Becoming an UNESCO World Heritage Site

It's a great, great pleasure to introduce our speaker for the second time in calendar 22, actually. Some of you will have heard Brian speak about Rome. It seems like just a few months ago, but it must be six or seven months ago. I'm losing track. Our speaker is Dr. Brian Rose. Many of you are familiar with him, I know. Brian is the James B. Pritchett Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Classical Studies here at Penn. And he is the Peter C. Ferry Curator-in-Charge of the Mediterranean section of the museum. He was also my predecessor as Deputy Director, and during his time in that position, Brian actually created the Great Series, which has turned out to be a great success. Brian has degrees from Haverford College and Columbia University, and has excavated extensively, particularly in Turkey, at the sites of Aphrodisias, Troy and Gordian, his last being one of the museum's major ongoing excavations. In addition to excavating, Brian publishes assiduously and prolifically, with an incredible range of excavation reports to his name, including several of the final reports on Troy, which are either authored or edited by him. Among his many publications, his book, The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Troy, provides an extensive introduction to all that is known about the sites in these periods. Brian was also the curator of a major exhibit of archaeological material from Turkey, The Golden Age of Midas, which ran from February to November 2016, to great acclaim and success. His outreach and activities and service to the profession are similarly extensive, ranging from the kinds of presentation we're about to hear from tonight, to the education of U.S. servicemen about ancient Near Eastern archaeology and history, and the importance of cultural heritage preservation and awareness. He was the President of the Archaeological Institute of America from 2007 to 2011, and was awarded the Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement by the selfsame AIA in 2015. He is currently President of the American Research Institute in Turkey, and was named Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth in 2021. I know we're all looking forward to hearing from him on becoming a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so please join me now in welcoming Dr. Brian Rose. Thank you, Steve, and my thanks to all of you for coming tonight. It's a great pleasure for me to be able to speak about Troy and Gordian, because so much of my life has been spent at both of these sites. I've had the honor of working at Troy, in what is now northwestern Turkey, for 25 years, from 1988 to 2012, and at Gordian, in west-central Turkey, about an hour's drive southwest of Ankara, since 2007, so 15 years at Gordian. And altogether, over 40 years of my life in the field in Turkey. Both of these sites have been considered for World Heritage Site status, and that's what I want to talk to you about tonight. The process that we went through at both Troy and Gordian to achieve, or to hopefully achieve, World Heritage Site status for both of these projects. This has worked out well for Troy, and I think it will work out well for Gordian, although I don't have the final word on Gordian yet, but I suspect I will this summer, and I'll explain why that has taken so much time. Both of these sites, of course, are famous for different reasons. Both have been occupied for unusually long periods of time. Occupation at Troy, and you're seeing the monumental fortification walls at the entrance to the site. Occupation at Troy has lasted from 3000 B.C. to the 15th century C.E., so nearly 4,500 years. Occupation at Gordian, which has equally strong fortification walls, has lasted from about 2400 B.C. to about 1400 C.E., so nearly 4,000 years. Both of them are distinctive because of the monumental burial mounds that surround them. The monumental burial mounds around the Citadel of Troy were already in antiquity, labeled as the burials of the Greek and Trojan heroes who had fought in the Trojan War. Now, are they the burials of the Greek and Trojan heroes who fought in the Trojan War? They are not. I can say this because I actually excavated the Tumulus of Achilles, and by tumulus, I mean monumental burial mound. And in the Tumulus of Achilles, I found no Achilles, no hero, no one at all. I found that they had monumentalized the Tumulus in the 3rd century B.C. as part of their tourism industry when they were trying to Homerize the landscape, turning it into a kind of Homeric Disneyland. And there are even more Tumuli at Gordian, over 125 of these monumental burial mounds that stretch from the 9th century B.C. through the Hellenistic period, through the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C.E. And that includes the earliest Tumulus, the earliest monumental burial mound in Asia Minor, and one of the largest burial mounds in Asia Minor, the so-called Midas Mound, about which I'll say more later. Both of them, as I said, applied for World Heritage Site status, or rather Turkey applied for each of these sites to receive World Heritage Site status. The process started much earlier at Troy. It started in the 90s and was complete by 1998. The process at Gordian was longer, starting in earnest in 2012, and World Heritage Site status for Gordian is still pending, but I'll say more about that in a minute. First, before getting into the stories of Troy and Gordian and how we dealt with the UNESCO application, I'd like to explain why World Heritage Site status and the protection of cultural heritage is essential. Cultural