Phrygians

In the centuries after the Hittite collapse, the uplands of central-western Anatolia were home to the Phrygians, an Indo-European-speaking people whose kingdom, centred on Gordium, flourished in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. Remembered by the Greeks through the legend of King Midas, the cult of the Mother Goddess and the music of the aulos, they passed under Lydian, Persian, Hellenistic and Roman rule, and their language faded out in late antiquity.

Greek writers used the name loosely, for a broad cultural world in central Anatolia rather than one tribe, so how unified the Phrygians were is debated. Herodotus said they had once lived in the southern Balkans as the Bryges and changed their name after crossing into Asia. Many historians accept a migration from Europe around 1200 BCE, and a conventional date of about 1180 BCE is often given, coinciding with the end of the Hittites' empire. Most Anatolian archaeologists, however, have dropped the idea, pointing to the lack of European pottery and to continuity in local styles; some suggest any movement was earlier and came in several stages. Whether the Phrygians helped bring down Hattusa or simply filled the gap it left is unknown.

From village and tribal beginnings, a Phrygian state emerged in the eighth century BCE with its capital at Gordium. Its rulers bore the alternating names Gordias and Midas, and it traded with eastern neighbours and with the Greeks. Assyrian records of the eighth century mention a king Mita of the Mushki, generally identified with Midas, who allied with Sargon II of Assyria in 709 BCE, though how the Mushki relate to the Phrygians is uncertain. At Gordium, a great burial mound of the Midas period covers a buried wooden chamber with a coffin, furniture and food offerings.

Raids by the Cimmerians in the late eighth and early seventh centuries BCE ended Phrygian independence. Herodotus, writing much later, reported that Gordium was sacked and burnt, and legend says the last Midas took his own life; excavations confirm a violent destruction of the city. Smaller Phrygian kingdoms lived on, and the art and culture kept flourishing. Phrygia was then absorbed by Lydia, which drove out the Cimmerians in the 620s, while its eastern part went to the Medes in 585 BCE. When Cyrus the Great defeated Croesus of Lydia in 546 BCE, Phrygia entered the Achaemenid Empire, which split it into two provinces, Hellespontine Phrygia and Greater Phrygia.

The Phrygians worshipped a Mother Goddess called Matar, or Matar Kubileya, the source of the Greek and Latin name Cybele, as well as a horseman sky god, Sabazios. Greek music owed them the Phrygian mode, regarded as warlike, and the double-piped aulos. Greek myth gave Phrygia the Gordian knot, King Midas's golden touch and the satyr Marsyas, while the Iliad makes the Phrygians allies of Troy. The soft cap that Greek art used to mark the Trojan Paris as foreign later became the liberty cap of the American and French revolutions.

Phrygian survives in fragmentary inscriptions. Once grouped with Armenian and Thracian, it is now usually regarded as closest to Greek, and some scholars propose a shared Graeco-Phrygian ancestor. After Alexander's conquests the region passed to his successors, then to the Attalids of Pergamon and finally the Roman Empire. The language is last mentioned in literature in the fifth century CE and had probably died out by the seventh.

Our maps draw a Phrygian territory, labelled Phrygians or Phrygia, in 1500, 1000 and 700 BCE. The outlines are approximate, and the 1500 BCE map comes well before the conventional date for the Phrygians' arrival in Anatolia. To the west and north-west lay the lands of the Thracians, from whose region Greek writers believed the Phrygians had come.