When we last surveyed Asia Minor as a whole it was in large part under
the dominance of a central power in Phrygia. This power is now no more,
and its place has been taken by another, which rests on a point nearer
to the western coast. It is worth notice, in passing, how Anatolian
dominion has moved stage by stage from east to west--from the Halys
basin in northern Cappadocia, where its holders had been, broadly
speaking, in the same cultural group as the Mesopotamian East, to the
middle basin of the Sangarius, where western influences greatly modified
the native culture (if we may judge by remains of art and script). Now
at last it has come to the Hermus valley, up which blows the breath of
the Aegean Sea. Whatever the East might recover in the future, the
Anatolian peninsula was leaning more and more on the West, and the
dominion of it was coming to depend on contact with the vital influence
of Hellenism, rather than on connection with the heart of west Asia.
A king Mita of the Mushki first appears in the annals of the New
Assyrian Kingdom as opposing Sargon, when the latter, early in his
reign, tried to push his sphere of influence, if not his territorial
empire, beyond the Taurus to include the principalities of Kue and
Tabal; and the same Mita appears to have been allied with Carchemish in
the revolt which ended with its siege and final capture in 717 B.C. As
has been said in the last chapter, it is usual to identify this king
with one of those "Phrygians" known to the Greeks as Midas--preferably
with the son of the first Gordius, whose wealth and power have been
immortalized in mythology. If this identification is correct, we have to
picture Phrygia at the close of the eighth century as dominating almost
all Asia Minor, whether by direct or by indirect rule; as prepared to
measure her forces (though without ultimate success) against the
strongest power in Asia; and as claiming interests even outside the
peninsula. Pisiris, king of Carchemish, appealed to Mita as his ally,
either because the Mushki of Asia Minor sat in the seat of his own
forbears, the Hatti of Cappadocia, or because he was himself of Mushki
kin. There can be no doubt that the king thus invoked was king of
Cappadocia. Whether he was king also of Phrygia, i.e. really the same as
Midas son of Gordius, is, as has been said already, less certain. Mita's
relations with Kue, Tabal and Carchemish do not, in themselves, argue
that his seat of power was anywhere else than in the east of Asia Minor,
where Moschi did actually survive till much later times: but, on the
other hand, the occurrence of inscriptions in the distinctive script of
Phrygia at Eyuk, east of the Halys, and at Tyana, south-east of the
central Anatolian desert, argue that at some time the filaments of
Phrygian power did stretch into Cappadocia and towards the land of the
later Moschi.
It must also be admitted that the splendour of the surviving rock
monuments near the Phrygian capital is consistent with its having been
the centre of a very considerable empire, and hardly consistent with its
having been anything less. The greatest of these, the tomb of a king
Midas (son not of Gordius but of Atys), has for façade a cliff about a
hundred feet high, cut back to a smooth face on which an elaborate
geometric pattern has been left in relief. At the foot is a false door,
while above the immense stone curtain the rock has been carved into a
triangular pediment worthy of a Greek temple and engraved with a long
inscription in a variety of the earliest Greek alphabet. There are many
other rock-tombs of smaller size but similar plan and decoration in the
district round the central site, and others which show reliefs of human
figures and of lions, the latter of immense proportions on two famous
façades. When these were carved, the Assyrian art of the New Kingdom was
evidently known in Phrygia (probably in the early seventh century), and
it is difficult to believe that those who made such great things under
Assyrian influence can have passed wholly unmentioned by contemporary
Assyrian records. Therefore, after all, we shall, perhaps, have to admit
that they were those same Mushki who followed leaders of the name Mita
to do battle with the Great Kings of Nineveh from Sargon to
Ashurbanipal.
There is no doubt how the Phrygian kingdom came by its end. Assyrian
records attest that the Gimirrai or Cimmerians, an Indo-European
Scythian folk, which has left its name to Crim Tartary, and the present
Crimea, swept southward and westward about the middle of the seventh
century, and Greek records tell how they took and sacked the capital of
Phrygia and put to death or forced to suicide the last King Midas.