heritage has been disappearing as fast as humankind has made it, and I brought in only a few examples that illustrate this point. Armed conflict, of course, is something we've experienced at first hand over the course of the last 25 years, and those of us who are older remember the Vietnam War before that. There has never been a time when armed conflict has not been active and has not threatened the cultural heritage of every region involved in that armed conflict. I'm just showing you one example from the 5th century BCE, from the period of the Persian Wars, where the Persians came to Athens, sacked the city, and burned the Parthenon, the archaic temple of Athena that lay on the Acropolis in the center of the city, destroying what was effectively the religious heart of the city as a way of destroying the morale of the people who lived there. We've seen this also, of course, in northern Iraq, especially at the site of Nimrud. If you look at the reliefs that decorated the palace of Nimrud, built in the 9th century BCE, you can see any number of cities that were destroyed by the siege engines of the Assyrians, one of which you see here destroying the walls, the citadel walls of one of their enemies. And, of course, the walls of the Assyrian palaces themselves were destroyed in the late 7th century as the Assyrian Empire began to disintegrate, and disintegrate very rapidly. And, of course, we've seen a renewed destruction of these Assyrian palaces only in the last 10 years, 2014, the invasion of ISIS into northern Iraq, and the destruction once again of the palace of Nimrud. Sometimes cities will cannibalize themselves. They'll destroy their own cultural heritage. And I'm giving you two examples from Rome. One is from the Colosseum, one of the great monuments of Imperial Rome, and still standing in fairly good shape in spite of the excavation that's been done there. And by excavation, I mean excavation into the masonry of the monument. In the Middle Ages, what they would do when they were hungry or in need of metal, they would dig into the building itself, and pull out the iron clamps and their leaden casings as a way of getting free metal. So when you look at any of the monuments of Imperial Rome, you see these pockmarks, which represent searches for iron and lead from the buildings. And of course, that is catastrophic for the stability of these structures, because you take out the clamps that hold the blocks together, and then over time, if there's an earthquake, or if you have someone like Mussolini attempting to triple the birth rate in Italy as a way of getting more soldiers for his new Italian army, and then you have the invention of the automobile, with one of the biggest traffic circles in the city around the Colosseum, you have constant vibration, and these stones are at risk, because the clamps that once held them together have been gone for 1,300 years. Another example is from the Roman Forum, the Temple of Antoninus in Faustina, built originally in 160 CE, and one of the great monuments still of the Roman Forum. In the Renaissance, in the early 16th century, when they were celebrating the revival of classical antiquity, at the same time they were taking the classical elements from buildings like this and putting them in lime kilns. If you burn marble, it will transition into lime, and you can use that lime as one of the cheap ingredients of the concrete that you need to use to build a whole series of new structures in Vatican City as the Renaissance takes flight. So we have Rome itself destroying classical antiquity at the same time it's celebrating it. And then, of course, in World War II, we've seen destruction of cultural heritage far more serious than what we've seen even in the last 25 years. You're all familiar with the monuments officers, the men and women, many of whom were classicists, art historians, museum curators, who went to Europe, cataloged, inventoried, and conserved the works of art and antiquities that had been stolen by the Nazis. In some cases, it would be the Allies, that would be us, who would bomb monuments of great cultural significance. That would be the case, of course, for the Battle of Monte Cassino, one of the great monasteries of Italy, which was bombed by the Allies in 1944, and the entire monastery destroyed. None of those catastrophes gave rise to a commission under the aegis of UNESCO to protect cultural property. The impetus was the creation of the Aswan Dam and Lake Nasser in the 1950s. There was a need for greater water. Nasser, of course, was now president in Egypt. And in building the Aswan Dam and Lake Nasser, what that would mean is that over 20 monuments would be submerged under the waters of the new dam and lake. And so Egypt and Sudan, which is directly south of Egypt, reached out to UNESCO for assistance in protecting these monuments that were about to be inundated. And from that came a new committee, the International Committee to Save the Monuments of Nubia, which lasted for a little over 20 years. And what that entailed was moving some of the monuments above the area that would be flooded. And so you see that happening here, with these four statues of Ramses II from the 13th century BC cut into pieces and then moved to an area that was safe. So here is where they were, here is where they have moved, 65 meters higher and 20 meters inland from the river. Each one of these colossal statues of Ramses II is 20 meters high. The height of this dome of the room in which you're sitting is about 9 meters, so these are twice as high as the dome of the room in which you're sitting. It was a phenomenally