UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date: 7-Jul-2010 I, Shannan M. Stewart , hereby submit this original work as part of the requirements for the degree of: Doctor of Philosophy in Classics It is entitled: Gordion After the Knot: Hellenistic Pottery and Culture Student Signature: Shannan M. Stewart This work and its defense approved by: Committee Chair: Kathleen Lynch, PhD Kathleen Lynch, PhD 8/23/2010 1,077 Gordion After the Knot: Hellenistic Pottery and Culture A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy in the Department of Classics of the College of Arts and Sciences by Shannan Marie Stewart July, 2010 B.A. University of Minnesota, 2001 M.A. University of Wisconsin, 2003 Committee Chair: Kathleen M. Lynch, Ph.D. Abstract The archaeological site of Gordion is located in central Anatolia, near the confluence of the Sakarya and Porsuk Rivers. Settlement at the site extended from the Early Bronze Age (third millennium B.C.E.) through the Hellenistic period (late fourth through early second centuries B.C.E.). Gordion is perhaps best known for its most famous king Midas, who ruled the Phrygian Empire in the late eighth century B.C.E., and for its most famous visitor, Alexander the Great, who cut the Gordian Knot in 333 B.C.E. Through the success of his military campaigns, Alexander established an empire stretching from Greece to the Himalayas and inaugurated a new cultural and historical era, the Hellenistic period. The material culture of Hellenistic Anatolia has received only limited attention from researchers, leaving a vast lacuna in our view of the Hellenistic world, which this dissertation begins to emend by documenting and analyzing the Hellenistic pottery recovered during the Rodney S. Young excavations at Gordion (1950–1973). A cultural history of the site in pre- Hellenistic periods examines religious, linguistic, and material characteristics that are retained, modified, or abandoned in the Hellenistic period. A review of the written accounts of Hellenistic Gordion is supplemented by a cultural history, which synthesizes over a century of research on several categories of material evidence. The Hellenistic pottery is then examined in terms of fabrics, wares, forms, and types. The implications of the ceramic evidence are discussed in a series of nested contexts, from how vessels facilitated the daily activities of the domestic sphere, to the scale and organization of the ceramic industry at Hellenistic Gordion, to the cultural connections between Gordion and other Hellenistic settlements in Anatolia. The Gordion Hellenistic pottery is then used to reassess the nature of Hellenization by challenging common assumptions about the processes, motivations, and results of this phenomenon. iii © Copyright 2010 Shannan Marie Stewart iv Preface Although the Gordion Hellenistic pottery has become a major part of my life, I am but one minor character in its long history. The material was first excavated by Rodney S. Young and his team between 1950 and 1973 under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. The scholars who participated in the Young excavations constitute a veritable Who’s Who of Greek and Near Eastern archaeology, and I am honored to be part of the Gordion tradition. Any study of the material would have been impossible were it not for the meticulous fieldwork of Rodney S. Young, G. Roger Edwards, Machteld J. Mellink, Ellen Kohler, Mabel Lang, Dorothy Cox, Oscar W. Muscarella, George Bass, James McCredie, Charles K. Williams III, Crawford H. Greenewalt Jr., G. Kenneth Sams, Keith DeVries, Karen D. Vitelli, Peter I. Kuniholm, and many others too numerous to mention. I am grateful to them all and regret that I did not have the chance to meet several members of this illustrious company. Despite the enormous quantity and excellent preservation of the Hellenistic pottery unearthed by Young and his team, the material slumbered quietly in storage facilities in Yassıhöyük and Ankara until the 1970s, when Frederick A. Winter, then a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, began his study of the Late Classical and Hellenistic black slipped imports, which resulted in his 1984 dissertation and several articles on the topic of Hellenistic Gordion. Frederick’s dissertation helped me navigate the baffling array of imported wares, and his insights and analyses have informed my understanding of that assemblage in no small way. He went on to a successful career in the administration of grant-making agencies, and the Hellenistic pottery was again left without an advocate. In the summer of 2003 Andrea M. Berlin visited Gordion and was kindly received by G. Kenneth Sams, General Project Director of the Gordion Excavations, who gave her a tour of the v storage depots and mentioned that the local and imported Hellenistic pottery from the Young excavations was not, at that time, assigned to anyone for publication. Andrea phoned me in the fall of