Description
City of Gold, the title of the exhibition and the publication, is a gloss on the modern name of the town in and around which Princeton University conducted archaeological excavations from 1983 to 2007: Polis Chrysochous translates roughly to ”city flowing with gold”. As Joanna Smith points out in her study of the history of the archaeology of the area, the origin of the name is obscure, though the name itself is many hundreds of years old. There is no known source of gold in the vicinity or any record of one. My own preference to think that gold is a metaphor for prosperity, since one compelling reading of the town’s name is ”the city of the valley flowing with gold”.
