IV. PHRYGIANS

Turning back to central and western Anatolia, the rising star of Phrygia flared brightly from the early 8C BC until the westward advance of the Cimmerians extinguished its dominance abruptly in 676 BC. In its prime, this powerful state extended from its capital at Gordion (Yassihoyuk—near Polatli) over the high plateau of central Anatolia beyond the Kizilirmak (Halys River) and into the Konya region as far as Tuz Golu (Salt Lake).

Yet the origins of the Phrygian people are obscure, as are also the questions of when and to which parts of Anatolia they originally migrated. It is generally agreed that the Phrygians were among those migrating peoples known loosely as the 'Peoples of the Sea' who were responsible for the final destruction of a Hittite Empire already weakened by Kashka attacks fn» the north. And certainly major Phrygian settlements include, besides the ones of Midas and Gor dion, a number of prominent Hittite centers such as Bogazkoy, Pazarli, Alisar, Alacahoyuk and Kultepe. Moreover, in the exca vations at Bogazkoy and Alisar, for example, layers of ash demon strate that the destruction wreaked by the invading peoples was complete, with Phrygian buildings—quite distinct in design and character—lying on top of or in close proximity to earlier Hittite buildings. The most plausible explanation, based on the writings of Greek and Lydian historians and archaeological evidence—par ticularly from Troy—establishes the Phrygians as migrants from the Danube (Tuna), first to Thrace (Trakya) where they seem to have settled for some time, thence migrating during the later 13C BC via the Canakkale Bogazi (Canakkale Straits; Hellespont) into north western Anatolia and settling in and around Troy; here they were soon 'Anatolized', adopting, for instance, local styles of ceramic design. From the 12C BC they seem to have spread rapidly over the whole of western Anatolia, pushing the older inhabitants of the area—chiefly Luwians—well beyond the Toros Daglari (Taurus Mountains). Moreover, the little that can be determined of the Phrygian language indicates a tongue of the Indo-European type with vocabulary deriving from Slavic, Aramaic and Hittite.

Part of the problem related to tracing Phrygian origins lies in the varied names applied to tribes or peoples who may have been Phrygians or who may have been related to them. Such is that of the Mushki, recurring in Assyrian annals, often in connection with the Tabal, and long assumed to have been Phrygians. It is most probable, although not wholly certain, that the Phrygian kingdom which emerged as a major power in the later 8C BC comprised a confederation of peoples, including Mushkis and Tabals, under the rule of King Midas (Mita in Assyrian sources), united against the assertive policies of Assyria in much the same way as the early Urartian confederation in 9C eastern Anatolia. And, from the beginning of the 7C, with a balance of power established in Anatolia and to the east, Phrygian attention was directed westward, to the Aegean and Greece.

Among the kings of Phrygia we know almost nothing of Gordios, the first king of this western Anatolian kingdom and the founder of its capital, Gordion, but more about his son and successor, Midas. Herodotus claims the latter as being of Macedonian origin, yet he was undoubtedly Anatolian, as was also his name. Mita, which appears in this form not only in Assyrian sources but also in Hittite documents of c 1400 BC b eastern Anatolia and in inscriptions written in Hittite hieroglyphs—and is thus not an 8C importation.

Midas (725-696? BC), whose name is synonymous with riches, was the wealthy ruler of a prosperous kingdom, strategically situated on the crossroads of the ancient Anatolian trade routes from Meso potamia, northern Syria and eastern Anatolia to the Aegean coast. In a period when the export of goods from north-western Iran, eastern and central Anatolia and Caucasia by sea from northern Syrian ports to the west had become virtually impossible, the rise in importance of the land routes must have been a great advantage to Phrygia. In addition, the kingdom possessed its own abundance of natural resources, notably its animal husbandry, producing excellent wool land, in particular, that of its Angora—or Ankara—goats); its thick forests yielding timber for housing, furniture and tombs; and its silver, lead and hematite deposits and seams of crystal, onyx and mica. Trade in its own products and its central position in transit trade clearly accounted in large measure for Phrygian economic and political prominence.

Midas' interest in Aegean affairs and good relations with the western Anatolian Greek city-states is indicated by his being the first Anatolian to offer gifts to Greek oracles, impressing the historian Herodotus with his wealth (according to Herodotus' own account) when he dedicated his throne at the Delphic shrine of Apollo, and by his marriage to the daughter of Agamemnon, king of Kyme (Cyme; near Izmir) over, Midas' name has been perpetuated in Greek epics; for example the stories of how he became king and how his Gordion knot was untied (or rather cut through) by Alexander of Macedocon, and how his ears were transformed into those of a donkey and the rumor of this spread by the whispering grass.

