By the side of the Great Mother stands the god Atys, whom Herodotus calls a son of Manes.[734] He grew up with the shepherds among the goats of the forest. The goddess loved him, but he fled away into the mountains, and there, under a fir-tree, into which his spirit passed, he made himself an eunuch. In search of him Amma roams over the hills in frantic grief, and carries into her cave the tree into which his spirit passed. The emasculation and death of Atys, as also his resurrection, were celebrated by the Phrygians.[735] At these festivals a fir-tree was felled, crowned with violets, twined with garlands, and carried into the sanctuary of the goddess. Afterwards Atys was sought in the mountains with wild music and frenzy, as Amma had sought him. The third day of the festival was "the day of blood," i.e. of the mutilation and death of Atys, who was bewailed with despairing grief, amid rending of the hair and beating of the breast. Then followed a happier scene, the festival of "the resurrection," and the washing of the stone of the goddess.[736] We learn further that Atys was also called Papas among the Phrygians. He is also entitled the goat-herd and neat-herd; the plastic art of Greece and Rome represents him as a youthful shepherd with the Pan's-pipe, and by his side is a pine and a ram. According to later accounts he was the "shepherd of the bright stars."[737] Hence we must assume that in Atys the Phrygians personified the youthful bloom of nature, the bloom of the spring, and they mourned the disappearance of this, just as, according to the Greeks, they sang a piercing wail—the Lityerses—at the time of corn-cutting. They lamented the death of the spring, and the fall of the fruit; the youthful god had resigned his own power; the creative vigour continued only to exist in the tree of Atys, the ever-green fir. In the spring time it awoke again; this was the day of the resurrection with its joy and pleasure. This orgiastic worship, and roaming with wild cries over the heights and in the ravines of the mountains, sometimes in wailing and lamentation, sometimes in joy, is peculiar to the religion of the Phrygians.
The central point of the Phrygian kingdom lay westwards of the great salt plain in the region between Gordium and Ancyra, between Midaëum and Pessinus in the valley of the Sangarius, on whose banks the Homeric poems place the Phrygians, who are the possessors of "well-walled cities."[738] If the majority of the Phrygians remained farmers and shepherds, they nevertheless arrived at an early date at a monarchy, and under this they reached a civilisation by no means contemptible, a national culture, with an architecture and music of their own. On the religion of the Phrygians the rites of their Semitic neighbours on the north and south no doubt exercised a strong influence. The combination of the creative power and the power hostile to procreation into one deity, and the custom of mutilation, are conceptions and rites unknown to the Aryan nations. But they are closely connected with the forms and worship of Astarte-Ashera, just as Atys resembles the Adonis of the Syrians. On the other hand, as was remarked above, the Phrygians adopted the Greek alphabet on their monuments, and Greek verses were composed for the tomb of Midas ([p. 528]). In return the Greeks adopted the Phrygian flute, and along with it the form of the elegy and the Phrygian harmonies. Nor were these all. The wild roaming, the unchecked sorrow and joy, the tambourines and drums of the Phrygian festivals passed without doubt in the first instance to the Greek colonies in the Propontis, and more especially to Cyzicus, and from thence to the mother country at the celebration of certain festivals of Demeter and Dionysus. "Take," says Euripides in the Bacchæ, "take the drums, the invention of the Phrygians and the mother Rhea. Long ago the Corybantes (the attendants of the Great Mother) devised the mighty circle of the stretched hide and placed in Rhea's hand, with the loud, sweet-sounding tone of Phrygian flutes, the thunder for the festal song."[739]
Towards the east, the south coast of Asia Minor was inhabited by the Cilicians and the Solymi. To the former belonged the slopes of Taurus and the coast to the right bank of the Kalykadnus. Towards the west came the Solymi, in a wild and broken mountain country. They took their name from the Solyma mountains (sallum = steps), which they inhabited, and according to Chœrilus of Samos, they spoke the language of the Phenicians.[740] "The pass," so Xenophon tells us, "which leads to Cilicia (from the interior of Asia Minor) is very steep, and only broad enough for a single waggon. On descending from it you come into a well-watered plain by the sea, which is inclosed from one end to the other by lofty and precipitous mountains. But the plain itself is large and beautiful, and filled with trees of every kind, and with vines. It produces much sesame, wheat, millet, and barley."