Search results for ""Author Lynn E. Roller""

In 1950, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology began excavations at the ancient Phrygian capital of Gordion in central Turkey. The Museum's Gordion Project continues today, with researchers from many disciplines and with many specializations contributing to a growing—and sometimes changing—body of information and understanding about this complex and multifaceted site, inhabited by peoples and diverse civilizations for millennia. In this volume of Gordion Special Studies, Lynn E. Roller focuses on a series of stone blocks with incised figural and abstract drawings recovered from early Phrygian structures at Gordion. The great majority of the incised stones come from a single structure within the Early Phrygian citadel at Gordion known as Megaron 2, a stone building with several remarkable features and a likely candidate for the citadel's temple. The volume begins with a description of the excavation of the stones and a discussion of Megaron 2. Next is an analysis of the subject matter of the drawings by type, describing scenes of human figures, animals, architectural drawings, geometric patterns, and formless marks. A discussion follows of the sources from which the drawings could have been taken and of parallels with similar scenes and designs on objects in other media from Gordion and other contemporary sites in Anatolia. The fourth section proposes an explanatory hypothesis on the origin of the drawings, and considers who could have made them and why. Parallels with comparable drawings from Anatolia and the Near East are discussed here. The final section summarizes the contribution of the drawings to our understanding of the development of the Early Phrygian material at Gordion. University Museum Monograph, 130

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This book examines one of the most intriguing figures in the religious life of the ancient Mediterranean world, the Phrygian Mother Goddess, known to the Greeks and Romans as Cybele or Magna Mater, the Great Mother. Her cult was particularly prominent in central Anatolia (modern Turkey), and spread from there through the Greek and Roman world. She was an enormously popular figure, attracting devotion from common people and potentates alike. This book is the first comprehensive assembly and discussion of the entire extant evidence concerning the worship of the Phrygian Mother Goddess, from her earliest appearance in the prehistoric record to the early centuries of the Roman Empire. Lynn E. Roller presents and analyzes literary, historiographic, and archaeological data with equal acuity and flair. While previous studies have tended to emphasize the more outrageous aspects of the Mother Goddess's cult, such as her orgiastic rituals and the eunuch priests who attended her, this book places a special focus on Cybele's position in Anatolia and the ways in which the identity of the goddess changed as her cult was transmitted to Greece and Rome. Roller gives a detailed account of the growth, spread, and evolution of her cult, her ceremonies, and her meaning for her adherents. This book will introduce students of Classical antiquity to many aspects of the Great Mother which have been previously unexamined, and will interest anyone who has ever been piqued by curiosity about the Mother Goddess of the ancient Western world.

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