Unraveling the Gordian Knot

A conversation with classics scholar Lynn Roller, whose work is shedding light on an ancient society that predates the Greeks.

By Susanne Rockwell

Lynn Roller has spent her career peering into dusty corners of museums and storerooms in Turkey to discover other gods, other religions and a world nearly 3,000 years away from today.

Although trained as an archeologist, Roller is housed in UC Davis’ classics and art history programs where she employs a broad expertise in the cultures of Mediterranean antiquity. She teaches subjects ranging from Greek and Roman religion to the works of Homer (in Greek) to art history classes that introduce students to the wonders of Greek and Roman architecture and art.

Roller says “the classics” encompass the study of the cultures of Mediterranean antiquity, a broad expanse of time that ranges from the earliest written evidence some 5,500 years ago to the dissolution of the Roman empire and the development of Christianity as a state religion, about 300 A.D. She studies the Phrygian (pronounced “free-jian”) culture, which flourished in 800–300 B.C. in what in ancient times was known as Anatolia and is now central Turkey.

Most of us are familiar with the most famous Phrygian, King Midas. But it was another Phrygian king with a name still familiar to us today—Gordios—who tied that difficult knot Alexander the Great so cleverly cut through on his campaign east to conquer the Persians. And it is now in a dusty village named after Gordios where Roller has focused her own scholarship. In Gordion, an hour outside of Ankara, she puzzles through stone figurines and inscribed jug handles to find how a culture survived conquering waves of Greeks, Assyrians and Romans.

Roller’s latest book, In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele, won a major prize in 2002 from the Archeological Institute of America for her groundbreaking research on a powerful female deity worshipped from Afghanistan to Africa. Roller says she was drawn to the topic in part by the feminist interest in female deities and the feminine element in religious practice. By examining various physical remnants throughout the Mediterranean, she shows how religious beliefs were constructed in this less complex time and the true role that the Mother God played in people’s lives.

Roller spoke to us about the book and about her study of this far-away time and place.

Why write a book on an ancient goddess?

Ancient Phrygian relief of the Mother Goddess, from Ankara, ca. 700 B.C.

People tend to undervalue the culture of the Phrygian people, but one of the things that I discovered was they created a particular religion with a goddess called “the Mother.” And I found that her appeal was very widely spread all over Anatolia, Greece, Rome and throughout the whole Mediterranean world. You find her in West Africa, you find her in Afghanistan, and practically every place in between. I became interested in what it was that made her so popular and such a powerful deity.

Can you sum that up?

That’s a question that is best answered by negatives. One of the things that surprised me is that, though she was called “Mother” and that was always her name in the different languages, she was not associated with childbirth. She was not necessarily a patron of females; she was worshipped by women and men and was often associated with the heads of society. And she received votive dedication from the elite and from people with humble backgrounds and limited economic means. Even though she was always called the Phrygian mother, she was pretty much at home in different parts of the world.

She seems to have had the capacity to transcend boundaries. She was the patron of the city and the patron of the state. She seems to have been the deity that people appealed to for just about anything—ordinary things as well as major personal issues or state issues.

She seems to have been a nurturing deity, but she was also a deity of great power, and she wasassociated with power. She seems to have been a protector for a lot of people; that is one of the reasons why she is so difficult to define because she was so amorphous and because she is so cross-cultural.

Feminists have been interested in her, and I know that you have been involved in feminist scholarship on campus. How do you see this role of a powerful female deity?

The discovery of the Mother God has offered a historical perspective for feminists. The most famous example of this perspective came from an extremely influential scholar named Marija Gimbutas. She developed a hypothesis that all human societies originally worshipped female divinities and that the Mother God is the prime goddess of all societies. As societies gained complexity that deity was suppressed in favor of a dominant male deity. She says that it is the duty of modern women to reclaim the feminine and reclaim the god within us.

Gimbutas had quite an enormous following among feminist scholars who were so eager to see models of female deities, because it’s true that most complex religions in society today tend to treat women as inferior or tend to reinforce limited roles that women have traditionally played in the society as nurturers. So the idea that goddesses were supreme is very attractive. But it’s a model that lacks historical support. The reality is that most ancient societies were highly polytheistic, with both female and male divinities.

Would you consider that the Mother God was popular in a more “complex” society or did that come later, during monotheism?

