Museum of Pennsylvania

This road of course prolonged itself

through the Taurus passes, where the mounds are rare. However, once the

Anatolian plateau is reached, they start again and increase in size at the

approach to the great cities of Phrygia. The crossing of the Sangarius River is

marked by a colossal mound representing the remains of the old Phrygian

capital, Gordion, and a wide area around it is studded with tumuli covering the

graves of the Phrygian kings.

Excavations by the University Museum of

Pennsylvania in the side of the hill have revealed a gigantic stone gateway,

from which travelers on the Royal Road must have set out on their journey

northward. Half a mile further on, a stretch of the road itself is exposed,

where it passes between the tumuli; and its fifteen foot width of stone

pavement is still perfectly preserved.

(1) A. H. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains.

(2) Published in “Iraq”,

(3) Happening to visit the excavations when

this section of the road had just been located. I found the pavement newly

cleared and, standing in the center of it, the American director, a volume of

Herodotus in his hand, from which he was declaiming the passage in praise of

the Persian couriers who carried the royal dispatches from Sardis to Susa.

Anatolia or Kurdistan

However, it is not only on great highways

of this sort that the purpose of mounds can be identified. In every major

highland valley of Anatolia or Kurdistan, there, probably at a river crossing

or road junction, is a substantial mound; the market town or administrative center

of an agricultural district, which may still be crowned by the ruined castle of

a feudal landlord—the “derebey” of Ottoman times. Scattered elsewhere over the

face of the valley are smaller mounds, which were mere villages or farmsteads.

There are mounds making obvious frontier

posts, and lines of mounds sketching in the communications, which served

military defense systems of the remote past: and there are skeins of more

recent defenses, like the fortresses of Diocletian’s Hines.1 and finally, there

are tiny, insignificant looking mounds standing no more than a few feet above

the level of the plain. In addition, sometimes these prove to be the most

important of all: for they have not been occupied for many thousands of years,

and the relics of their prehistoric occupants lie directly beneath the surface.