that year, during my first month in residence as a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, to ask whether I knew anyone who would be interested in writing a dissertation on some “unbelievable” Hellenistic pottery from Gordion. I cannot claim to have known anything about Gordion, or Phrygia, or Turkey, but her description of the site and its history, excavation, and pottery were enough to pique my interest in the material. Later that week Andrea mailed me photographs of the Gordion Hellenistic pottery and I fell in love at first sight. She warned me of the magnitude of the project. Young had moved a lot of dirt and his excavations had produced thousands of inventoried pots and hundreds of thousands of sherds kept as context material. The excavation records existed only in hardcopy; nothing had been computerized, digitized, or scanned (a situation that has since been rectified by the tireless efforts of Gareth Darbyshire). No work had been done on the Hellenistic stratigraphy and there was no state plan of the Hellenistic architecture. There was no published ceramic comparanda, no chronological guide for the Gordion Hellenistic vessels. Furthermore, living and working conditions at the excavation house were primitive, with no indoor plumbing and limited electricity. After a second look at the photographs of the pottery, none of these circumstances mattered to me. After much pleading, including an email to Andrea with an itemized list entitled “Why I would be the perfect person to work on the Gordion Hellenistic pottery,” I found myself in possession of a very glamorous dissertation topic. At the same time, Andrea arranged for Martin G. Wells, a graduate student in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, to begin work on reconstructing the Hellenistic stratigraphy and vi architecture. That project (Marty’s dissertation) is now nearing completion. Marty and I have worked closely on the Gordion material for six years, and it has been a great comfort to share with him both the frustration and the satisfaction of working on Young’s Hellenistic Gordion. Our individual endeavors should be considered two parts of a larger Hellenistic whole and I look forward to further collaboration with Marty. In retrospect, I do not know if Andrea had me in mind for this project from the beginning, or if I simply managed to convince her that I was up to the task before someone else had the chance, but I am eternally indebted to her for securing my access to the most important corpus of Hellenistic pottery yet discovered in Anatolia. If she does not regret her decision, I will have accomplished half of what I set out to do. vii Acknowledgments I have spent six years working on the Gordion Hellenistic pottery, and for six years I have been eager to document formally my gratitude to the many institutions and individuals that have supported this study. From 2003 to 2009 I was the grateful recipient of a Louise Taft Semple Fellowship in the Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati, which not only gave me the opportunity to study at one of the finest and most rigorous archaeological programs in the United States, but allowed me to do so without the anxiety of financial uncertainty. I wish to thank the faculty of the Classics Department for their many and varied contributions to my academic and professional development, especially Getzel M. Cohen, Jack L. Davis, Harold C. Gotoff, Kathryn J. Gutzwiller, William A. Johnson, Kathleen M. Lynch, and Gisela Walburg. I am particularly grateful to William Johnson for his invaluable career advice. This dissertation was vastly improved by the unparalleled resources of the Burnam Classics Library, not the least of which is its excellent staff, namely David Ball, Michael Braunlin, and Jacquelene W. Riley. Their exhaustive knowledge of the collection and their tireless efforts to fulfill even my most obscure requests have made researching this dissertation a pleasure. I am deeply indebted to John Wallrodt, Senior Research Associate in the Classics Department. Every aspect of my work has benefitted from his expertise and his technological vision for the department. I also thank everyone involved in the Iris Lightbox image database, which saved me countless hours of work during my first year of full-time teaching and consequently allowed me enough time to finish this dissertation. Gayle McGarrahan, Kenneth J. Gottorff, and Laura Deller provided indispensable administrative support with unflagging energy and cheerfulness. I am deeply honored to have had the permission and support of the General Directorate for Cultural Properties and Museums in the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. In 2004 and 2006 the late Hikmet Denizli, Director of the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara and a steadfast friend of Gordion, kindly approved my requests to examine the Gordion pottery that had been stored there in 1950.