difficult undertaking. Moving all of these monuments cost over $80 million. And UNESCO oversaw the movement. And the U.S. was an active participant in the rescue of some of these monuments, providing funding in the amount of over $16 million. What that meant was that the U.S. was given a temple by Egypt in thanks for the contribution that had been made to protect the cultural heritage of pharaonic Egypt. So Egypt offered the U.S. a temple, in this case the Temple of Dendur, late 1st century BC, reign of the first Roman emperor Augustus, offered to Lyndon Johnson, who had to decide what city would receive it. There were some strong contenders. Cairo, Illinois, you get it. Memphis, Tennessee, for obvious reasons. And the Smithsonian. But the Metropolitan Museum won because they offered to build an independent pavilion that was climate-controlled so that the temple would, at least in theory, last forever. And there were other temples that Egypt gifted as well, one to Spain, one to Italy, and one to the Netherlands. But as a result of this movement, saving the monuments of southern Egypt and northern Sudan, the World Heritage Convention was formulated, an international treaty that was concluded, ratified in 1972. And one of the byproducts of the World Heritage Convention was the creation of the World Heritage Site List. So cultural sites, historical sites, natural sites that were in danger of disappearing or that were worthy of additional conservation funded by UNESCO or deserve to be highlighted because of their outstanding universal significance. So the first sites to be inscribed on the World Heritage List were in 1978, and I just put three of the twelve here. Some of them, as you see, are natural sites. Some are cultural sites. Yellowstone and the Galapagos Islands is natural sites. Aachen Cathedral is a cultural site. Now there are 1,154 World Heritage Sites, one of which is Troy. And these are spread across 167 countries, with Italy having more World Heritage Sites than any other region. I should point out also that we're not a member of UNESCO. The U.S. is not a member of UNESCO at the moment. We were, of course, one of the founding members. Then we withdrew under Ronald Reagan in 1984, rejoined under George W. Bush in 2003, and withdrew again in 2018 under Donald Trump. We have not yet rejoined, although this is something that we certainly hope the Biden administration will do. There are certain criteria that you have to satisfy in order to be selected as a World Heritage Site if you're in the cultural sphere. The site has to evince human creative genius. It has to represent a civilization which has disappeared or is on the verge of disappearing, in danger of disappearing. There need to be outstanding examples of ancient structures, monuments, buildings. There is often a situation where the site is vulnerable to looters or to natural disasters or to both. The example of Egypt and the Sudan would be a case in point. And all in all, they need to present or evince outstanding universal significance, which is something that we grappled with at Gordian. It can't just be important in the region. It can't just be important in the country where it's located. It has to be important on a global scale, and that is hard to put into an application. Now let's move to the first case study, that is Troy. Again, northwestern Turkey at the mouth of a body of water called the Dardanelles or the Hellespont, which connects the Aegean with the Sea of Marmara, then up through the Bosporus, where Istanbul is located, and then into the Black Sea. And again, I've had the good fortune of working there for 25 years of my life. This is not one city, but rather nine, or really ten, one built on top of the other, all in a single location, so that a city would be built as of 3000 BC, destroyed, another built on top of that, destroyed, and gradually the citadel mound rose 20 meters above the surrounding area. You're seeing an aerial view of the mound of Troy here, and then an illustration that we did for Smithsonian Magazine in the early 1990s, showing what each of the settlements looked like at its period of greatest prosperity, starting with one, the oldest, 3000 BC, at the bottom, and moving up to Roman Troy, Troy 9, at the top, and it even continues into the 13th and 14th century with Byzantine Troy, which would technically be Troy 10. This is a site that's been linked to Homer, which, believe me, is something we tried to capitalize on for our UNESCO application, since antiquity. Some of you have been to Troy. I've been to Troy with some of you. And so as you enter the site, you can rent costumes and become Hecuba and Priam or Achilles and Penthesilea or anyone from the Homeric stories that you want to be for a small charge. You can go up into the stomach of the hollow horse that has been erected here in 1975 to remind visitors of the wooden horse at the conclusion of the Trojan War that the Greek soldiers had used to trick the Trojans into letting them into the city, which they would then sack. And every August, the first weekend in August, if you were to go to Mount Ida, here is Troy, here is Mount Ida, from which Zeus watched the Trojan War unfold, you would find the Judgment of Paris beauty contest reenacted each year with three finalists, like the first one that allegedly took place in 1200 BCE with Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite as the contestants hoping to win a golden apple. All of that still happens, although these are women from the surrounding villages and towns rather than, of course, goddesses, but they still get a golden apple, although