Missing Link

At the time of Homer there lived, deep in the interior of Asia Minor, a great king named Midas. The Greeks were awed by his enormous wealth, amused by his odd taste in music. To celebrate the first they grew the legend of the "Midas touch." The king had once wished, they said, that everything he touched would turn to gold, and his wish was granted, even to the inclusion of whatever touched his lips. Before the laughing gods allowed him to rescind his wish, Midas almost died of thirst. As for his taste in music, Midas had the long, pointed ears of an ass, according to the Greeks, because in judging a musical contest he had preferred Pan to Apollo.

Midas was no legend. Generations of kings bearing his name reigned over Phrygia from the great city of Gordium,* now a desert waste 70 miles southwest of Turkey's Ankara. Two years ago an archaeological expedition mounted by the University of Pennsylvania, scratching the Gordian ground, broke through to tombs, closed up eight centuries before Christ. One contained the bones of Midas' line. Also found in the tombs were a four-poster bed (bearing a five-ft.-three-skeleton), inlaid screens and tables, riding gear, weapons and quantities of bronze objects, from giant caldrons ornamented with winged figures to enormously complex hairpins with concealed catches. Buried with a little prince were a vase in the shape of a goose and toy animals of great refinement.

This strange and splendid treasure has been touring the U.S., was on exhibition at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum last week. In August it will return to Turkey. The find opens a new chapter in the history of art, providing a missing link between the culture of the Euphrates basin and that of archaic Greece. Similarities in style show that Greek traders and marauders must have brought home in their hollow ships a mass of Phrygian treasure--which in turn helped shape Greek art.

* At the start of his sweep through Asia in 333 B.C., Alexander took Gordium and whether in a fit of impatience or as a calculated gesture sliced apart with his sword the legendary "Gordian knot," pride of the Phrygian priesthood, which no man before his time had ever been able to untie.

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