Was King Midas a real person?

A name in the Assyrian annals

The first witness to Midas is not a Greek poet but an Assyrian scribe. Sargon II, king of Assyria from 722 to 705 BC, had his campaigns recorded year by year. His annals name a strong western ruler, Mita of the land of Mushki, who had long backed Assyria’s enemies in Anatolia. In 709 BC, they report, Mita finally sent an envoy with gifts to Sargon. Historians identify this Mita with the Midas of Greek tradition, king of the Phrygians.

Phrygia and Gordion

Phrygia filled the high plains of central Anatolia. Its capital, Gordion, lies on the Sakarya River, southwest of Ankara. To the west lay Lydia, with its capital Sardis and the Pactolus, the river where Ovid’s Midas washes off his golden touch.

Gordion is famous for another reason too. Greek tradition made Gordias, a Phrygian king, the father of Midas, and an ox-cart linked to the family stood in the city, tied with a knot nobody could undo. In 333 BC Alexander the Great arrived and, as Arrian tells it, solved the Gordian knot (Anabasis 2.3).

The Midas Mound

Beside Gordion rises an artificial hill of earth about 53 meters (174 feet) high, long called the “Midas Mound.” In 1957 a team led by Rodney Young of the University of Pennsylvania Museum tunneled into it and reached a sealed burial chamber built of timber. Inside lay a man of about sixty, with around a hundred bronze bowls, inlaid wooden furniture and the remains of a funeral feast. Chemical tests on the residues, published in 1999, suggest a lamb and lentil stew and a drink that mixed grape wine, barley beer and honey mead.

Tree rings in the chamber’s logs date it to about 740 BC, decades before Mita’s envoy reached Sargon. So the man in the tomb is probably not Midas but his father. And the tomb of the king of the golden touch held no gold at all.

Midas in Greek memory

The Greeks remembered him as a real king who looked west. Herodotus, writing in the 400s BC, says Midas son of Gordias was the first foreigner to send an offering to Delphi: the royal throne on which he sat to give judgment, still on show there in Herodotus’s day (Histories 1.14).

The gold, though, belonged to the neighbors. The Pactolus carried electrum, a natural blend of gold and silver, and Lydia struck the first coins around 600 BC; Herodotus calls the Lydians the first people to coin gold and silver (1.94). Their last king, Croesus, is still the measure of wealth in the phrase “rich as Croesus.” The myth handed the river’s riches to the best-known king nearby.

Put in order, the dates tell the story: the mound about 740 BC, Mita in the annals in 709 BC, the first coins about 600 BC, and Ovid writing his golden touch around AD 8. Some seven centuries separate the real king from the poem. Even the donkey’s ears, which Ovid adds next, belong to a separate tale that no record supports.