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Muska

23 February 2020
Archaeology

This discovery sufaced a couple of weeks ago and may already have been mentioned but here is a new link – https://phys.org/news/2020-02-archaeologists-lost-city-conquered-kingdom… … archaeologists from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago were involved in the discovery at the lost city, near the modern village of Turkmen-Karahoyuk, in southern Turkey. A local farmer directed them to a huge stone with a strange inscription …

    … he had  found it while dredging an irrigation canal. The script was Luwian. They went on to unearth a lost city that covered 300 acres. The stone was in fact a stele erected by an ancient king – which was dated by the researchers to the 8th century BC. It recorded the victory of Hartapu over the Muska (Meschech of the Bible). Muska is various associated by some historians with the Phrygians (a Greek name for an unknown people on the Anatolian plateau). However, the Mushki crop up in texts much earlier than the 8th century – during the collapse of the Late Bronze age. For example, Tiglath Pileser I, a late contemporary of Ramses III, records the Mushki in the 11th century BC – somewhere in eastern Anatolia. It is not thought Phrygians penetrated that far east – so the jury is out on whether a connection with Midas exists or not. The link in question is at pains to stress a connection with Midas – which may or may not be true.

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