Biologist searches for answer in King Midas's tomb

BOWLING GREEN, O.—Bowling Green State University biologist Dr. Scott Rogers, along with a Turkish colleague, has made a foray into the tomb of the legendary King Midas, seeking to determine if the huge timbers and logs lining the ancient burial site are Lebanon cedar, or perhaps a variety that has vanished altogether.

While most people are aware of the legend of King Midas-who foolishly wished that everything he touched be turned to gold, only to find to his horror that that included his beloved daughter, his garden and even his food-few realize that there was a real King Midas, who ruled the people of Mushki (known to the Greeks as Phrygia) between about 740 and 696 B.C.

The tomb was discovered in 1959 by a team from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology making excavations at the ancient Phrygian capital of Gordion in central Turkey. Described as one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries of the 20th century, the Midas Mound, now a tourist site, looms over the modern village of Yassihöyük and the village cemetery.

The mound is about 60 meters high and covered with earth and grass atop a heavy layer of rocks. The royal burial chamber is deep underground and, compared with the 100-degree July heat outside, was about 60 degrees, Rogers said. A double wall of tree logs and timbers surrounds the inner chamber, the earliest known intact wooden structure in the world.

Rogers, an expert in ancient DNA and the extraction and preservation of nucleic acids, and Dr. Zeki Kaya, a plant geneticist from the Department of Biological Sciences at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, set out to determine if the logs are indeed Taurus, or Lebanon, cedar. Because of its resistance to rot, the highly prized wood was widely used in ships, buildings and tombs for important people in the community.

Extracting the DNA from the 4,000-year-old wood samples they collected has been a long and exacting process, Rogers said. Using sterile scalpels, they cut through many layers to find relatively fresh material, which then had to be decontaminated through a many-step process. “Fungi, mouse and human contaminants are a big problem,” he said. The DNA they found was of low concentration and degraded, but using a technique called polymerase chain reaction amplification, they were able to amplify it a million times in five or six hours.

The ancient DNA sequences were compared with available fresh conifer-tissue sequences, and with samples from the GeneBank on the National Center for Biotechnology Information Web site.

Of the 46 samples they looked at, only two turned out to be cedar. “More samples and more DNA sequencing will be required to make a definite identification of the type of wood,” Rogers predicted.

The two scientists have submitted an article describing their work and findings to the journal Silvae Genetica.

Today there is no Lebanon cedar within 150 kilometers of the burial site, but in King Midas's time it had a broader range, according to Rogers, a professor and chair of the BGSU Department of Biological Sciences.

The study could reveal whether the cedar forest was in fact continuous from north to south, including the Gordion site, but was depleted by overcutting and overgrazing.

“There could have been bad forestry practices then, just as there are today,” Rogers offered as a possible explanation for the disappearance of the wood from the area. Also, “humans can take a species down so far that if a disease or a fire comes along, it may become extinct.”

The researchers would also like to identify which population of cedar the logs come from and how they were transported to the site.

(Posted December 23, 2005 )