The extensive western part of central Anatolia, the boundaries of which varied greatly over the years, is the area of Phrygia. The people seem to have been widely spread throughout the Aegean region also. Greek tradition has it that the Bryges are the oldest of all people and their language the original tongue; however they now appear to have supplanted an older civilization, possibly the Mushki, enemies of the Hittites. Among their kings are Midas of the golden touch and Gordius of the knot, whose kingdoms were in the Sangarius (Sakarya) River valley.
The larger cities were Dorylaeum (Eskişehir), Cotyaeum (Kütahya) and Trajano-polis (Uşak), with Laodicea and Colossae also included. Phrygians are credited with having invented the frieze.
Aegean Coast Caria
Caria is a mountainous area along the southwestern Aegean coast of Turkey. Cnidus (now an archeological site), Halicarnassus (Bodrum, famous for the monument to King Mausolus), Miletus, Priene, and Magnesia are the main cities of ancient times.
The most important bay, the Ceramic Gulf or the Gulf of Cos (Kerme Körfezi), has always been feared by sailors for the treachery of its winds, and today is proving a rich source for underwater archeology because of the numerous shipwrecks.
The Phrygians are most famous for their legendary kings of the heroic age of Greek mythology: Gordias whose Gordian Knot would later be untied by Alexander the Great, Midas who turned whatever he touched to gold, and Mygdon who warred with the Amazons. According to Homer’s Iliad, the Phrygians were close allies of the Trojans and participants in the Trojan War against the Achaeans. Phrygian power reached its peak in the late 8th century BC under another, historical King Midas, who dominated most of western and central Anatolia and rivaled Assyria and Urartu for power in eastern Anatolia. This later Midas was however also the last independent king of Phrygia before its capital Gordium was sacked by Cimmerians around 695 BC. Phrygia then became subject to Lydia, and then successively to Persia, Alexander and his Hellenistic successors, Pergamon, Rome and Byzantium. Phrygians were gradually assimilated into other cultures by the early medieval era, and the name Phrygia passed out of usage as a territorial designation after the Turkish conquest of Anatolia.
Inscriptions found at Gordium make clear that Phrygians spoke an Indo-European language with at least some vocabulary similar to Greek, and clearly not belonging to the family of Anatolian languages spoken by most of Phrygia’s neighbors. According to one of the so-called Homeric Hymns, the Phrygian language was not mutually intelligible with Trojan.
According to ancient tradition among Greek historians, the Phrygians anciently migrated to Anatolia from the Balkans. Herodotus says the Phrygians were called Bryges when they lived in Europe.] He and other Greek writers also recorded legends about King Midas that associated him with or put his origin in Macedonia; Herodotus for example says a wild rose garden in Macedonia was named after Midas. The Phrygians were also connected by some classical writers to the Mygdones, the name of two groups of people, one of which lived in northern Macedonia and another in Mysia. Likewise the Phrygians have been identified with the Bebryces, a people said to have warred with Mysia before the Trojan War and who had a king named Mygdon at roughly the same time as the Phrygians were said to have had a king named Mygdon. The classical historian Strabo groups Phrygians, Mygdones, Mysians, Bebryces and Bithynians together as peoples that migrated to Anatolia from the Balkans. This image of Phrygians as part of a related group of northwest Anatolian cultures seems the most likely explanation for the confusion over whether Phrygians, Bebryces and Anatolian Mygdones were or were not the same people.
The apparent similarity of the Phrygian language to Greek and its dissimilarity with the Anatolian languages spoken by most of their neighbors is also taken as support for a European origin of the Phrygians.