it's now paper mache rather than actual gold. But this is an example of the dominance of the Homeric heritage in the region. Now, as I said, this has been excavated over a long period of time, starting with Heinrich Schliemann in 1870 and continuing through four major campaigns until the present. So my colleague Manfred Kurfman and I, you see Manfred here, and this is me in my bearded face, started together in 1988 and continued until 2012. And the current excavation director from the University of Chinacole is Rustem Aslan. Earlier excavations also involved a team from the University of Cincinnati, which you see up here, in the 1930s. Now, the site became famous during the Schliemann excavations because of the treasures that he found dating to the early Bronze Age, to about 2400 BCE. And this, he christened the treasure of Priam, believing that it was a treasure that would have been worn by Helen or by Hecuba, but by the royal family of Troy during the time of the Trojan War. Schliemann, upon excavating it in 1873, draped some of it on the head, shoulders, and ears of his wife Sophia. And you see some of the examples of this treasure here, a gold sauceboat, a globular vessel, a gold pin, a lapis lazuli axe that was gilded, lapis lazuli, of course, coming to Troy from northeastern Afghanistan, from the region of Badakhshan. So it was an incredibly wealthy city, already in the early Bronze Age, connected to extensive trading networks. When Carl Blagan took over in the 1930s, he was a wonderful excavator, and his results are of singular importance for the history of archaeology. But he did not conserve what he excavated, and neither did Schliemann. They were interested in discoveries, not stability and permanence of the monuments that they excavated, and they were focused, really, on the late Bronze Age levels, because those were the levels that they thought would clarify the questions involving the Trojan War. So when Manfred and I began the excavations in 1988, we decided that we wanted to explore, or to give equal weight, to every one of the occupation layers at Troy, not just those from the late Bronze Age that may well be connected with the Trojan War, but every level from 3000 BCE to 1400 CE. And we wanted to focus on conservation of the site, as our predecessors had not done, and we wanted to make it an international team, no longer German or American, but a kind of UNESCO operation. Manfred had been born at the end of World War II, and he was very specific about the need to do this, with which I readily agreed. So you see all the flags of the participants of the Troy excavation that we assembled in the excavation village. Now, the first thing we had to do was conservation, and this was something UNESCO looked at very carefully. They're not going to award you UNESCO site status unless you're dedicated to conserving the monuments over the long term. So we had a lot of problems with the late Bronze Age fortification walls that I showed you a little earlier. These date to the 14th century BC, and of course there are a lot of movies about the Trojan War. Some of you saw the one in 2004, where Brad Pitt climbed the walls of Troy. I actually don't know if Brad Pitt climbed the walls of Troy, but let's say he did. And so you have these movies, and then visitors come to Troy, and they want to be Brad Pitt climbing the walls of Troy. So this happens to us all the time. We have whistles, we blow them to get people off the walls of Troy, because everyone wants to be a latter-day Achilles. These walls were not meant for consistent climbing, and they are 3,400 years old. So the climbers, the would-be Achilles characters, pulled stone after stone after stone from the makeup of the wall over time. So we had to develop a conservation strategy, and you see it here. UNESCO looked very carefully to see if we followed the outlines of something called the Charter of Venice, wherein you have to conserve an ancient site, but you have to do it in a way where modern intervention can always be distinguishable from the ancient materials, from the ancient construction, yet not in a way that detracts from the aesthetic integrity of the monument being conserved. So you have to show what is modern, but not too egregiously. And you see what we did with the walls of Troy. We put small stones together in a larger block. So the small stones indicate that it's our intervention, but the larger block of stones that we used mimics the shape of the original stones that had been laid there in the 14th century B.C. So from a distance, the wall looks solid. It all looks ancient. But if you go up to it, as you can also see here, you can see that these are different from the ancient technique of construction. So we had to present this to UNESCO when they sent observers to look at how well we were handling the conservation. Now, Homer began to be connected to the site in a much more powerful way in the 1990s. I showed you earlier the treasure of Priam that Schliemann had found in 1873 that he stole, then smuggled out of the Ottoman Empire, which is what Turkey was at that point, and ultimately took it to Germany, to Berlin, where it was installed in the Museum of Pre- and Proto-History in Berlin, the Museum für und für Geschichte. And then it disappeared in 1945 when the Soviets attacked the city at the end of World War II, and we all thought it had been melted down. But it showed up miraculously in the basement depots of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in 1993, and we learned that the Soviet soldiers who sat Berlin at the conclusion of World War II were under orders