Yet on the actual working of the Phrygian state, there is very little solid documentation apart from archaeological evidence. The earliest depictions of Phrygians appear in the Assyrian reliefs of Tiglatpileser III in his palace at Nimrud and the polychrome frescoes of Tel Ahmar palace in northern Syria—men with curled hair and short beards wearing round earrings, long robes decorated with tasseled bands and high boots. On baked-clay tablets in Phrygian Pazarli and or wooden painted panels in Tatarh barrow near Afyonkarahisar art found illustrations of Phrygian foot-soldiers with their short tunics and knee-length socks, helmets protecting their cheeks and with horse-hair crests, and carrying short spears and shields. Women and cavalry are also depicted in relief and frescoes.

Phrygian architecture was well developed, with the megaron style of a room with a hearth entered through a vestibule—an architectural feature familiar in western Anatolia since the Chalcolithic Age. Houses were built of timber, with thatched roofs of mud and rushes, although examples of stone houses exist in late 8C to mid-6C Gordion and Pazarli. (Interestingly, in both places roof tiles have been found depicting the Tree of Life flanked by goats.) The general style of building the walls around a supporting framework of timber uprights and horizontal beams was both sturdy and aesthetically pleasing. As for the outer appearance of Phrygian houses, evidence from excavation is complemented by numerous sacred monuments carved in rocks, which display the same gabled roofs as the wooden-framed houses, in addition to the common flat-roofed houses of much of Anatolia. A most interesting innovation was that of decorating the floors of houses with pebble mosaics, for example, in a geometrical pattern of red or dark blue on a white background, as seen in Troy and Gordion, or with painted baked-clay nail mosaics, for example, in a geometrical pattern in black and cream in Pazarli. Geometrical patterns particularly popular among Phrygians included the swas tika, the winding meander motif and parallelograms.

From the mid 6C BC, Phrygian houses were ornamented exter nally, in addition to carved wooden doors, by the application to walls of polychrome baked-clay decorative panels with animal or human figures and geometrical designs. This geometrical ornamentation seems to have been specific to Iron Age Phrygia, spreading from Akalan (near Samsun on the Black Sea—Karadeniz—coast) down to Duver (near Burdur) and becoming most prevalent during the period of Lydian domination of Phrygia about the mid 6C, with similar designs found in Sardis, the Lydian capital.

In sum, Phrygian architecture occupied an important place in western Anatolian architectural development, with its blend of Anatolian (megaron plan) and Thracian/Balkan (timbered housing with pitched roofs) elements.

Of the ceramic arts, not a great deal is known, beyond the division of what might loosely be called the central Anatolian Iron Age ceramics into two broad divisions: the eastern and south-eastern, approximating roughly to the old Hittite area, with its emphasis on patterns of stylized stag motifs and geometrical concentric circles, and the western, with its grey or red monochrome—a developed version of Thracian coarse and primitive ceramics found at Troy after its invasion and destruction in c 1200 BC.

In metallurgy, however, the Phrygians excelled, with their bronze vessels, fibulae (clasps) and ladles renowned as far away as Assyria in the east and Greece in the west, and their phyales—used for pouring libations to the mother-goddess, Kubile, and identical with the modern Turkish hamam tasi, used when bathing—exported along the Aegean coast and to Greece. Some of the Urartian-style bronze cauldrons on tripod bases found in Greece may well have been made in Phrygia. But this thriving export of bronze and other metal artifacts from Phrygia to Greece, attested by finds in Delphi, Olympia, Perachora, Argos, Heraion, Ithaca, Sparta, Mitylene (Midilli; Lesbos), Rhodes and Ephesus, was not matched by the import of Greek products. Hence, the contribution of Anatolian Phrygia to Greek art and craft seems to have been considerable.

In weaving, Phrygia was also renowned; with the best example of decorated Phrygian material being the dress of the Tabal king Urpalla (Warpalawa) on the Ivriz rock monument relief at Eregli. Embroidery in gold thread was a particular specialty, from which derives the Latin pbyrgio, 'an embroiderer', while the famous Phrygian kilims known as tapates survive in the French tapis (carpet).

The carpentry of this timber-producing country was well made and artistic. Phrygian carpenters made furniture without the use of nails, and often contrived contrasting colors through the use of different woods. In addition to painted decoration, ivory inlay was a popular craft and evidently developed quite independently of the contempor ary Assyrian and northern Syrian workshops.

All in all, Phrygian art, from their mosaics to their stone-and woodcarving, from their bronze-ware and geometrically decorated ceramics to their textile- and kilim-weaving, reveals a distinctive creativity and originality. That their textile techniques and designs and their woodcarving directly affected early Greek art is attested by 7C BC eastern Greek painted vases. Moreover, Greek authors attributed such musical instruments as the cymbal, flute, triangle and syrinx (Pan-pipes) to Phrygians. Clearly, such cultural influence must have derived from some historical factors. Notable among these would be that as the Greeks established, for economic reasons, trading colonies in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, they met societies with a rich cultural heritage and an advanced artistic tradition, which inspired the further development of their own artistic style. Thus the hitherto principally abstract geometric forms of the Greek city-states were intermixed with elements from Urartian and Phrygian bronze-work, human figures and stylized animal motifs such as sphinxes and griffons. The role of Phrygia as a channel transmitting Near Eastern and Anatolian culture westward into Greece and beyond may also be perceived in its writing. The Phrygians used an alphabet, similar to that of the Greeks, which was fairly easily read if not easily understood. This alphabet origin ated in Phoenicia, but, eventually it was disseminated across the Mediterranean—a dissemination in which the Phrygians, as evident from the inscriptions in tombs excavated in Gordion, played a vital role.

