Phrygian

Phrygian religion, so far as it can be recovered, is dominated by one figure. Matar, the Mother, appears in the rock-cut monuments of the Phrygian highlands standing in a niche, flanked by lions, and her name in inscriptions carries epithets rather than a genealogy. There is no assembly around her, no consort of equal standing in the early material, and no succession narrative.

That singularity may be genuine or it may be an artefact of what survives, and it is worth holding both possibilities open. A few other divine names appear in the Phrygian inscriptions, and Sabazios, a god later well known in the Greek and Roman world, is associated with the region.

What the tradition is chiefly known for is what happened to it elsewhere. The Mother travelled, becoming Kybele to the Greeks and the Magna Mater at Rome, where her cult was formally imported during the war with Hannibal and given a temple on the Palatine. With her travelled the story of Attis, her consort, and the self-castration of her priests, which fascinated and unsettled Roman writers and which is reported almost entirely by them rather than by Phrygians.

Of Phrygian cosmogony nothing survives. The atlas records that as unknown rather than debated, because there is no position for anyone to hold, and states in the Open Questions panel what kind of find would change it.

The Phrygian evidence divides into two bodies that answer different questions, and neither answers the ones a reader most wants asked.

The first is Phrygian itself. Old Phrygian inscriptions, written in an alphabet related to the Greek, are short, and they are mostly dedications and funerary formulae. New Phrygian, from the Roman period, consists largely of curse formulae protecting tombs. The language is Indo-European and is understood in outline, but the corpus is too small and too formulaic to yield narrative, and readings of individual words remain contested.

The second is Greek and Roman testimony, which is abundant and is about the exported cult rather than the Phrygian one. Writers describe the Magna Mater at Rome, her festival, her eunuch priests and the myth of Attis, and they do so from within a Mediterranean religious world in which the goddess had already been reinterpreted for several centuries. Using that material to reconstruct what was believed in Phrygia is an inference that has to be made carefully and is often not.

The monuments themselves are the third source and the most directly Phrygian: facades carved into rock in the highlands, with geometric patterning and niches holding the goddess, some of them very large. They establish where she was worshipped, at what scale and in what visual language. They do not speak.