from the Kremlin to seize it and bring it back secretly to the Pushkin Museum, and no one knew it was there or even in existence until 1993. So that was an engine, a kind of Homeric engine that brought us closer to the Homeric epics. We also, in 1993, began to find two rock-cut ditches. You see one here and another here, this being the citadel about which I've been speaking. These two rock-cut ditches were intended for defense, so to protect the residential district south of the citadel of Troy. And what was interesting is that similar defensive ditches are written about in the Iliad. So if you were to look at two passages in Book 7, we must dig a deep ditch encircling our camp. That's the Greek camp, not the Trojan citadel, but nevertheless it's a defensive ditch nevertheless. And they dug a deep ditch, making it great and wide, and inserted sharp stakes inside of it. And so when we found the ditch, there was speculation that Homer had actually come to Troy, had seen the defensive ditches, and had written about it in the Iliad. Did this happen? It did not. These ditches were filled at the time in which Homer, if there was a Homer, was writing in the 8th century BCE. And every citadel worth its salt, every citadel of importance, had these defensive ditches. Whether you're in Greece or Turkey or Syria or Israel, they all had these defensive ditches. Gordian has a defensive ditch as well, so it doesn't mean that Homer saw it. But it was another part of this Homeric engine that I'm speaking about. Then in 1995, we found the only piece of writing from Bronze Age Troy that has ever been found. This bronze seal with writing on both sides. The writing is called Luwian, which is the language of Western Asia Minor. It's not surprising that we would find Luwian. But what this did, the finding of this seal, was provoke a great deal of research on the cuneiform, or on the clay tablets of Hatusha, the capital of the Hittite Empire, which controlled much of Asia Minor during the Late Bronze Age. And in re-examining those tablets, and also with accelerated research on Late Bronze Age geography in Western Asia Minor, we were able to establish that the Hittite word, Wilusa, is the same as Ilion or Troy. This is as of the late 1990s, the second half of the 1990s. So this enabled us to look at the tablets from Hatusha, where there are a lot of tablets that mention Wilusa or Troy, and reconstruct what happened at the site in the Late Bronze Age, between 1400 and 1200. So one tablet spoke of the Wilusan ruler, Alexandu. Alexandu is the Hittite word for Alexandros, the other word for Paris. Wilusa is Ilion, is Troy. So with this we had evidence for Paris, ruler of Troy, in the early 13th century BCE. Another tablet spoke of conflict between the Hittites and the Greeks, the Achaeans, in the middle of the 13th century. And they specifically reference the land of Wilusa, where the Hittites and the Greeks were hostile to one another. Many thought this was an indication, a kind of smoking gun, referring to the Trojan War, which I think is unlikely. We can talk about this more later. But all of this is happening at more or less the same time, in the mid-1990s. So when we put the application for UNESCO site status together, in 1995-96, we were able to highlight the outstanding universal significance of Troy, in part because of its connection to the Homeric heritage that has consistently been wrapped around the site. We were also able to emphasize the longevity of occupation, and we were able to emphasize that the site represents the earliest example of east-west conflict in the region, and the last, so far, example of east-west conflict in the region. The Trojan War between the Greeks, the Hittites, and the Trojans in the early 12th century B.C., represented by this horse from the Warner Brothers movie of 2004 that was given on long-term loan to Chenocle, the large city next to the site of Troy, which you see here, and then directly opposite it, one of the Gallipoli monuments, which is the last of the great east-west wars that took place in this area. And at more or less the same time as we were talking about Troy bookending these great east-west wars, we get the publication of Jonathan Shea's Achilles in Vietnam, 1994, and an examination of the Trojan War in tandem with post-traumatic stress experienced by Vietnam veterans, looking at it from the point of view of what the Trojans and the Greeks experienced on the battlefield of Troy and what Vietnam veterans experienced. So we were able to say in our application that World Heritage Site status for Troy was especially timely because we were connected to this new attitude, this new examination of warfare and particularly post-traumatic stress of the warrior viewed diachronically. We were also able to point out that the site was at risk. In the early 1990s, many of the highways in Turkey were turned from two-lane roads into four-lane roads, which meant that there was a lot of construction equipment available in the vicinity of archaeological sites. Looters would take the construction equipment one way or another and claw away at burial mounds or tumuli, thereby hoping that they would find tombs such as this, the earliest figural sarcophagus or coffin with figural scenes ever to have been found in the Mediterranean, dating to about 500 BC. They were hoping that they would find this and the jewelry inside, which had once been there, like the jewelry of Priam that I showed you earlier. So the burial mounds around Troy were being robbed with great rapidity and this was something else that we could stress to UNESCO. That was one of the