When we last surveyed Asia Minor as a whole it was in large part under the dominance of a central power in Phrygia. This power is now no more, and its place has been taken by another, which rests on a point nearer to the western coast. It is worth notice, in passing, how Anatolian dominion has moved stage by stage from east to west--from the Halys basin in northern Cappadocia, where its holders had been, broadly speaking, in the same cultural group as the Mesopotamian East, to the middle basin of the Sangarius, where western influences greatly modified the native culture (if we may judge by remains of art and script). Now at last it has come to the Hermus valley, up which blows the breath of the Aegean Sea. Whatever the East might recover in the future, the Anatolian peninsula was leaning more and more on the West, and the dominion of it was coming to depend on contact with the vital influence of Hellenism, rather than on connection with the heart of west Asia.
A king Mita of the Mushki first appears in the annals of the New Assyrian Kingdom as opposing Sargon, when the latter, early in his reign, tried to push his sphere of influence, if not his territorial empire, beyond the Taurus to include the principalities of Kue and Tabal; and the same Mita appears to have been allied with Carchemish in the revolt which ended with its siege and final capture in 717 B.C. As has been said in the last chapter, it is usual to identify this king with one of those "Phrygians" known to the Greeks as Midas--preferably with the son of the first Gordius, whose wealth and power have been immortalized in mythology. If this identification is correct, we have to picture Phrygia at the close of the eighth century as dominating almost all Asia Minor, whether by direct or by indirect rule; as prepared to measure her forces (though without ultimate success) against the strongest power in Asia; and as claiming interests even outside the peninsula. Pisiris, king of Carchemish, appealed to Mita as his ally, either because the Mushki of Asia Minor sat in the seat of his own forbears, the Hatti of Cappadocia, or because he was himself of Mushki kin. There can be no doubt that the king thus invoked was king of Cappadocia. Whether he was king also of Phrygia, i.e. really the same as Midas son of Gordius, is, as has been said already, less certain. Mita's relations with Kue, Tabal and Carchemish do not, in themselves, argue that his seat of power was anywhere else than in the east of Asia Minor, where Moschi did actually survive till much later times: but, on the other hand, the occurrence of inscriptions in the distinctive script of Phrygia at Eyuk, east of the Halys, and at Tyana, south-east of the central Anatolian desert, argue that at some time the filaments of Phrygian power did stretch into Cappadocia and towards the land of the later Moschi.
It must also be admitted that the splendour of the surviving rock monuments near the Phrygian capital is consistent with its having been the centre of a very considerable empire, and hardly consistent with its having been anything less. The greatest of these, the tomb of a king Midas (son not of Gordius but of Atys), has for façade a cliff about a hundred feet high, cut back to a smooth face on which an elaborate geometric pattern has been left in relief. At the foot is a false door, while above the immense stone curtain the rock has been carved into a triangular pediment worthy of a Greek temple and engraved with a long inscription in a variety of the earliest Greek alphabet. There are many other rock-tombs of smaller size but similar plan and decoration in the district round the central site, and others which show reliefs of human figures and of lions, the latter of immense proportions on two famous façades. When these were carved, the Assyrian art of the New Kingdom was evidently known in Phrygia (probably in the early seventh century), and it is difficult to believe that those who made such great things under Assyrian influence can have passed wholly unmentioned by contemporary Assyrian records. Therefore, after all, we shall, perhaps, have to admit that they were those same Mushki who followed leaders of the name Mita to do battle with the Great Kings of Nineveh from Sargon to Ashurbanipal.
There is no doubt how the Phrygian kingdom came by its end. Assyrian records attest that the Gimirrai or Cimmerians, an Indo-European Scythian folk, which has left its name to Crim Tartary, and the present Crimea, swept southward and westward about the middle of the seventh century, and Greek records tell how they took and sacked the capital of Phrygia and put to death or forced to suicide the last King Midas.
