“But what was Phrygia, in the seventh and sixth centuries? Why should a Phrygian divinity be so prominently recognized? After the reign of the great Midas there was no powerful king of Phrygia. It is true, as Herodotus records, that a royal Phrygian lineage passed on the names of Gordius and Midas to succeeding generations, but they were nonentities. An answer emerges when we consider the time and place in which the fame of the Phrygian Mother grew. Phrygia, in the seventh and sixth centuries, evoked the memory of the great Midas in a land that was now ruled by the tyrants of Lydia. The heart of Phrygia lay within the bounds of the Lydian empire, west of the great bend of the Halys River. Early in the sixth century, Alyattes the Lydian was fighting the Medes along the Halys River, and there is no indication that this represented a recent enlargement of his dominion. Before the middle of the seventh century, Assyrian sources took note of the power and influence of Gyges of Lydia. In the absence of any Phrygian ruler of note in this period, it is most probable that Gyges became overlord of the former dominion of Midas, on the Anatolian plateau, not long after the death of the great Midas. Any explanation of the significance of Phrygia and its native Mother in the seventh and sixth centuries must take account of the interests of the rulers of Lydian Sardis. “Phrygian,” in the context of the archaic cult of the Mother, should not be understood as a simple identification of ethnic origin. The Phrygian identity of the Mother of the Gods was an ideological construct, signifying the essential divinity of the primeval land of Phrygia. Like the legacies of Phrygian Midas, who engendered the discovery of agriculture and who endowed the Pactolus River with its charge of gold, the gifts to humanity of the Phrygian Mother were in the custody of the rulers of her land. And those rulers were the Mermnad tyrants of Lydia. The elaborate rock-carved shrines and cult places of the Phrygian Mother were monuments of the heartland of the Lydian empire, created during the seventh- and sixth-century era of Mermnad rule. Inscriptions on these monuments in the Phrygian language, far from signifying a cultural distinction between Phrygia and Lydia, represent the Lydian appropriation of Phrygia as a signifier of ancient authenticity.
A reflection of this appropriation of Phrygian tradition is found in Herodotus’ story about bekos, the Phrygian word for bread. The discovery that this Phrygian word was the first articulate sound uttered by a human voice was announced in the name of Psammetichus I of Egypt, the contemporary of Gyges of Lydia. Shortly before the middle of the seventh century, Psammetichus had secured his rule in Egypt with the assistance of Ionian and Carian mercenaries, as Herodotus attests, who were sent on the authority of Gyges, as contemporary Assyrian records indicate. (Herodotus reports that prior to his rise to power, Psammetichus had spent time in exile in Syria - which, to Herodotus, might include Cappadocia - and that he secured his power with the support of armed Ionians and Carians. An alliance of Gyges and Psammetichus I is attested in the records of Assurbanipal of Assyria, and it is widely accepted that these Carians and Ionians were sent to Psammetichus, ca. 655 b.c.e., as a result of this alliance) In affirming the primacy of Phrygia, Psammetichus was acknowledging that his kingship depended upon the true source of sovereignty, centered in Phrygia and controlled by the tyrant of Lydia. The truth about the origins of human life that Psammetichus allegedly discovered was in fact a reflection of contemporary realities. Although Herodotus does not explicitly say so, the Phrygian story that he tells at the beginning of his account of Egypt reflected the power and influence of Gyges and of the dynasty of Lydian tyrants that he founded. The present chapter examines the characteristics that made the Phrygian Mother of the Gods an appropriate manifestation of Lydian sovereignty. Like the figure of Midas, a real person whose memory generated an ahistorical archetype, we will find that the divine Mother in Lydia was, paradoxically, both a mortal woman and mother of a king-to-be, and a divinity whose communion with tyrants assured their supremacy. As in the case of Midas, this paradox was achieved through the perspective of time. Real individuals of the past were enshrined through rituals and monuments to become the idealized foundations of present conditions. In this process, the mothers of kings tended to lose their individual identities and become assimilated to the ideal of the divine Mother.
The ideal of a divine woman who engenders tyrants was not the invention of the Mermnads. Although the Greeks (and evidently the Saïte kings of Egypt) regarded Phrygia as the original home of this divine bearer of sovereignty, in fact she was a type long familiar among the rulers of the eastern Mediterranean...a goddess known to the Lydians as Kybebe, and familiar to the contemporaries of Midas as Kubaba. This ancient deity of northern Syria and central Anatolia was the archetype on whom the Phrygian Mother was formed, and after whom, as we shall see, she became known as Kybele.” - Mark Munn, The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia: A Study of Sovereignty in Ancient Religion. University of California Press, 2006. pp. 97-98.
