SECTION 7. ASIA MINOR
Into Asia Minor beyond Taurus we have no reason to suppose that an Assyrian monarch of the ninth century ever marched in person, though several raiding columns visited Khanigalbat and Tabal, and tributary acknowledgment of Assyrian dominance was made intermittently by the princes of both those countries in the latter half of Shalmaneser's reign. The farther and larger part of the western peninsula lay outside the Great King's reach, and we know as little of it in the year 800 as, perhaps, the Assyrians themselves knew. We do know, however, that it contained a strong principality centrally situated in the southern part of the basin of the Sangarius, which the Asiatic Greeks had begun to know as Phrygian. This inland power loomed very large in their world - so large, indeed, that it masked Assyria at this time, and passed in their eyes for the richest on earth. On the sole ground of its importance in early Greek legend, we are quite safe in dating not only its rise but its attainment of a dominant position to a period well before 800 B.C. But, in fact, there are other good grounds for believing that before the ninth century closed this principality dominated a much wider area than the later Phrygia, and that its western borders had been pushed outwards very nearly to the Ionian coast. In the Iliad, for example, the Phrygians are spoken of as immediate neighbours of the Trojans; and a considerable body of primitive Hellenic legend is based on the early presence of Phrygians not only in the Troad itself, but on the central west coast about the Bay of Smyrna and in the Caystrian plain, from which points of vantage they held direct relations with the immigrant Greeks themselves. It seems, therefore, certain that at some time before 800 B.C. nearly all the western half of the peninsula owed allegiance more or less complete to the power on the Sangarius, and that even the Heraclid kings of Lydia were not independent of it.
If Phrygia was powerful enough in the ninth century to hold the west Anatolian lands in fee, did it also dominate enough of the eastern peninsula to be ranked the imperial heir of the Cappadocian Hatti? The answer to this question (if any at all can be returned on very slight evidence) will depend on the view taken about the possible identity of the Phrygian power with that obscure but real power of the Mushki, of which we have already heard. The identity in question is so generally accepted nowadays that it has become a commonplace of historians to speak of the "Mushki-Phrygians." Very possibly they are right. But, by way of caution, it must be remarked that the identification depends ultimately on another, namely, that of Mita, King of the Mushki, against whom Ashurbanipal would fight more than a century later, with Midas, last King of Phrygia, who is mentioned by Herodotus and celebrated in Greek myth. To assume this identity is very attractive. Mita of Mushki and Midas of Phrygia coincide well enough in date; both ruled in Asia Minor; both were apparently leading powers there; both fought with the Gimirrai or Cimmerians. But there are also certain difficulties of which too little account has perhaps been taken. While Mita seems to have been a common name in Asia as far inland as Mesopotamia at a much earlier period than this, the name Midas, on the other hand, came much later into Phrygia from the west, if there is anything in the Greek tradition that the Phryges or Briges had immigrated from south-east Europe. And supported as this tradition is not only by the occurrence of similar names and similar folk-tales in Macedonia and in Phrygia, but also by the western appearance of the later Phrygian art and script, we can hardly refuse it credit. Accordingly, if we find the origin of the Phrygians in the Macedonian Briges, we must allow that Midas, as a Phrygian name, came from Europe very much later than the first appearance of kings called Mita in Asia, and we are compelled to doubt whether the latter name is necessarily the same as Midas. When allusions to the Mushki in Assyrian records give any indication of their local habitat, it lies in the east, not the west, of the central Anatolian plain - nearly, in fact, where the Moschi lived in later historical times. The following points, therefore, must be left open at present: (1) whether the Mushki ever settled in Phrygia at all; (2) whether, if they did, the Phrygian kings who bore the names Gordius and Midas can ever have been Mushkite or have commanded Mushkite allegiance; (3) whether the kings called Mita in records of Sargon and Ashurbanipal were not lords rather of the eastern Mushki than of Phrygia. It cannot be assumed, on present evidence at any rate (though it is not improbable), that Phrygian kings ruled the Mushki of Cappadocia, and in virtue of that rule had an empire almost commensurate with the lost sway of the Hatti.
Nevertheless theirs was a strong power, the strongest in Anatolia, and the fame of its wealth and its walled towns dazzled and awed the Greek communities, which were thickly planted by now on the western and south-western coasts. Some of these had passed through the trials of infancy and were grown to civic estate, having established wide trade relations both by land and sea. In the coming century Cyme of Aeolis would give a wife to a Phrygian king. Ephesus seems to have become already an important social as well as religious centre. The objects of art found in 1905 on the floor of the earliest temple of Artemis in the plain (there was an earlier one in the hills) must be dated - some of them - not later than 700, and their design and workmanship bear witness to flourishing arts and crafts long established in the locality. Miletus, too, was certainly an adult centre of Hellenism and about to become a mother of new cities, if she had not already become so. But, so early as this year 800, we know little about the Asiatic Greek cities beyond the fact of their existence; and it will be wiser to let them grow for another two centuries and to speak of them more at length when they have become a potent factor in West Asian society. When we ring up the curtain again after two hundred years, it will be found that the light shed on the eastern scene has brightened; for not only will contemporary records have increased in volume and clarity, but we shall be able to use the lamp of literary history fed by traditions, which had not had to survive the lapse of more than a few generations.