INTRODUCTION
In 2005 work at this Iron Age capital brought to a successful conclusion the current program of excavation. The grandeur and sophistication of the great Monumental Entrance to a huge palatial complex are without known parallel in Anatolia, demonstrating that developments on the Central Plateau were every bit as innovative as any in Ionia or Lydia. Kerkenes provides the first clear evidence that the great rock-cut facades at Midas City and elsewhere in the Phrygian Highlands were indeed representations of built structures of not dissimilar proportions. We may venture to suggest that had they been preserved, contemporaneous buildings at Gordion, the Phrygian Capital, would have been equally grand and, unlike their counterparts at Kerkenes, embellished with architectural terracottas and pebble mosaics. These similarities and differences underscore the view that in the first half of the 6th Century BC Kerkenes was Pteria, the capital of an independent kingdom east of the Kızılırmak, and that the culture of the Pterians was predominantly Phrygian, whilst the ancient kingdom of Phrygia fell under Lydian sway. One reading of Herodotus would link Pteria with the Iranian Medes, whose territorial claims extended to the banks of the Kızılırmak, but any such political subjugation or imperial Median pretension is not manifest in the archaeological record. What Kerkenes/Pteria appears to represent is a late floruit of Phrygian culture, newly established to the east of the old Phrygian state at a period when the entire geopolitics of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Ancient Near East were in flux.
