King Midas' Modern Mourners - Midas feast re-created for University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology fundraiser

Science News, Nov 4, 2000 by Jessica Gorman

Chemistry resurrects--in Philadelphia--an ancient funeral banquet

"Pan scrapings!" announced G. Kenneth Sams. "When you come down to it, that is what has brought us all here tonight--pan scrapings."

It was probably not the most appetizing introduction for a $150-per-plate museum fundraiser. Some 150 guests, many in black tie, had just sat down to enjoy their first course at lavish banquet tables in the Upper Egyptian Gallery of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. Did they really want to consider dirty dishes as they sipped wine and sampled the Turkish meze before them?

Well, yes. After all, these weren't just any old dishes left in the sink overnight. Sams, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the project director for the Gordion archeological site in central Turkey, was telling the attendees about the vessels from which mourners ate an elaborate feast during King Midas' funeral 2,700 years ago.

That wasn't all. The modern diners sitting before Sams were about to eat the first reconstruction of that feast--a celebration that had remained undiscovered for decades after archaeologist Rodney S. Young first excavated Midas' tomb in 1957.

Ancient Roman, Greek, or even Maya banquets had been re-created previously, but generally from texts and ancient recipes. Not so with the Midas feast. "It's the first time that somebody tried to do it working just from the chemical evidence," says Patrick E. McGovern, the museum's molecular archaeologist who led the analyses. In other words, from the pan scrapings.

According to Greek myth, a foolish King Midas requested his famed golden touch from the god Dionysus. Soon after Dionysus granted his wish, however, Midas found that even his food became gold, and he faced starvation. Fortunately for Midas, Dionysus permitted the greedy king to return to his old self once he bathed in the river Pactolus.

Archaeologists and historians know that the real king Midas was a powerful leader around 700 B.C. in Phrygia, a region in what is now central Turkey. When Young discovered and excavated what is almost certainly Midas' tomb at Gordion in 1957, he found that it held no gold but plenty of evidence of a royal and wealthy man.

Yet even more treasure lay unrecognized near Midas' remains. Perhaps in Young's rush to finish his work before grave robbers could intercede, he misinterpreted some of the tomb's contents. He didn't realize that the vessels and wooden furniture he had found had been used by mourners for a funerary feast outside the tomb and then stashed in it.

More than 20 years later, archaeologist Elizabeth Simpson found that the telltale clue to an outdoor feast had been lying right under Midas himself.

While Simpson was drawing pictures of Young's excavation finds for a posthumous book on his research in 1978, she realized that something was amiss. She was recreating the structure of a deteriorated four-poster bed that Young had said the king's skeleton lay upon when the excavation team opened the tomb. But Simpson couldn't work out a satisfactory arrangement of a bed's pieces from the original tomb photos.

She went to Turkey in 1981 and eventually turned up the so-called four-poster in a storage area at the Gordion site. It was not a bed, it turned out, but a hollowed-out log coffin that could have served as a bier for displaying the king's body. "And then, the light went on," she says.

Simpson determined that four supports, which Young had thought to hold the bedposts, actually had steadied the coffin for display. However, these pieces of wood weren't in their supporting locations when Young opened the tomb. "That was how I figured out there was a ceremony outside," says Simpson. If the king wasn't properly on display in the tomb, he must have previously been on display somewhere else.

It took Simpson the next 10 years to work out the details. She eventually determined that mourners had held a ceremonial banquet outside the tomb. All the while, amid the scene, Midas' body lay in state on his bier.

After the mourners had their fill of food and alcohol, they lowered Midas' body into the tomb, along with their party leftovers. Simpson's theory was supported by other tomb contents, including furniture such as banquet tables and the best collection of Iron Age drinking vessels ever uncovered. Yet she became frustrated in her attempt to more completely reconstruct the event. She needed to understand what the ancient Phrygians had served in the vessels.

Simpson knew that Young's 1957 research team had removed dry yellow powder and some brown residue from the tomb vessels and dumped the samples into bags. The excavators had then shipped the bags off to storage in the University of Pennsylvania Museum's Gordion archives. Yet Simpson couldn't find anyone who could tell her what those residues had looked or tasted like 2,700 years ago.

Then in 1997, Simpson asked McGovern to help out. McGovern had by that time used modern chemical techniques to analyze the remnants of the earliest wine and the earliest beer yet found (SN: 6/8/96, p. 359). Simpson, who now leads the Gordion Furniture Project and is a professor at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts in New York City, located and labeled the samples in the Penn archive and turned them over to McGovern.