[741] In addition to these advantages the slopes of Taurus offered splendid pastures for horses, and on the coast were excellent harbours. The inhabitants of this favoured land, known in Assyrian inscriptions as Chillakai, and on the coins of the district from the Persian times as Chelech,[742] belonged, like their neighbours on the Orontes and on the Upper Euphrates, to the Semitic stock. This is proved by the names of their districts and places of their gods, and by the inscriptions on their coins. The Semitic stamp of names of places like Amanus (amana, firm), Adana (eden, delight), Mallus (maa'la, height), Tarsus (tars, dry) is beyond a doubt.[743] Herodotus tells us that the Cilicians wore woollen clothes, and peculiar helmets of ox-leather, and carried swords and spears like the Egyptians, and he maintained that they were descended from Cilix, the son of Agenor, a Phenician. Their princes were always styled Syennesis.[744] This standing name was, without doubt, the title given by the princes of Cilicia to themselves: it must have been schu'a nasi, i. e. "noble prince."[745] Hellanicus tells us that of the two kings of the name of Sardanapalus, who ruled over Assyria, one had built the two cities of Tarsus and Anchiale in Cilicia in one day.[746] On the other hand Berosus informs us that Sennacherib (705-681 B.C.) had heard in Assyria that an army of Greeks had landed in Cilicia; against this he marched and defeated it, but with heavy loss. As a memorial of this victory he caused his image to be set up there, and afterwards the city of Tarsus was built in such a way that the Cydnus flowed through the middle of it. The temple at Anchiale (west of Tarsus, on the sea) was also founded by Sennacherib.[747] When Alexander of Macedonia reached Cilicia his attendants found that the circuit and towers of the walls of Anchiale proved that the city was planned on a large scale. Near the walls they saw the statue of an Assyrian king. His right hand was raised, and the inscription in Assyrian letters is said to have called him Sardanapalus, the son of Anakyndaraxes.[748]
No king of the name of Anakyndaraxes or Sardanapalus ever ruled over Assyria, unless perhaps by the latter is meant Assurbanipal (Assurbanhabal), the son of Esarhaddon. On the other hand, the inscriptions of Shalmanesar II. of Asshur (859-828 B.C.) mention the fact that he had overcome "Pikhirim the chief of the land of Chilakku (Cilicia)," and Sargon, king of Assyria (722-705 B.C.), tells us that the Cilicians had not been subject to his father, and that he had transferred the dominion over Cilicia to Ambris, king of Tubal. Hence Cilicia must have become subject to Sargon in the earliest years of his reign. In consequence of the revolt, which Ambris undertook with Urza of Ararat, and Mita, the king of Moschi, as we saw above ([p. 520]), Ambris was taken captive and dethroned in the year 714 B.C. Sennacherib, the successor of Sargon (705-681 B.C.), informs us that in the very first years of his reign he had caused rebellious Cilicians to be removed: the inscriptions of the later years of his reign remark that the cities of the Cilicians were destroyed and burnt, and the Cilicians in the forests were reduced. After this the inscriptions of Esarhaddon (681-668 B.C.) assure us that he reduced the Cilicians; and Assurbanipal recounts that Sandasarmi of Cilicia, who had not submitted to the kings his fathers, and fulfilled their commands, sent his daughter with many presents to Nineveh for the harem of Assurbanipal, and kissed his feet.[749]
The fall of the Assyrian kingdom restored their freedom to the Cilicians, and they appear to have maintained it till the times of Cyrus. After that time the princes of Cilicia were merely the viceroys of the kings of Persia. To these sovereigns Cilicia paid each year 500 Babylonian talents of silver and 360 selected horses. The harbours, which carried on a lively trade, were able, at the beginning of the fifth century B.C., to equip and man a hundred ships of war (triremes).[750]
The coins which have come down to us from the supremacy of the Persians allow us to form some conclusions about the religious rites of the Cilician cities. They represent Baal, the sun-god of the Syrians, on the throne, with grapes and ears of corn in his right hand, and sometimes an eagle at his side. Others exhibit Heracles attacking a lion with his club. The inscriptions name the god thus represented Bal Tars, i. e. Baal of Tarsus. A coin of Mallus also exhibits Heracles strangling the lion, i.e. the beneficent sun-god who overcomes the terrible sun-god in the sign of the lion, the consuming glow of the sun. On other coins we can trace the war-goddess, on others the birth-goddess of the Syrians, or her cow; some coins of Celenderis exhibit the goat of this goddess.[751]
The land of the Cilicians must at one time have stretched northwards over the Taurus range to the inner table-land as far as the sources of the Sarus, to the watershed between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, or even further. Sargon could not have transferred the sovereignty over Cilicia to the king of Tubal if his territory was not contiguous to Cilicia. And if we assume that the land of Tubal reached at that time as far as the Taurus, we are met by the objection that even Herodotus represents the Halys as passing through the land of the Cilicians on its way from Armenia.[752] Hence the land afterwards called Cataonia, between Taurus and Antitaurus and the northern spur of the latter range, must, even in the time of Herodotus, have belonged to Cilicia.
