellingly,
the wine wasn‘t resinated. Many ancient vintners used tree resins to prevent
wine from going to vinegar (Greek retsina is a remnant). “It‘s strange
that the wine found in the tomb wasn‘t resinated,” says McGovern.
“That may be somehow related to the traditions of the Phrygians, where
they came from and what they were used to.”
The
mix of mead, wine and beer is more of a European tradition, lending some credence
to the notion that the Phrygians came down to Turkey from the Balkans or modern
Greece some time around 1200-800 B.C. “The mixing of these drinks is substantiated
in northern Europe,” McGovern explains. “They didn‘t have a lot
of possibilities for stretching out the grapes, so they used barley, wheat,
and honey—whatever sugar source they could use to get the fermentation
going.” Analysis of Greek kykeon, a mixed fermented beverage from
400 years earlier, bolsters the possibility that the Phrygians carried this
recipe from Greece to Turkey.
When
ancients drank to their health, they really meant it. McGovern suggests that
the microbes employed to spark fermentation and help preserve the beverage also
increased the nutrient value of the drink.
While
McGovern considers the analysis of the Midas funerary feast the piece de
resistance of his team‘s work, it also marks the acceleration of a
trend to probe the secrets of history with modern diagnostic technologies. For
instance, by recovering DNA from yeast used to ferment grapes to wine, scientists
can chart how yeast evolved over the centuries and begin to understand how humans
developed fermentation technology. “Once we get a grasp on how these processes
developed, we could maybe make better products than we do today. We may have
lost a lot along the way,” says McGovern. “Molecular
archaeology has more than
entertainment value; it will have a very practical impact on food science in
the future, in addition to helping us understand diseases and human
genetic development.”
—Harry Goldstein
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