Phrygia

The Assyrian name for the Phrygians, Mušku, the people the cuneiform records track from the twelfth-century campaigns of Tiglath-pileser I to the eighth-century dealings of Sargon II. Sargon’s annals name their king Mita šar Mušku, “Mita king of Mušku,” who intrigued against Assyria in Cilicia and ultimately sent tribute: this Mita is the historical original of the Greek Midas, fixing one of the rare firm synchronisms between the Anatolian and Mesopotamian records.

Mušku is the eastern face of Phrygia, the kingdom seen from Assyria rather than from the Aegean, and it puts the legendary Midas of Greek fable into the hard chronology of the royal annals. The same name reaches the Hebrew Bible as Mešek; the Assyrian Mušku, the Greek Phrygía, and the Hebrew Mešek are three windows on one Anatolian power, and only the cuneiform one shows its king negotiating, campaigning, and paying tribute as a real contemporary state.

The Greek name of the central Anatolian kingdom, Phrygía, its people the Phrýges. Homer already knows them as a people of the Sangarios valley and allies of Troy, and Herodotus reports a tradition that they had crossed into Anatolia from Europe, where they had been called Bryges. To the Greeks Phrygia was the land of King Midas, of the golden touch and the ass’s ears, and of the orgiastic cult of the Mother of the Gods, Cybele.

Phrygía is the western, Aegean name of the kingdom, and the one the modern world inherited. It stands opposite the eastern Mušku of the Assyrian records, the two naming traditions converging on the historical Midas, Mita of Mušku in the cuneiform annals and Midas of Phrygia in the Greek. The kingdom that the Greeks remembered through fable, the Assyrians had known as a frontier power and a tributary.

The Hebrew name Mešek, a son of Japheth in the table of nations (Genesis 10) and, in the prophets, a far-northern people: Ezekiel pairs Mešek with Tuḇal among the trading nations and the armies of Gog, and the Psalmist names it as a remote and barbarous land. It is widely identified with the Assyrian Mušku, the Phrygians, the same pairing of Mušku and Tabal that the cuneiform records make appearing in Hebrew as Mešek and Tuḇal.

The Hebrew form preserves the Anatolian name at one more remove, in the schematic geography of the table of nations, where Mešek stands for the dim northern edge of the known world. That the Bible keeps the Mušku-Tabal pairing intact is the strongest argument for the identification: the same two Anatolian peoples travel together from the Assyrian annals into Hebrew prophecy. The kingdom of Midas thus survives in three traditions at once, as a Greek legend, an Assyrian tributary, and a Hebrew name for the ends of the earth.

The Latin name of the region, Phrygia, taken from the Greek and carrying a special charge in Roman culture: because Rome traced its descent from Trojan Aeneas, and the Greeks counted the Trojans among the Phrygians, “Phrygian” became a half-affectionate, half-sneering term for the Romans’ own legendary forebears and for the eastern cults, Cybele above all, that Rome imported from the region.

The Latin preserves the Greek form unchanged and passes it to the modern languages. By the Roman period Phrygia was no longer a kingdom but a district of the province of Asia, its independent history long over; the name survived as a geographical and cultural label, the homeland of the Great Mother and of the soft “Phrygian mode” of music. The realm the Assyrians had fought as Mušku ended as a Roman byword for the orient.