U.S. scientists eat Midas feast of grog, lamb stew

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (Reuters) -- For only the second time in nearly three millennia, the legendary King Midas of Phrygia was honored this weekend by admirers who gulped a special golden elixir and devoured an authentic spicy lamb stew.

This time, the entourage was led not by purple-robed Phrygian noblemen, but by U.S. archaeologists in dinner jackets and cocktail dresses who recreated on Saturday parts of the 2,700-year-old funeral feast of the king known for his golden touch.

In a first for science, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology reconstructed the recipes for the drink and main course of the original dinner from leftovers unearthed in Midas' Iron Age tomb 43 years ago in central Turkey.

"Pan scrapings," joked archaeologist G. Kenneth Sams of the University of Pennsylvania. "When you come right down to it, that's what's brought us here tonight, pan scrapings."

Universities have been hosting recreated Greek and Roman banquets for some time.

"But what you usually get from those is a composite of foods eaten over hundreds or even thousands of years," said Patrick McGovern, a University of Pennsylvania archaeological chemist who identified the world's oldest wine, from about 5,400 B.C., and the oldest known beer, from about 3,400 B.C.

"I don't think anybody's ever tried to produce a feast like this, recreating a specific historical event by using the actual remains as a guide," said McGovern, who led the team that did the chemical analyses on the "pan scrapings" recovered from Midas' tomb in the ancient city of Gordion, about 60 miles (100 km) southwest of Ankara.

The 150 dinner guests, who paid up to $150 to attend, sat at tables covered with royal purple and decorated with golden apples.

For an aperitif, diners got "King Midas's Golden Elixir," an odd mixture of beer, wine and honey mead that was the grog of choice not only for Midas but for other monarchs of the ancient Mediterranean world, including the mythical King Agamemnon of Mycenae, who led the Greeks against Troy.

"The stew is way too spicy," University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Keith DeVries said of the piece de resistance -- lamb stewed in lentils, olive oil, honey, wine and anise.

The museum's guests also munched on olives, figs, goat cheese, a garlic and olive spread and rustic breads. Diners were also served a watercress and goat cheese salad with cherry vinaigrette. Dessert was a fennel tart.

The meal included a decidedly unauthentic chocolate truffle and coffee. Cocoa is native to what is now Latin America, while coffee is thought to originate in Ethiopia.

According to myth, Midas was a Macedonian king with a rose-garden palace when the god Dionysus granted his wish that everything he touched would turn to gold. The wish became a curse when even food turned to gold. Midas won reprieve by journeying to Asia Minor and washing in the river Pactolus.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have shown some of the myth to be true.

The Midas of history was a warrior king of an Indo-European people who migrated to Asia Minor from the Balkans around 1,000 B.C. Known as King "Mita" to the neighboring Assyrians, he had a large palace on a semi-arid prairie that came to life with wild flowers each spring.

But scholars suspect that Midas' legendary gold was actually polished bronze vessels that Greek storytellers either mistook for gold or embellished for the purposes of entertainment.

"The real gold was what we found in those vessels," said McGovern, referring to a handful of copper-colored dust that had been the grog and a clump of material resembling dried tree-bark shavings that had been the spicy lamb stew.

The museum, which has research projects under way in 18 countries from Mongolia to Bolivia, is hoping to turn the menu of the Midas feast to gold by offering it as authentic royal banquet fare to banks, law firms and other possible donors.

The days of adventurous archaeologists like the fictional Indiana Jones, who pilfered ancient relics from exotic sites and brought them home, are long gone.

The contents of the Midas tomb, for instance, remains in Turkish museums, leaving this weekend's diners to sit in an Egyptian gallery beneath the 3,800-year-old stone visage of the Pharaoh Ramses II.

"Today, we need to find creative ways to connect our research to the public," said museum director Jeremy Sabloff. "This is one of them."

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