Phrygians

Phrygian religion is dominated by one figure. Matar, mother, appears in the earliest Phrygian inscriptions with an epithet understood as of the mountain, and she is carved into rock facades across the Phrygian highlands: a standing female figure in a doorway cut into a cliff, framed by geometric patterning, facing open country rather than a settlement. Lynn Roller's study argues that this Anatolian mother is a goddess of the wild and of the boundary between the settled and the unsettled, and that the fertility reading imposed on her later distorts what the Phrygian evidence shows.

The Greeks received her as Meter or Cybele and gave her ecstatic rites, drums, cymbals and eunuch priests. Whether the self castration of those priests is Phrygian or a Greek elaboration of Phrygian material is disputed, since it appears in Greek and Roman sources and not in Phrygian ones.

Attis, the youth who is the goddess's companion and who dies and is mourned, appears late in the record and is not securely Phrygian in origin. Maarten Vermaseren's study collects the material for both figures. Their combined worship became a state cult at Rome, where the black stone of the goddess was brought from Pessinus in 204 BCE during the war with Hannibal.

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.