reasons we needed the site designation, the inscription. And so this worked. The decision was made in 1998. Representatives from UNESCO came in 1999 and officially inscribed us on the list of World Heritage Sites. And so, by extension, we were able to add the UNESCO label to all of our site signs. And this was more of a political decision or a political move than I had realized. So in 1999, when we were inscribed, in the same year the Turkish president, Suleyman Demirel, came to Troy and gave a speech wherein he said that Troy lies at the center of the Iliad, the Iliad lies at the foundation of the European cultural tradition. Therefore, Troy and Turkey are inextricably connected to the European cultural tradition. And therefore, Turkey should be a member of the European Union. It had applied for membership and that was still pending. So there were larger political issues surrounding the inscription on the World Heritage Site list that I realized only gradually. Now, with Gordian, we got started later. Again, this is a site in west-central Turkey, about an hour's drive southwest of Ankara, where Penn, specifically the Penn Museum, has excavated since 1950. So over 70 years. You see some of the archaeologists here. The first of the great excavators of Gordian, Rodney Young, between 1950 and 1973. And then Keith DeVries, Ken Sams, and Mary Voigt. So again, over the course of 70 years. It also has its own legendary stories like Troy. So the most famous king of Gordian is Midas, whom you see here on this fifth-century red-figure vase in the British Museum, who allegedly had a golden touch, able to turn anything he touched into gold. This is also the place where Alexander the Great came in the late fourth century and cut the proverbial Gordian knot, thereby giving rise to the expression, cutting the Gordian knot, finding a fast and efficient solution to a difficult problem. Gordian was much more important than people realized, and this is something that we incorporated extensively into the application to UNESCO. It was the capital of a kingdom that looks as if it stretched from the Sea of Marmara, here again is Istanbul, all the way to the Euphrates River during the reign of Midas in the eighth century BC. So we emphasize that this is the capital city of a kingdom and the primary example of Phrygian civilization, because it's the Phrygian kingdom of which Gordian served as the capital. So better examples of Phrygian architecture and Phrygian civilization at Gordian than you would find anywhere else. We wanted also to emphasize that the city was larger than the UNESCO representatives might have thought. So we started an extensive remote sensing campaign using magnetic perspection, radar, and a technique called electric resistivity tomography to show how expansive the city actually was. You don't see this on the surface of Gordian, but if you look at the magnetic perspection results, we were able to find that there was a large outer town, a large residential district to the west of the citadel, to the south of the citadel, and to the north of the citadel. Here is the citadel mound. And last summer we even found that there was another residential district here to the east of the citadel. It too had a variety of occupation layers all built in the same place. So nine levels, one on top of the other, just like Troy. There are in fact a lot of similarities between Gordian and Troy, so I really do count my lucky stars that I've had the opportunity to dig both of them. The best examples of Phrygian architecture that have ever been found. So you can see here the east citadel gate dating to the 9th century BC. The stone walls of the gate still standing to a height of 10 meters. As great, if not greater, than the walls that surrounded the citadel of Troy. And we've done of course a great deal of conservation here. You see it in 2019 at the conclusion of the conservation because an earthquake here in 1999 had seriously undermined the stability of the walls. We also have a series of firsts. Things that happened at Gordian earlier than anywhere else. The earliest pebble mosaics. The earliest stone mosaic floors with decoration that have ever been found. 825 BC. An elaborate series of geometric designs as you see in this watercolor of the floor. You see the floor as it was being excavated in the 1950s and then one of the panels from that floor after we conserved it. The earliest tumulus. The earliest monumental burial mound in Asia Minor. And one of the largest burial mounds in Asia Minor. 53 meters high. The same height as those colossal Buddhas in central Afghanistan at Bamiyan that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. And within this particular burial mound the oldest standing wooden building in the world dating to 740 BCE. And still in terrific shape all things considered. Within that chamber excavated by Rodney Young of the Penn Museum in 1957 we found that robbers had never broken in. The original assemblage was still there intact with the best preserved wooden furniture from antiquity. And you can see the state of preservation here. I've taken you inside the tomb chamber which is a mix, the tomb chamber is a mixture of cedar, juniper and pine. And you see some of the furniture here all 740 BCE with the inlay still intact. So all of these things we could emphasize to UNESCO. These are among the best examples of mosaics, of wooden furniture and of burial customs that you would find anywhere in the world. We were especially interested in getting some more publicity for Gordian before we submitted the application to UNESCO. So really showcasing what the