Similarly, the Phrygian (and deeply Anatolian) cult of the mother-goddess was transmitted into Greek religious belief. For this, the oldest and the most predominant Phrygian cult, centered on the worship of a mother-goddess, Kubile, or Matar Kubile, known to the Greeks as Kybele (or Cybele) and worshipped as Kubaba by the Luwians and as Kybele or Kybebe by the Lydians. Often identified with Agdistis by Phrygians, she is believed to have been transformed in some Anatolian cities into the Greek goddess Artemis, and had been worshipped under various names in Anatolia for 7000 years, since the neolithic cultures of Catalhoyuk and Hacilar.

This fertility cult was based at the holy city of Pessinus (Ballihisar) where an effigy of the goddess in black stone (probably a meteorite) was supposed to have fallen from the sky, and the cult was appar ently dependent upon the myth of Kubile and her beloved, the beautiful young Atys (Attis). A number of versions of this myth exist, most of them involving self-castration—either of Atys or of the hermaphrodite Agdistis (Kubile's rival where not identified with Kubile herself)—the loss of Atys through his untimely death and the apparent symbolism of man, who must fertilize and then perish, for the planting of the crops and nature's retreat during winter. Around the Pessinus shrine and its High Priest, known as Atys, there were held fairs and religious celebrations, most prominent being the orgiastic spring festivals at which young men would castrate them selves in an extreme of spiritual fervor, imitating the self-castration of Kubile's consort, Atys; they were then accepted as subordinate priests (galli; the secondary meaning of gallus is eunuch). This annual ritual of passionate lamentation, self-mutilation and castra tion was believed to resuscitate Atys and thus revive the flagging forces of nature. Such was the importance of this cult, according to which Phrygians maintained that the entire state was the property of Kubile of Pessinus, that even after the destruction of the kingdom Phrygian worshippers apparently maintained its practice and spread it from town to town across a wide swathe of central and western Anatolia during the Lydian era; passing thence to Rome in 204 BC, this cult of the mother-goddess was to continue in importance. Indeed, the associations with the orgiastic cult of the Bacchae, women who followed Bacchus (deriving from the Lydian God of Wine, Baki, also known as Dionysus), as well as with the all-female Amazons, are striking.

Throughout the mountainous areas of Phrygia were to be found stone shrines to Kubile, represented in her shrine of Aslankaya, for example, standing between two lions, especially near mountain springs, ravines and precipices—places the goddess was believed to inhabit- It is significant that the Homeric epithets for Artemis included Mistress of Beasts and Lady of the Wilds—epithets that cannot be wholly coincidental in their aptness- for Kubile. Prominent among these shrines is the Midas Mezari (Midas Tomb), not in fact a tomb but a place of prayer, bearing the name of Midas (Midai) in its Phrygian cuneiform inscription. Other shrines are carved into the rock face in the form of stone stairs leading to a ledge or seat, either symbolizing the goddess throne or used as a sacrificial platform.

Important Phrygian citizens were customarily buried in rock tombs or in barrows. The rock tombs having been robbed over the cen turies, most available information derives from the less vulnerable barrows, the majority of which are located just outside Gordion, the capital. Of these hundred or so, by far the largest—in a system where the height of the mound directly reflected the importance of the deceased—is the Buyuk Tumulus (Great Tumulus), believed to be of either Gordios or, more probably, Midas. Few of the Phrygian barrows have yet been excavated, but these conform to a pattern in that the body is laid out (uncremated until the 7C BC, from which time the body was cremated beforehand) on a wooden couch inside a finely constructed wooden room with a variety of artifacts as gifts on tables and hanging on the walls. The tomb is covered with earth or gravel to form a large mound. The size and careful construction of the Buyuk Tumulus is in striking contrast with the total lack of gold and silver artifacts inside. This may indicate that it was not customary among Phrygians to offer such gifts for tombs. On the other hand it fits in with the tradition that Midas committed suicide by drinking bulls' blood after his humiliating defeat by the Cimmerians in c 696 BC, who then sacked and burned the city of Gordion and devastated the Phrygian state. Possibly Midas died after an early defeat and was interred as honorably as his subjects could manage after the sacking of the city, with the main invasion and evacuation of the city following later. In any event, the Phrygian state did not completely cease to exist after the death of Midas, but never again possessed any political importance.