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66 The House of Israel

belts and bringing them back to display for all their friends “It used to be hard to detect the Galatians at Gordion,”
at home.” said Dr. Keith DeVries, a University of Pennsylvania
archaeologist and former director of the Gordion exca-
Dr. Oscar White Muscarella, an archaeologist at the Met- vations. “There was not a single artifact that was abso-
ropolitan Museum of Art, called the discoveries “an ex- lutely demonstrable as Celtic. Some began to think the
traordinary accomplishment.” For the first time, he said, literary sources must be misleading us.”
“we are able to see and hold in our hands what the
Galatians did and can now talk about Galatians in Livy described Galatian Gordion as a trading center
Anatolia.” and a fortified settlement in the early second century
BC, a judgment now supported by archaeologists. Ar-
...Gordion’s Galatian period had been neglected, Dr. tifacts like a small bone lion, probably used as inlay,
Voigt explained in an interview, because archaeologists suggested the Galatians enjoyed some affluence.
had their eyes on bigger prizes. They dug through the lay- Traces of a few substantial buildings -- with tile roofs,
ers of Galatian ruins to get to the city as it was in Alexan- many rooms, paved floors, stone benches and gener-
der’s time, 332 BC, and the even earlier city of Midas, ous courtyards -- seemed to attest to a city with a social
ruler of Phrygia, probably in the eighth century BC. and political hierarchy. This was more than a simple
crossroads farming settlement, as some scholars once
Dr. Voigt said archaeologists were also put off by the suspected.
seemingly impossibility of finding anything distinctive to
confirm the Galatian presence in the city. How do you es- A Roman army destroyed much of the city in 189 BC,
tablish the ethnicity of an ancient population, especially if but excavations showed that it was soon rebuilt and
the people were warriors who traveled light, carrying with eventually became part of the Roman province of
them little of their own material culture, and lived off the Galatia, though with a continuing Celtic imprint.
land?
In more than a decade of meticulous excavations, ar-
“Historically, we knew they were at Gordion,” Dr. Voigt chaeologists were struck by the juxtaposition of Greek
said, “but we didn’t know anything definitive about their and Celtic customs in Gordion. Ruins of a workshop
way of life.” yielded figurines of Greek deities presumably used in
household rituals. Nearby, in the lower town, five skel-
In one of the few sketchy accounts, the Roman historian etons were strewn across the ground of what had been
Livy noted that a king in Anatolia hired Celts as mercenar- an outdoor area, and another four had been thrown into
ies to reinforce his own army. They arrived in 278 BC, a deep pit.
20,000 of them, including provisioners and merchants as
well as their families, in a caravan of 2,000 baggage wag- Even though the date of the buried skeletons is in some
ons. But by this time the Celts had become somewhat doubt, Dr. Voigt’s team said, “their treatment is un-
Hellenized. doubtedly linked to ritual practices that began in
third-century Gordion and would represent continuity
For an unknown number of years since leaving their of Celtic traditions” after the town became part of a
homeland, somewhere in central Europe near the headwa- Roman province.
ters of the Danube, the Celts had passed through the Bal-
kans and paused in Greece to sack Delphi. In battle, they Nearly all these people appeared to have met violent
stood naked before the foe. Along the way, they learned ends, with strangulation by hanging or garroting the
Greek and inscribed some of their possessions in that lan- most usual cause. Several had broken necks and
guage. Their ceramics and other household wares were in spines. A woman, probably 30 to 45 years old, had a
the Greek style. fractured skull, and was also strangled. Below her lay

The Berean Voice March-April 2003