Phrygia

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The Sangarius runs slow and brown through the high plateau of west-central Anatolia, and where it meets the lesser Porsuk a mound rises out of the plain that the Greeks would call Gordion. From this confluence a kingdom grew that held the inland routes between the Aegean coast and the empires of the east: the road that carried tin and silver, embassies and armies, between the emerging powers of Lydia on the western sea and Assyria beyond the Taurus. The land was Phrygia, and for the better part of three centuries — roughly the twelfth through the seventh before the common era, with its height in the eighth — it was the dominant power of the Anatolian interior. What it left behind is double. There is the documentary kingdom of Gordion and its kings, recovered spade by spade from the citadel mound and the great burial tumuli around it. And there is the thing Phrygia gave the wider world and never took back: the cult of the mountain mother, the goddess the Phrygians called Matar, whom Greece received as Cybele and Rome enthroned as the Magna Mater, the Great Mother of the Gods.

The plateau kingdom

The Phrygians enter the record after a collapse. The Hittite empire that had ruled central Anatolia fell apart around 1200 BCE in the wider unraveling of the Late Bronze Age, and into the vacuum on the Sangarius plain came the people who would build Gordion into a capital. Their own beginnings are contested. Herodotus records a tradition that they came from the southern Balkans — that they had been called the Bryges or Briges, neighbors of the Macedonians, and on crossing into Asia became the Phryges. The migration, on that account, belongs to the centuries of the Bronze Age collapse, a Balkan people pressing east into the ruined Hittite world. Many Anatolian archaeologists now hold the migration story lightly or set it aside: the material record at Gordion shows more continuity than a sudden European arrival would predict, and the case for a Balkan crossing rests largely on the literary sources rather than on the dirt. From the middle of the eighth century the Phrygians are, almost certainly, the people the Assyrians called the Mushki — the name under which their king first steps out of legend and into a dated archive.

By that eighth century Gordion was a true capital, a fortified citadel of megaron halls — long rectangular rooms with central hearths, their floors sometimes laid in pebble mosaic, among the oldest such mosaics known. The kingdom commanded the central plateau and reached toward the Halys bend and the upper reaches of the western river valleys. Its neighbors were the Iron Age powers of the age: the Neo-Hittite states of the southeast, the Assyrian empire pressing from beyond the mountains, and to the northeast the kingdom of Urartu around Lake Van, whose god Haldi and whose fortress-building rivaled Phrygia’s own. Westward, the kingdom of Lydia would rise at Sardis to inherit the Anatolian interior when Phrygia’s power broke.

Gordias, Midas, and the historical king

The Phrygian kingship comes down in legend as a dynasty alternating two names, Gordias and Midas, father and son and father again. The capital itself was held to take its name from Gordias, a farmer raised to the throne by an oracle, whose ox-cart was dedicated in the citadel with its yoke bound by an intricate knot; whoever could loose the Gordian knot, the oracle promised, would rule Asia. These are the materials of folktale, but they cluster around a real reign.

In the cuneiform records of Sargon II of Assyria, who ruled from about 722 to 705 BCE, a Phrygian king named Mita of the Mushki appears as a power on Assyria’s northwestern frontier — first an adversary stirring the buffer states of Cilicia and the Taurus against Assyria, then, by around 709 BCE, a king seeking accommodation and even alliance as a new danger gathered on the steppe. This Mita is the historical Midas. The chronicle of Eusebius, in Jerome’s Latin, places a King Midas of Phrygia across roughly the same span, dying near the end of the eighth century. The Greek and Phrygian and Assyrian threads converge on a single eighth-century ruler of real consequence, a king who corresponded with the greatest empire of his day and whose name the Greeks remembered for a thousand years.

His end belongs to the catastrophe that overtook the plateau. The Cimmerians, horse-nomads driven down out of the north, fell on Anatolia in successive waves; Strabo preserves the tradition that Midas, defeated and despairing, took his own life by drinking the blood of a bull, around 696 or 695 BCE. The same nomads are remembered as the burners of Gordion. Here legend and archaeology pull against each other in an instructive way: the great burned layer once read as the Cimmerian sack of the city — the so-called Destruction Level on the citadel mound — has been redated by radiocarbon to around 800 BCE, a full century before Midas, so that the fire that scholarship long hung on the Cimmerians turns out to predate the king it was meant to bury. The city the Cimmerians struck had already risen, larger, from an earlier ruin. The plateau did not so much end as pass: Phrygia survived as a cluster of lesser principalities until the Lydians under Gyges and his successors absorbed it in the seventh century, with Gordion itself falling under Lydian control around 600 BCE.