SECTION 9. LYDIA
It must have been in the hour of that disaster, or but little before, that a Mermnad prince of Sardes, called Guggu by Assyrians and Gyges by Greeks, threw off any allegiance he may have owed to Phrygia and began to exalt his house and land of Lydia. He was the founder of a new dynasty, having been by origin, apparently, a noble of the court who came to be elevated to the throne by events differently related but involving in all the accounts some intrigue with his predecessor's queen. One historian, who says that he prevailed by the aid of Carians, probably states a fact; for it was this same Gyges who a few years later seems to have introduced Carian mercenaries to the notice of Psammetichus of Egypt. Having met and repulsed the Cimmerian horde without the aid of Ashurbanipal of Assyria, to whom he had applied in vain, Gyges allied himself with the Egyptian rebel who had just founded the Saite dynasty, and proceeded to enlarge his boundaries by attacking the prosperous Greeks on his western hand. But he was successful only against Colophon and Magnesia on the Maeander, inland places, and failed before Smyrna and Miletus, which could be provisioned by their fleets and probably had at their call a larger proportion of those warlike "Ionian pirates" who had long been harrying the Levant. In the course of a long reign, which Herodotus (an inexact chronologist) puts at thirty-eight years, Gyges had time to establish his power and to secure for his Lydians the control of the overland trade; and though a fresh Cimmerian horde, driven on, says Herodotus, by Scythians (perhaps these were not unconnected with the Medes then moving westward, as we know), came down from the north, defeated and killed him, sacked the unfortified part of his capital and swept on to plunder what it could of the land as far as the sea without pausing to take fenced places, his son Ardys, who had held out in the citadel of Sardes, and made his submission to Ashurbanipal, was soon able to resume the offensive against the Greeks. After an Assyrian attack on the Cimmerian flank or rear had brought about the death of the chief barbarian leader in the Cilician hills, and the dispersal of the storm, the Lydian marched down the Maeander again. He captured Priene, but like his predecessor and his successor, he failed to snatch the most coveted prize of the Greek coast, the wealthy city Miletus at the Maeander mouth.
Up to the date of our present survey, however, and for half a century yet to come, these conquests of the Lydian kings in Ionia and Caria amounted to little more than forays for plunder and the levy of blackmail, like the earlier Mesopotamian razzias. They might result in the taking and sacking of a town here and there, but not in the holding of it. The Carian Greek Herodotus, born not much more than a century later, tells us expressly that up to the time of Croesus, that is, to his own father's time, all the Greeks kept their freedom: and even if he means by this statement, as possibly he does, that previously no Greeks had been subjected to regular slavery, it still supports our point: for, if we may judge by Assyrian practice, the enslaving of vanquished peoples began only when their land was incorporated in a territorial empire. We hear nothing of Lydian governors in the Greek coastal cities and find no trace of a "Lydian period" in the strata of such Ionian and Carian sites as have been excavated. So it would appear that the Lydians and the Greeks lived up to and after 600 B.C. in unquiet contact, each people holding its own on the whole and learning about the other in the only international school known to primitive men, the school of war.
Herodotus represents that the Greek cities of Asia, according to the popular belief of his time, were deeply indebted to Lydia for their civilization. The larger part of this debt (if real) was incurred probably after 600 B.C.; but some constituent items of the account must have been of older date--the coining of money, for example. There is, however, much to be set on the other side of the ledger, more than Herodotus knew, and more than we can yet estimate. Too few monuments of the arts of the earlier Lydians and too few objects of their daily use have been found in their ill-explored land for us to say whether they owed most to the West or to the East. From the American excavation of Sardes, however, we have already learned for certain that their script was of a Western type, nearer akin to the Ionian than even the Phrygian was; and since their language contained a great number of Indo-European words, the Lydians should not, on the whole, be reckoned an Eastern people. Though the names given by Herodotus to their earliest kings are Mesopotamian and may be reminiscent of some political connection with the Far East at a remote epoch--perhaps that of the foreign relations of Ur, which seem to have extended to Cappadocia--all the later royal and other Lydian names recorded are distinctly Anatolian. At any rate all connection with Mesopotamia must have long been forgotten before Ashurbanipal's scribes could mention the prayer of "Guggu King of Luddi" as coming from a people and a land of which their master and his forbears had not so much as heard. As the excavation of Sardes and of other sites in Lydia proceeds, we shall perhaps find that the higher civilization of the country was a comparatively late growth, dating mainly from the rise of the Mermnads, and that its products will show an influence of the Hellenic cities which began not much earlier than 600 B.C., and was most potent in the century succeeding that date.
We know nothing of the extent of Lydian power towards the east, unless the suggestions already based on the passage of Herodotus concerning the meeting of Alyattes of Lydia with Kyaxares the Mede on the Halys, some years later than the date of our present survey, are well founded. If they are, then Lydia's sphere of influence may be assumed to have included Cilicia on the south-east, and its interests must have been involved in Cappadocia on the north-east. It is not unlikely that the Mermnad dynasty inherited most of what the Phrygian kings had held before the Cimmerian attack; and perhaps it was due to an oppressive Lydian occupation of the plateau as far east as the Halys and the foot of Anti-Taurus, that the Mushki came to be represented in later times only by Moschi in western Armenia, and the men of Tabal by the equally remote and insignificant Tibareni.