Word: gordian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Midas was no legend. Generations of kings bearing his name reigned over Phrygia from the great city of Gordium,* now a desert waste 70 miles southwest of Turkey's Ankara. Two years ago an archaeological expedition mounted by the University of Pennsylvania, scratching the Gordian ground, broke through to tombs, closed up eight centuries before Christ. One contained the bones of Midas' line. Also found in the tombs were a four-poster bed (bearing a five-ft.-three-skeleton), inlaid screens and tables, riding gear, weapons and quantities of bronze objects, from giant caldrons ornamented with winged figures...
...start of his sweep through Asia in 333 B.C., Alexander took Gordium and whether in a fit of impatience or as a calculated gesture sliced apart with his sword the legendary "Gordian knot," pride of the Phrygian priesthood, which no man before his time had ever been able to untie...
...landscape. His best scenes have the faithfulness and the feeling of fine color plates in a history book-King Philip's drunken dance among the corpses at Chaeronea, the hurling of the spear into Asia, the symbolic blow at the navel of a continent when Alexander cut the Gordian knot, the sordid grandeur of Darius' doom, the murder of Cleitus in a childish...