Penn Museum had been able to do over the course of 70 years. So we decided to put together an exhibit The Golden Age of King Midas that would showcase Penn's excavations over the last 70 years and the discoveries which would ideally be brought here for an exhibit of one year duration. And we did this. We did this in 2016. Many of you had seen it. When we decided to do it I made the application to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Turkey requesting the loan of 125 objects that Penn had excavated at Gordian and that some of the earlier excavators in the region had found. What I didn't know at the time We're now in 2008. What I didn't know at the time is that that would trigger an investigation of the ethics of the Penn Museum. And I didn't find this out until much later. Had I known, I wouldn't have been worried because we're the most ethical museum in North America. It's a component of our identity. It's part of our signature. As the Ministry of Culture and Tourism began to investigate the Penn Museum to determine whether we were an appropriate venue for these 125 objects that would come from Turkey to here they saw that we had a collection of 24 pieces of gold jewelry very similar in style and workmanship to the Treasure of Priam that Schliemann had found at Troy in 1873. The Penn Museum had bought this jewelry which you see on display here in 2010 from an art dealer in Philadelphia in 1966 and it was showcased in our magazine, Expedition Magazine in 1966, the year of its acquisition. No one was quite certain where this came from. No one was quite certain whether all 24 of the pieces were genuine. So since this was in the Mediterranean section and under my care, I brought two archaeometallurgists from Berlin, one of whom is the best archaeometallurgist I know, Ernst Pernitschke to examine our gold. They had just examined the Treasure of Priam in Moscow so it was an ideal endeavor, I thought for them to look at our gold after looking at the Treasure of Priam. Within one of the pendants, they found a grain of sand extraordinarily high in arsenic the same high arsenic counts that one finds in the soil of Troy. This seemed like a potential smoking gun whereas before we weren't certain if this came from a region that was under Greek jurisdiction or Turkish jurisdiction or even Iraqi jurisdiction. This grain of sand high in arsenic made it look as if the gold had been stolen in the 60s from Troy. We made no attempt to hide this. We conduct research in order to educate the public and the scholarly world so we reported it to the newspapers who produced an article on it wondering whether the gold could have been stolen from Troy in the 1960s. All of this made its way into the dossier in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism that they were assembling as part of the process to investigate whether we should have the loan of 125 objects for this exhibit in 2016 and so Troy and Gordian were coming together in my life in a way that I could never have anticipated. When shortly thereafter the Ministry of Culture and Tourism made the claim for the gold to be repatriated to Turkey we pointed out that it was impossible to know really where the jewelry had been found. If you look at the example from our gold in the Penn Museum from Troy the treasure of Priam and from Lemnos the Greek island in the North Aegean it's the same style and workmanship and you can see the same sort of thing here with the bracelets from Troy, from Lemnos and from the Penn Museum and in some cases the jewelry looked like the gold from Ur which dates to the same period. You see one of the pendants from Ur and one of the pendants from Penn. It's nearly identical. So earlier we weren't sure if the gold had been assembled from Greece or from Turkey or from Iraq. But the grain of sand made it look as if it had come from Turkey and this had to be settled before we could conclude an agreement to borrow the material for the Gordian exhibit which we saw as a launching pad for our application to UNESCO for World Heritage site status. Finally, after a year of negotiation because the president of Penn, Amy Gutmann, was reluctant to repatriate an assemblage of early Bronze Age gold on the basis of one grain of sand even though it was high in arsenic we came to an agreement wherein the gold would go to Turkey on indefinite loan and it is now on display in the new Penn Museum in Troy. This is the exhibit at the Ankara Museum that they put on right after the gold returned. Brought in our country by the University of Pennsylvania Museum and it's indicated that we behaved in a well-intentioned manner. Always good to see. So with this agreement in place and with the gold of Troy from the Penn Museum now in Turkey we were able to launch the exhibit which was on display for a year in 2016 and again many of you saw it. It was in 2012 the year in which we concluded our agreement with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism that Aysa Saltzman and Evan Erdere, two of our colleagues completed a conservation management plan for Gordian and so with that plan in place and with the new agreement with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism Turkey agreed to add us to the tentative list of sites that would be considered for World Heritage status by UNESCO. Planning for the dossier went on in earnest beginning in 2019 but much more so in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic and then even more so in 2021 where we had to decide in the course of the dossier what areas would be protected and how large the buffer zone offering some protection around