Phrygia rose in central Anatolia after the collapse of the Hittite empire, with its centre at Gordion on the Sangarius river. Its best known king is Midas, an actual historical figure attested in Assyrian records in the later eighth century BCE, whose name afterwards attracted the Greek stories about gold and about ass's ears.
The Phrygian language is Indo-European and is written in an alphabet closely related to Greek, so it can be read aloud. The inscriptions are short and the language is only partly understood. The largest of the rock monuments, usually called the Midas Monument, carries a Phrygian inscription and has no burial behind it, which is one reason the facades are read as cult sites rather than as tombs.
Phrygian power ended with invasion from the east, traditionally by the Cimmerians in the early seventh century BCE, and the region passed to Lydia, then Persia, then the successors of Alexander, and finally Rome. The goddess outlasted every one of those states. The soft peaked cap that Greek artists drew on Phrygians became, by a long route through Roman caps of manumission and eighteenth century revolutionary imagery, the liberty cap of the French and American revolutions, which is the most unexpected survival of anything in this article.