Monotheism is a much more sophisticated idea that came quite a bit later. You can see this in the Book of Genesis—that the God of these people exists as opposed to the God of those people, and my God can beat up your God, and that kind of thing. They were nationalistic forms, but the idea is that there is just one entity as deity. As males gained the dominant hand in complex societies, they tended to favor the male deity and to portray females only in the aspects of female life that made them essential, which is primarily in reproduction and nurturing children.

The Mother God was very powerful for a long time. Do you see carryovers to today’s life?

No, I really don’t. People have tried to make her the ancestor of the Virgin Mary, for example, and some of her shrines actually were rebuilt and integrated with churches dedicated to Mary. But I see that as a very artificial development.

When you are in Gordion, are you on your hands and knees digging?

Wooden lion found in a child’s burial mound at Gordion, ca. 700 B.C.

Not too much, because most archeologists who work in the Mediterranean world don’t do the pick and shovel work. It’s almost always done for us by workmen in the village. That’s actually the expectation—that we will hire local people to do the work for us. It is part of their economic support. And, actually, most of my work is studying the finds from excavation done between 1950 and 1973. Now we are sorting and analyzing the backlog from that work.

What do you hope to find in that backlog?

One of the things we would like to know is to what degree can we trace the borrowing of ideas through material culture—the artifacts, such as pottery, bronzes and small figurines. But it’s very hard to define ideas, particularly in the case of the Phrygians, who had no literature and very few written texts. The few written texts that we do have are very, very short, and they’re primarily short inscriptions of identity.

Now that you’ve written the first book on the Mother God, it seems like you left yourself room for another on the subject. What’s next?

Others have asked me that, too. My research is really two-pronged because, on the one hand, I’m very interested in the cultural development of the Mediterranean world and of the Mother Goddess. But I’m still very interested in the archeology and in the development of the pre-Greek people who lived in Anatolia before the area came under heavy Greek influence, such as the Phrygians and the Lydians. My first book was a volume in the Gordion series that focused on the development of writing in this area, the introduction of the alphabet and the introduction of the writing system.

It wasn’t the only place that written language was happening.

It wasn’t the only place that was happening, no, not at all, but there’s some pretty interesting material from this area that shows a particular regional tradition of writing ideograms and symbols that was only partially superseded by the introduction of the Greek alphabet. The alphabetic texts in the Phrygian language have never been translated, though, because we haven’t found enough examples to work with. But we think the language was Indo-European and closely related to Greek.

How do the archeological finds change over time?

It’s a part of a whole cultural phenomenon as the general region of central Anatolia became increasingly Hellenized. The traditional Phrygian motifs in art and ceramics and all sorts of small finds gradually gave way to Greek models, and Greek became the dominant culture in the region. Eventually Anatolia came under Greek political control. The native Anatolian cultures—what were they and what were their contributions—and the whole process of this cultural shift—becoming Greek—is something that also interests me very much.

It is clear, during the 9th and 8th centuries B.C. in central Anatolia, the Phrygians were technically more sophisticated than the Greeks. They were building monumental architecture and elaborate stone buildings, and they were making very complex bronze objects and a variety of other things. And the Phrygians continued to identify themselves as Phrygian for something like a thousand years after they became part of the Greek cultural world and then, eventually, of the Roman Empire.

Most people have always seen as inevitable that the Greek culture would dominate because it was superior. I don’t see it as quite so inevitable. I’m also interested in seeing how the Greeks borrowed and developed ideas of the ancient Near East.

There’s a whole phase of Greek art that was very heavily influenced by the artists and people of Western Asia. The question is, how did the Greek people move beyond that to create their own distinctive style? It has always been one of the hot questions.

Those issues of maintaining or melding identities are the hot questions we ask today.

Absolutely, and I think all these questions are highly appropriate and valuable because this is a process we see today: the spread of the dominant Western culture of North America and Western Europe (it’s not limited to the United States) and the enormous resistance. I see this especially in Turkey—that’s why I find Turkey so fascinating. On the one hand, everyone wants to become more prosperous, and they want to have the advantages of modern goods and communication and want to participate in the modern world. On the other hand, they want to maintain their regional identity. They have certain values that they see as good or even superior to those of the West, and they see these things being lost. It is a fascinating echo of the past.

Susanne Rockwell ’74, M.A. ’96, writes about the humanities and social sciences for the campus. Photo of Lynn Roller by Debbie Aldridge/UC Davis.