Gordion is one of the most important archaeological sites in the Near East, occupied for more than 4,000 years from the Bronze Age to modern times.
People began living at the site of Gordion in the Early Bronze Age, at least as early as ca. 2500 BCE. Knowledge of the Bronze Age at Gordion is more limited than that of later periods owing to the masking of these earlier settlement levels by later activity.
Gordion’s heyday came in the Iron Age, following the breakup of the Hittite kingdom, when the site emerged as the capital of the land of Phrygia, one of the most powerful states to develop in Anatolia.
Gordion is also linked with Midas, the Iron Age king of the late 8th century BCE, who in later Greek mythology is cursed with the “golden touch”
Alexander the Great cut the famous Gordian Knot and fulfilled a prophecy to become the ruler of Asia.
In 277 BCE, Celtic-speaking mercenaries, the Galatians, moved into Anatolia from ancient Thrace in eastern Europe and ultimately settled in the Gordion region and further north and east.
According to Roman textual sources, the inhabitants of Gordion abandoned the site in the face of a Roman punitive expedition into Galatia led by the consul Manlius Vulso.
Alfred and Gustav Körte, the German brothers who first identified the Yassıhöyük site with ancient Gordion excavated five tumuli and two locations on the citadel mound, plus a trench in the Lower Town. They published their findings just over three years later in 1904.
First series of excavations by the University of Pennsylvania, directed by Rodney S. Young.
Excavations resumed once again in 1988 under the direction of Mary Voigt of the College of William and Mary, and continued until 2006, with work also directed by T. Cuyler Young, Andrew Goldman, and Brendan Burke.