C. Brian Rose – författare

Tracing the development of Rome over a span of 1200 years, The Topography and Monuments of Ancient Rome offers an overview of the changing appearance of the city and the social, political, and military factors that shaped it. C. Brian Rose places Rome's architecture, coinage, inscriptions and monuments in historical context and offers a nuanced analysis regarding the evolution of the city and its monuments over time. He brings an interdisciplinary approach to his study, merging insights gained from cutting-edge techniques in archaeological research, such as remote sensing, core-sampling, palaeobotany, neutron-activation analysis, and isotopic analysis, with literary, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence. Rose also includes reconstructions of the ancient city that reflect the rapid developments in digital technology and mapping in the last three decades.  Aimed at scholars and students alike, Rose's study demonstrates how evidence can be drawn from a variety of approaches. It serves as a model for studying and viewing the growth and structure of ancient cities.

Gordion is frequently remembered as the location of an intricate knot ultimately cut by Alexander, but in antiquity it served as the center of the Phrygian kingdom that ruled much of Asia Minor during the early millennium B.C.E. The site lies approximately seventy kilometers southeast of Ankara in central Turkey, at the intersection of the great empires of the East (Assyrians, Babylonians, and Hittites) and the West (Greeks and Romans). Consequently, it occupied a strategic position on nearly all trade routes that linked the Mediterranean and the Near East. The University of Pennsylvania has been excavating at Gordion since 1950, unearthing a wide range of discoveries that span nearly four millennia. The vast majority of these artifacts attests to the city's interactions with the other great kingdoms and city states of the Near East during the Iron Age and Archaic periods (ca. 950-540 B.C.E.), especially Assyria, Urartu, Persia, Lydia, Greece, and the Neo-Hittite city-states of North Syria, among others. Gordion is thus the ideal centerpiece of an exhibition dealing with Anatolia and its neighbors during the first millennium B.C.E. Through a special agreement signed between the Republic of Turkey and the University of Pennsylvania, Turkey has loaned the Penn Museum more than one hundred artifacts gathered from four museums in Turkey (Ankara, Gordion, Istanbul, and Antalya) for an exhibition titled The Golden Age of King Midas. The exhibition features most of the material recovered in Tumulus MM, or the "Midas Mound" (ca. 740 B.C.E.), which was the burial site of King Midas's father, as well as a number of objects found in a series of Lydian tombs. The Turkish loan has made possible a uniquely comprehensive and elaborate exhibition that also features a disparate group of rarely seen objects from the Penn Museum's own collections, particularly from sites in the Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Greece. With the historic King Midas (ca. 740-700 B.C.E.) as its guiding theme, the exhibition illuminates the relationships Phrygia maintained with Lydia, Persia, Assyria, and Greece. The accompanying catalog includes full-color illustrations and essays that expound on the sites and objects of the exhibition.

The New Chronology of Iron Age Gordion argues that the history and archaeology of the site of Gordion, in central Turkey, have been misunderstood since the beginning of its excavation in the 1950s. The first excavation director, Rodney Young, found evidence for substantial destruction during the first decade of fieldwork; this was interpreted as proof that Gordion had been destroyed ca. 700 B.C. by the Kimmerians, a group of invaders from the Caucusus/Black Sea region, as attested in several ancient literary sources. During the last decade, however, renewed research on the archaeological evidence, within, above, and below the destruction level indicated that the catastrophe that destroyed much of Gordion occurred 100 years earlier, in 800 B.C., and was the result of a fire that quickly got out of control rather than a foreign invasion. This discovery requires a reassessment of Anatolian history during the entire first millennium B.C. and has serious implications for our understanding of the surrounding regions, such as Assyria, Syria, Greece, and Urartu, among others. The New Chronology of Iron Age Gordion is the product of a multidisciplinary research program, with dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating working hand in hand with textual and artifact analysis, each of which is treated in a separate chapter in this volume. All of these categories of evidence point to the same conclusion and demonstrate that we need to look at Gordion, and much of the ancient Near East, in a completely new way.