Some scholars have theorized that such a migration could have occurred more recently than classical sources suggest, and have sought to fit the Phrygian arrival into a narrative explaining the downfall of the Hittite Empire and the end of the high Bronze Age in Anatolia. According to this recent migration theory, the Phrygians invaded just before or after the collapse of the Hittite Empire at the beginning of the 12th century BC, filling the political vacuum in central-western Anatolia, and may have been counted among the “Sea Peoples” that Egyptian records credit with bringing about the Hittite collapse. The so-called Handmade Knobbed Ware found in Western Anatolia during this period has been suggested to be an import connected to this invasion.
However, most scholars reject such a recent Phrygian migration and accept as factual the Iliad’s account that the Phrygians were established on the Sakarya River before the Trojan War, and thus must have been there during the later stages of the Hittite Empire, and likely earlier. These scholars seek instead to trace the Phrygians’ origins among the many nations of western Anatolia who were subject to the Hittites. This interpretation also gets support from Greek legends about the founding of Phrygia’s main city Gordium by Gordias and of Ancyra by Midas, which suggest that Gordium and Ancyra were believed to be date from the distant past before the Trojan War. Some scholars dismiss the claim of a Phrygian migration as a mere legend, likely arising from the coincidental similarity of their name to the Bryges.
No one has conclusively identified which of the many subjects of the Hittites might have represented early Phrygians. According to a classical tradition, popularized by the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, the Phrygians can be equated with the country called Togarmah by the ancient Hebrews, which has in turn been identified as the Tegarama of Hittite texts and Til-Garimmu of Assyrian records. Josephus called Togarmah “the Thrugrammeans, who, as the Greeks resolved, were named Phrygians”. However, the Greek source cited by Josephus is unknown, and it is unclear if there was any basis for the identification other than name similarity. Scholars of the Hittites believe Tegarama was in eastern Anatolia – some locate it at Gurun – far to the east of Phrygia. Some scholars have identified Phrygia with the Assuwa league, and noted that the Iliad mentions a Phrygian (Queen Hecuba’s brother) named Asios. Another possible early name of Phrygia could be Hapalla, the name of the easternmost province that emerged from the splintering of the Bronze Age western Anatolian empire Arzawa. However, scholars are unsure if Hapalla corresponds to Phrygia or to Pisidia, further south.
A further claim made by Herodotus is that Phrygian colonists founded the Armenian nation.] This is likely a reference to a third group of people called Mygdones living in northern Mesopotamia who were apparently allied to the Armenians; Xenophon describes them in his Anabasis in a joint army with the Armenians. However, little is known about these eastern Mygdones and no evidence of Phrygian language in that region has been found.
It was the “Great Mother”, Cybele, as the Greeks and Romans knew her, who was originally worshiped in the mountains of Phrygia, where she was known as “Mountain Mother”. In her typical Phrygian form, she wears a long belted dress, a polos (a high cylindrical headdress), and a veil covering the whole body. The later version of Cybele was established by a pupil of Phidias, the sculptor Agoracritus, and became the image most widely adopted by Cybele’s expanding following, both in the Aegean world and at Rome. It shows her humanized though still enthroned, her hand resting on an attendant lion and the other holding the tympanon, a circular frame drum, similar to a tambourine.
The Phrygians also venerated Sabazios, the sky and father-god depicted on horseback. Although the Greeks associated Sabazios with Zeus, representations of him, even at Roman times, show him as a horseman god. His conflicts with the indigenous Mother Goddess, whose creature was the Lunar Bull, may be surmised in the way that Sabazios’ horse places a hoof on the head of a bull, in a Roman relief at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Phrygian costumes
Phrygia developed an advanced Bronze Age culture. The earliest traditions of Greek music derived from Phrygia, transmitted through the Greek colonies in Anatolia, and included the Phrygian mode, which was considered to be the warlike mode in ancient Greek music. Phrygian Midas, the king of the “golden touch”, was tutored in music by Orpheus himself, according to the myth. Another musical invention that came from Phrygia was the aulos, a reed instrument with two pipes. Marsyas, the satyr who first formed the instrument using the hollowed antler of a stag, was a Phrygian follower of Cybele. He unwisely competed in music with the Olympian Apollo and inevitably lost, whereupon Apollo flayed Marsyas alive and provocatively hung his skin on Cybele’s own sacred tree, a pine.