Of the burials clustered around the citadel, the greatest is the tumulus the excavators labeled MM and called the Midas Mound — an artificial hill nearly three hundred meters across and some fifty high, the largest of more than a hundred such mounds scattered over the plain. Inside, sealed under that weight of earth, stands a chamber of squared timber, the oldest standing wooden building known anywhere, holding the body of a king laid out among bronze cauldrons and inlaid wooden furniture. Tree-ring dating puts the cutting of its timbers around 740 BCE — too early for Midas himself, who was still treating with Assyria in 709, and so most likely the tomb of his father or predecessor, the Gordias of the alternating dynasty. The American excavations under Rodney Young of the University of Pennsylvania, beginning in 1950 and reaching the chamber through a long tunnel in 1957, made Gordion the type site of Phrygian civilization and the chamber its single most eloquent monument.

The legendary Midas

Around the historical king there gathered a second Midas, the figure of folktale the Greeks could not stop telling. To this Midas Dionysus granted a wish in thanks for the hospitable return of his lost companion Silenus, and the king asked that whatever he touched turn to gold — and learned the horror of the gift when his bread and wine and, in the cruelest tellings, his own daughter went rigid and golden in his hands, until the god let him wash the curse away in the river Pactolus, whose sands ran gold ever after and would one day enrich Lydia. To this Midas too belonged the ass’s ears: set as judge in a musical contest between Apollo and the rustic piper, he gave the prize to the pipes, and the offended god of the lyre lengthened his ears into a donkey’s, which the king hid under his Phrygian cap until a barber, unable to keep the secret, whispered it into a hole in the ground, and the reeds that grew there murmured it to the wind. These stories say nothing certain about the eighth century, but they preserve a Greek memory of Phrygia as a place of fabulous wealth, of music and ecstatic religion, of a wealth so total it became a kind of death. That memory was not baseless. Herodotus reports that Midas dedicated his royal throne at Delphi — that he was, with Gyges of Lydia, among the first foreign kings to send offerings to the Greek sanctuary, a real act of a real king standing behind the gold of the fable.

Matar, the mountain mother

The deepest thing Phrygia made was a goddess. In the rock of the highlands south and west of Gordion the Phrygians carved her likeness into the living cliff face: a tall, frontal figure standing in a deep doorway or niche, sometimes crowned, her hands at her breast or holding the attributes that would follow her for a thousand years. Old Phrygian inscriptions name her Matar — Mother — and give her the epithet Kubileya or Kubeleya, which carries the sense of “of the mountain.” She is the Mother of the Mountain, and the mountain is her body: she is worshipped not in a built temple but at the rock itself, at springs and outcrops and the carved façades that turn whole cliffs into shrines. The grandest of these, the so-called Midas Monument at the site the Turks call Midas City, is a sheer rock face carved as the gabled front of a building, its surface covered in the geometric patterning of Phrygian textile and woodwork, bearing an Old Phrygian inscription in which the word ΜΙΔΑΙ — “to Midas” — can be read, binding the goddess to the royal house. At Arslankaya, the Lion Rock, she stands in her doorway flanked by two rampant lions, the beasts that are hers wherever she goes.

Her worship was aniconic at its oldest core: at Pessinus, the great cult center in the river country, the goddess was present in a black stone, a baetyl held to have fallen from the sky. Around her gathered the elements that the wider world would always associate with her — the frame-drum and the cymbal, the wild music, the dance that tips into ecstasy, the attendant divinities the Greeks called Korybantes who clashed their arms about her. She was a goddess of the boundary between the settled land and the wild mountain, mistress of beasts and of the fertile earth, sovereign and terrible. To her belonged a youthful consort whose myth would become inseparable from hers in the later cult: Attis, the beautiful boy of Pessinus who in a frenzy unmanned himself beneath a pine and died, and whose self-mutilation the goddess’s eunuch priests would repeat in their own flesh. The Mother and the dying youth, the cliff and the pine, formed a single religious complex that the plateau exported intact.

The goddess goes west

When the Greeks of the Anatolian coast met Matar they recognized her as their own Rhea, the Titaness mother of the Olympian gods, and they took her name as Kybele, Cybele. By the sixth and fifth centuries her worship had crossed to mainland Greece, kept somewhat apart as a foreign and ecstatic rite even as her image — the enthroned goddess between her lions, the drum in her hand — became familiar in the Greek cities. Her great westward translation, though, was Roman, and it was an act of state.

