Gordian Knot

The oracle decreed that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart should become their king.

The Phrygians, the people who lived in present-day Türkiye (Turkey) were without a leader at the moment. This was somewhere in the neighborhood of about 3000 years ago.

The next person driving an ox-cart into the city turned out to be a peasant farmer named Gordias. He was immediately declared king, and the city of Gordium was named after him.

Gordias’s son, Midas, dedicated the ox-cart to the Phrygian god Sabazios (identified with Zeus by the Greeks), and then tied it to a post with an incredibly intricate knot. Midas made sure that the Gordian Knot, as it came to be known, had multiple knots woven together in perplexing ways.

A second prophecy formed around this Knot: whoever could unravel it was destined to become ruler of all of Asia. The Gordian Knot came to be viewed as an intractable, unsolvable problem all around the surrounding region.

Alexander was a smart kid. He had Aristotle…