In antiquity, Phrygia was a kingdom in the west central part of the Anatolian highlands, part of modern Turkey, from ca. 1200 BC to 700 BC. It had a rich mythological heritage, as the homeland of the Great Mother Cybele, and an influential history, before it was overwhelmed by Cimmerian invaders, then briefly conquered by its neighbor Lydia, before it passed successively into the Persian Empire of Cyrus, the empire of Alexander the Great and his successors, was taken by the king of Pergamon, and eventually became part of the Roman Empire. The Phrygian language survived until ca. the 6th century AD.
Later, Phrygia was conceived as lying west of the Halys River and east of Mysia and Lydia.
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 called the Mountain Mother. It appears, however, that her original seat of power was in Colchis to the north, which was the home of the Medea (the Eponymous Mother of the Medes). Her temples and shrines were always in mountains or caves and her guardians were lions (or leopards) as Her priestesses had a close affinity with nature.
The Phrygians also venerated Sabazios, the sky and father god depicted on horseback. Though the Greeks associated Sabazios with Zeus, representations of him, even into Roman times, show him as a horseman god. His early conflict 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 Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Phrygia is mentioned in the book of Acts in the Bible as one of the places visited by Paul and Silas on Paul's second missionary journey (Acts16:6).
Phrygia developed an advanced Bronze Age culture. The earliest traditions of Greek music, derived from Phrygia and transmitted through the Greek colonies in Asia Minor, included the Phrygian mode, considered the warlike mode in ancient Greek music. And 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, or double Flute. 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 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. Although the Phrygians adopted the Alphabet originated by the Phoenicians, and several dozen inscriptions in the Phrygian language have been found, they remain untranslated, and so much of what is thought to be known of Phrygia is second-hand information from Greek sources.
Josephus claimed the Phrygians were founded by the biblical figure Togarmah grandson of Japheth and son of Gomer: "and Thrugramma the Thrugrammeans, who, as the Greeks resolved, were named Phrygians". By this historical account, the Phrygians would be an offshoot of the Galacians.
According to Greek mythographers Citation needed, the first Phrygian Midas had been king of the Moschi (Mushki), also known as Bryges (Brigi) in the western part of archaic Thrace, which later Greeks knew as Macedonia. This Midas, who became surrounded in myth and legend, migrated with his people through Thrace, eventually reaching Asia Minor, probably in the period of unrest and migrations, about 1200 BC, that the Egyptians associated with the "Sea Peoples". Purported epigraphic evidence of the Bryges in what later became Macedonia has recently (21st C) been discovered , but is still being analysed.
In the mythic age before the Trojan War, during a time of 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' Persian "Royal Road" from Pessinus to Ancyra, and not far from the River Sangarius.
Myths surrounding the first king Midas connect him with Silenus and other satyrs and with Dionysus, who granted him the famous "golden touch." In another episode he judged a musical contest between Apollo, playing the Lyre, and Pan, playing the rustic Pan pipes. Midas judged in favor of Pan, and Apollo awarded him the ears of an Ass.
The mythic Midas of Thrace, accompanied by a band of his people, travelled 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.
Homer recounts briefly that the Trojan king Priam had in his youth come to aid the Phrygians when the Amazons attacked them. (Iliad 3.189).
The Phrygian Sibyl was the priestess presiding over the Apollonian oracle at Phrygia.
According to Herodotus (Histories 2.9), 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.
Firmer history begins with the Phrygian Golden Age under the King Midas who reigned c. 725 - 696 BC. An Assyrian inscription records tribute sent by Midas, 709 BC.
A series of digs have opened Gordium as one of Turkey's most revealing archeological sites. A tomb of the Midas period, popularly identified as the "Tomb of Midas" revealed a wooden structure deeply buried under a vast tumulus, containing grave goods, coffin, furniture, food offerings, (Archaeological Museum, Ankara). The Gordium site contains a considerable later building program, perhaps by Alyattes, the Lydian king, in the 6th century BC.
Cimmerian invasions continued intermittently throughout a long interregnum, until the Lydians repulsed the Cimmerians in the 620s, and Phrygia was subsumed into a short-lived Lydian empire.
According to Herodotus, the Armenians moving to the area of Lake Van in about the 7th century BC were colonists of the Phrygians.
Under Persian rule, the Phrygians seem to have lost their intellectual acuity and independence. Phrygians became stereotyped among later Greeks and the Romans as passive and dull.
Gauls overran the eastern part of Phrygia which became part of Galatia. The former capital of Gordium was captured and destroyed by the Gauls soon afterwards and disappeared from history. In imperial times only a small village existed on the site. and in 188 BC the remnant of Phrygia came under control of Pergamon. In 133 BC, western Phrygia passed to Rome.