the most important zone how large that would be. So we spent a lot of time drawing these plans. What area would be most important? What area would be of secondary importance but important nevertheless and much of this was done by Gareth Darbyshire, our archivist who's here today. We spent long hours looking at the plans, drawing the plans visiting the areas that were going to be protected and this wasn't easy because many of these areas had tumuli and so of course they needed to be protected but those tumuli were in the middle of farms and the farmers didn't want their land to be under the jurisdiction of UNESCO because then they might not be able to plow and plant in the way that they had been and their economic fortunes would be affected. So there were a lot of political issues that were involved in this. Finally in August 2021 we submitted the dossier to UNESCO and this was a dossier that was about 500 pages. So this is not 5 pages or 10 pages, 500 pages where we had to show Gordian had universal significance on a global scale. Then they sent a visiting team, the UNESCO visiting team, you see me up here taking them around the site in August of 2021 and an expert in archaeology who asked question after question after question. It's like taking your graduate school exams all over again. What had we done for the handicapped at Gordian? There were some answers I could give. We have some ramps but archaeological sites are not known for being handicapped accessible. So it was a very good process to go through. It started me thinking in completely new ways but I spent an entire week lobbying her, the expert Cynthia Dunning, about Gordian. Arguing on an hourly, even minute by minute basis, why Gordian was more important than almost any other site in the history of the world. She was a good sport about it and at the end of it at the end of that week long visit she announced to us, assembled in our garage that she did believe that Gordian had outstanding universal significance which is the most important thing. She didn't say Gordian is important in the region but not in the world or in Turkey but not in the world. She acknowledged this is one of the world's most important sites and therefore she was going to make a positive recommendation for Gordian to be inscribed on the list of World Heritage Sites. We thought with that that our problems were over and that it was just a question of time before Gordian was added. We had another visit. Gareth and I were on a conference call in Thanksgiving of 2021 where we met with UNESCO representatives who were in Paris. That was about an hour. They asked us more questions and they gave us every reason to believe that we would be inscribed at the UNESCO meeting in 2022. So we stopped worrying but then something happened that we hadn't expected and we didn't expect would influence the Gordian UNESCO decision. That was Russia's invasion of the Ukraine in 2022 and that was relevant because the head of the World Heritage Committee, the committee that would vote on whether or not Gordian would be added to the World Heritage Site list, the president for the year 2022 of that committee was Russian. He insisted on having the meeting during which Gordian's candidacy for World Heritage Site status would be considered and voted on in Kazan in Russia. The representatives in UNESCO refused to go to Russia because of Russia's invasion of the Ukraine. They asked him whether or not they could have it on Zoom. He refused to have the meeting on Zoom and insisted that no matter what they thought of the war, they had to come to Kazan in order for the vote to take place. And UNESCO again said no. The result was there was no meeting and we're still in limbo. Now that presidency will last only for 2022. There will be a new president that comes in in 2023. So we have every hope and expectation that in June of 2023, Gordian will be inscribed on the World Heritage list of historic sites. There's absolutely no reason that we can see why we would be excluded. All of the major criteria that we need to satisfy, we feel we have satisfied as did the visiting team in the course of that 500 page document. So again, I can't give you the last chapter of this saga, only the penultimate chapter, but I think it will turn out all right. In the meantime, of course, we keep our eyes on the conservation of the site with the knowledge and the understanding that Penn will not be digging at Gordian forever. We've been very lucky that the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara have welcomed us to their country for a period of over 70 years. But no excavation lasts forever. Eventually, the residents of the area need to become stakeholders in the conservation and protection of the archaeological site. And so, with the help of Aisha Saltzman and Halil Demirdelen, we inaugurated 10 years ago, nearly 10 years ago, a program that provides cultural heritage education training for school students, for their parents, and for their teachers, who now incorporate statements about Gordian significance and the significance of Phrygia and the importance of cultural heritage preservation into their lesson plans. This is a way in which we ensure that there will be a future for the past that I've spent the last 42 years of my life trying to uncover and trying to preserve. And I will simply close by saying that has given me a kind of exhilaration that I can't imagine getting from any other profession. And that exhilaration is a fundamental component of this museum, so I close with thanks for listening to me, and thank you for your support of the Penn Museum. Thank you.