In 204 BCE, in the long agony of the war against Hannibal, the Roman Senate turned to the prophetic books and found, in the verses of the Sibylline collection, the counsel that the foreign enemy could be driven from Italy only if the Idaean Mother of Pessinus were brought to Rome. An embassy went east, the black stone of the goddess was obtained — by tradition through Attalus of Pergamon, into whose orbit Pessinus then fell — and carried to Italy, where the Senate named Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica the most virtuous man in Rome and sent him to receive her at the harbor of Ostia. She was lodged on the Palatine; her temple there was dedicated in 191 BCE; and her games, the Megalesia, were kept in her honor each April. So the mountain mother of the Sangarius came to stand at the sacred heart of the Roman state. Yet the Romans served her at arm’s length: the self-castration of her Galli, the eunuch priests who entered her service in Attis’s image, was held incompatible with Roman manhood, and for generations citizens were barred from the priesthood and from full participation in her wilder rites. The Phrygian Mother was enthroned and quarantined at once.

She did not travel alone. The wider Phrygian and Thracian religious milieu sent westward other ecstatic gods, among them Sabazius, the Thraco-Phrygian deity the Greeks matched now to Dionysus, now to a sky-father Zeus Sabazios, served in night rites with the live serpent and known by the bronze votive hands raised in his name. The Mother’s cult, with the mourned and risen springtime of Attis at its center, took its place among the mystery religions of the Greco-Roman world — beside the rites of Eleusis with their Demeter and her descended daughter, and the soldiers’ mysteries of Mithras — as one of the great initiatory cults that promised the worshipper a thing undergone rather than merely believed.

The kingdom after the kingdom

As a political body Phrygia did not outlast the seventh century with its independence intact. Swallowed by Lydia, it passed with Lydia to Persia when Cyrus the Great overthrew Croesus around 547 BCE, and became a province of the Achaemenid empire, governed from Sardis and Dascylium and crossed by the Royal Road. In 333 BCE Alexander of Macedon, having wintered at Gordion, was shown the ancient ox-cart of Gordias with its impossible knot and the prophecy that its loosener would rule Asia; the story that he drew his sword and cut it has been a figure for decisive force ever since, and within a decade the prophecy had, after a fashion, come true. After Alexander the land passed through the Hellenistic successor kingdoms; in the third century BCE bands of migrating Celts, the Galatians, seized its northeastern districts and gave their name to the region of Galatia; and at last it was absorbed into the provincial system of the Roman empire, a quiet upland of farms and shrines in the province of Asia and its neighbors.

But the goddess kept the kingdom’s name alive in a way no satrapy could. Long after Gordion had shrunk to a village on its mound, the cliffs of the highlands still bore her doorways, and the priests of the Palatine still mourned the Phrygian boy and cut the Phrygian pine each March in the heart of Rome. When a Roman called upon the Great Mother, or a Greek upon Cybele, or a poet upon the goddess of Ida and her lions, the word reached back to a Phrygian cliff and an inscription that named her Matar of the mountain. The plateau had raised a king whom three empires’ records remember and a tomb that is the oldest wooden room on earth; but its longest reach was the figure carved standing in the rock above the Sangarius, the mother of the mountain whom half the ancient world would learn to worship under her traveling names.

Sources and scholarship

The reconstruction of Phrygia rests on two bodies of evidence held in tension: the excavated record of Gordion and the textual memory of the Greeks, Romans, and Assyrians. The American excavations begun by Rodney Young in 1950 are published in the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s Gordion Excavations Final Reports, including Young’s Three Great Early Tumuli (1981) on the royal burials; the redating of the citadel’s Destruction Level to around 800 BCE, which dislodged the long-standing Cimmerian chronology, was argued from radiocarbon by Keith DeVries, Peter Kuniholm, and their collaborators, and the dendrochronology of the great tumulus chamber is the work of the Cornell tree-ring laboratory. The Penn Museum’s account of the royal burial in Tumulus MM sets out the chamber and its dating. A clear synthesis of the kingdom’s political history is available in the World History Encyclopedia entry on Phrygia, and a concise survey of the people and their origins in the Livius article on the Phrygians.

For the religion, the indispensable modern work is Lynn E. Roller’s In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele (University of California Press, 1999), which reoriented the study of the goddess toward her Phrygian and Anatolian roots and the evidence of the rock monuments; Maarten Vermaseren’s Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult (Thames & Hudson, 1977) remains the standard survey of the cult’s archaeology and iconography, and his Corpus Cultus Cybelae Attidisque gathers the material record. The ancient testimonia are scattered: Herodotus on the Phrygians’ Balkan origin and on Midas’s offerings at Delphi (Histories 1.14, 7.73), Strabo on the cult of the Mother and on Midas’s death (Geography 1.3.21, 12.5–6), and the Assyrian royal inscriptions of Sargon II on Mita of the Mushki, edited in the modern corpora of Neo-Assyrian texts. The divergence between the literary migration of the Bryges and the archaeological continuity at Gordion remains a genuine and active debate among Anatolian specialists, conducted in the pages of Anatolian Studies and the Gordion final reports with the texts and the spade pulling in different directions on Phrygian origins.

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