On the north-western slope of the Armenian mountains toward the Black Sea we have already found the Moschi and Tibarenes, whom the Hebrews counted among the sons of Japhet. The western neighbours of the Tibarenes on the coasts of the Black Sea were the Chalybians. It is the land of the Chalybians of which the Homeric poems speak, when they mention the city of Alybe—"where is the birth of silver."[753] But it is not only the obtaining of silver that is ascribed by the Greeks to the Chalybians; they are also the discoverers of the working of iron; and steel, which the Greeks obtained from this coast, was named after the Chalybians. Æschylus calls the Chalybians "barbarous workers in brass, men averse to foreigners."[754] In the scriptures of the Hebrews Tubal-cain, a name of which the first part seems to denote the Tibarenes, is the father of the smiths in brass and iron. Hence it is clear that the mines of ore and iron in the land of the Tibarenes and Chalybians must have been opened at a very early period. As a fact the ore lies at a very slight depth in the mountains. Even now large masses of copper are discovered along the coast to the west of Trebizond; beside copper, the mines of Gümüsh Khane, two days' journey in the interior from Trebizond, even now yield lead containing silver, which is also found in the mines of Baibut and Tokat, further to the south.[755] Hence these districts could furnish not only iron and steel, but silver also; elsewhere silver was only to be got in the mines on Mount Ida till the Phenicians imported this metal in large quantities from Tartessus.
Westward of the Chalybians on the Thermodon, the Iris, and the lower course of the Halys, dwelt a population which, setting aside any later admixture, were of Semitic origin. Herodotus calls the inhabitants of the land which reaches from Armenia on the east to the Halys on the west, from the coast of the Black Sea southwards as far as Cilicia, Syrians, and remarks that this was the name of the people in use among the Greeks.[756] Pindar speaks of "a spear-armed Syrian host" on the mouth of the Thermodon.[757] The Greek colony of Sinope west of the mouth of the Halys is said to have been founded in the land of the Syrians of noble stock.[758] A promontory running into the sea to the north of Sinope is called Syrias.[759] The Greeks derived the people in this district from Syrus, a son of Apollo.[760] Scylax of Caryanda names the coast of the Black Sea, from the Chalybians to Armene, westward of the promontory of Syrias, Assyria.[761] Strabo states that these Syrians, who extended from the Taurus northwards as far as the Pontus, were named Leuco-Syrians, i. e. white Syrians, to distinguish them from the true Syrians, and that the Cataonians ([p. 538]) spoke the same language with them.[762] The coins struck at Sinope (Sanab), Side and Kotyora (Gazir), in the fourth century B.C., have Aramaic legends, and we can trace on them the name and form of the god Baal.[763] The Persians called these people Cappadocians (Katapatuka), and extend the name to Cilicia also. If the Phrygians when marching westwards from Armenia not only traversed but took possession of the land, the Phrygians who remained in the country must have retired to the west before the Semitic tribe, which forced its way from Cilicia and the Upper Euphrates, or have been absorbed by them.
In the eighth century B.C. the Syrians between the Lower Halys and Armenia received a peculiar admixture. "On the shore of the Pontus, where the Scythians now dwell"—such is the account of Herodotus—"it is said that the territory of the Cimmerians lay, and in Scythia the Cimmerian Bosporus and Cimmerian walls and harbours remain, and a region which is called Cimmeria. When the Scythians who once dwelt in the east were driven out by the Massagetes or the Issedones, they came into the land of the Cimmerians. The latter took counsel on the river Tyras, and one part were inclined with the kings to fight against the Scythians, but the others wished to abandon the land. Thus a strife arose between the two parties, and those who wished to retire from the land defeated the king and all who were of the same opinion with him, and buried the slain on the Tyras, where their grave is still to be seen. Then the remainder fled before the Scythians along the sea to Asia, and settled on the peninsula, where Sinope, the city of the Greeks, is now built. But the Scythians took their land in possession, and, led by their king Madyas, they pursued the retreating Cimmerians, but missed them, as they took the upper road, which is far longer, and keeps the Caucasus on the right."[764]