Phrygia retained a separate cultural identity. Classical Greek iconography identifies the Trojan Paris as non-Greek by his Phrygian cap, which was worn by Mithras and survived into modern imagery as the “Liberty cap” of the American and French revolutionaries. The Phrygians spoke an Indo-European language. (See Phrygian language.) Although the Phrygians adopted the alphabet originated by the Phoenicians, only a few dozen inscriptions in the Phrygian language have been found, primarily funereal, and so much of what is thought to be known of Phrygia is second-hand information from Greek sources.
The name of the earliest known mythical king was Nannacus (aka Annacus). This king resided at Iconium, the most eastern city of the kingdom of Phrygia at that time; and after his death, at the age of 300 years, a great flood overwhelmed the country, as had been foretold by an ancient oracle. The next king mentioned in extant classical sources was called Manis or Masdes. According to Plutarch, because of his splendid exploits, great things were called “manic” in Phrygia. Thereafter the kingdom of Phrygia seems to have become fragmented among various kings. One of the kings was Tantalus who ruled over the north western region of Phrygia around Mount Sipylus. Tantalus was endlessly punished in Tartarus, because he allegedly killed his son Pelops and sacrificially offered him to the Olympians, a reference to the suppression of human sacrifice. Tantalus was also falsely accused of stealing from the lotteries he had invented. In the mythic age before the Trojan war, during a time of an interregnum, Gordius (or Gordias), a Phrygian farmer, became king, fulfilling an oracular prophecy. The kingless Phrygians had turned for guidance to the oracle of Sabazios (“Zeus” to the Greeks) at Telmissus, in the part of Phrygia that later became part of Galatia. They had been instructed by the oracle to acclaim as their king the first man who rode up to the god’s temple in a cart. That man was Gordias (Gordios, Gordius), a farmer, who dedicated the ox-cart in question, tied to its shaft with the “Gordian Knot”. Gordias refounded a capital at Gordium in west central Anatolia, situated on the old trackway through the heart of Anatolia that became Darius’s Persian “Royal Road” from Pessinus to Ancyra, and not far from the River Sangarius.
The Phrygians are associated in Greek mythology with the Dactyls, minor gods credited with the invention of iron smelting, who in most versions of the legend lived at Mount Ida in Phrygia.
Gordias’s son (adopted in some versions) was Midas. A large body of myths and legends surround this first king Midas. connecting him with a mythological tale concerning Attis. This shadowy figure resided at Pessinus and attempted to marry his daughter to the young Attis in spite of the opposition of his lover Agdestis and his mother, the goddess Cybele. When Agdestis and/or Cybele appear and cast madness upon the members of the wedding feast. Midas is said to have died in the ensuing chaos.
The famous king Midas is said to have associated himself with Silenus and other satyrs and with Dionysus, who granted him the famous “golden touch”.
Man in Phrygian costume, Hellenistic period (3rd–1st century BC), Cyprus
In one version of his story, Midas travels from Thrace accompanied by a band of his people to Asia Minor to wash away the taint of his unwelcome “golden touch” in the river Pactolus. Leaving the gold in the river’s sands, Midas found himself in Phrygia, where he was adopted by the childless king Gordias and taken under the protection of Cybele. Acting as the visible representative of Cybele, and under her authority, it would seem, a Phrygian king could designate his successor.
The Phrygian Sibyl was the priestess presiding over the Apollonian oracle at Phrygia.
According to Herodotus, Herodotus), the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus II had two children raised in isolation in order to find the original language. The children were reported to have uttered bekos which is Phrygian for “bread”, so Psammetichus admitted that the Phrygians were a nation older than the Egyptians.
Phrygia Valley Anatolia
Phrygia,
