Geographical definition
The Phrygians were widespread through Anatolia, living in regions from the Hellespont to Cappadocia. Phrygia proper lay in central Anatolia and centered around the Sakarya River, just west of Cappadocia, directly east of Lydia and considerably to the north of Lycia. Their name for themselves is not known, nor is the name by which the Persians called them.
History
Herodotus believed (and some modern scholars agree) that the Phrygians were relatively recent immigrants to Anatolia descended from an offshoot of the Bryges, who lived in the Balkans. He also further states that they were in turn ancestral to the Armenians, which is uncertain. Greek mythology has the Phrygians fighting on the side of the Trojans during the Trojan War, and Gordium was the home of the legendary kings named Midas (of whom there were three).
The Phrygian kingdom in central Anatolia reached its peak in the eighth century BC. Around 675 Gordium was sacked, an act the Greeks attributed to Cimmerian invaders. The Cimmerians were driven out around 620 by the Lydians, who made Phrygia one of their provinces. Gordium was built up with Lydian financing. The accidental slayer of Croesus' son in Herodotus I.34-45 was Adrastus, a prince of Gordium.
As a Lydian province, Phrygia passed to Persia when the latter conquered Lydia some time after 547. By the time of Herodotus, it was placed with the Hellespont, Paphlagonia, Syria, the Mariandynians and the Thracians of Asia in the third imperial tax district, whose yearly tribute totaled 360 talents.
The satrapy of Hellespontine Phrygia was split off around the turn of the fifth century. Its capital was Dascylium. Lendering notes that "[t]he architectural remains from this age are not very monumental" though a terrace wall in Dascylium shows similarity to walls at Pasargadae and Persepolis.
In the 480 invasion of Greece, Phrygians served together with the Armenians under Artochmes, one of Darius' sons-in-law. We are not told what role they played in the fighting, but Herodotus says that some Phrygians were picked by Mardonius to remain in Greece after Xerxes left and it seems reasonable that they participated at Plataea if nowhere else.
Our history of Greater
(interior) Phrygia is poor, due to its isolation from the Greek world
and dearth of surviving domestic or Persian documents. However it was
still in the empire's hands by the time Alexander arrived in Gordium in
334. In 333, he appointed the satrapy to his general Antigonus, founder of the Antigonid dynasty.
As a reward for his leadership of the surviving Persian army out of Greece, Artabazus (*Artavazdâ), Xerxes' first cousin and formerly commander of the Chorasmian and Parthian cavalry contingents, was given the satrapy of Hellespontine Phrygia in 477. His descendants held this office until the invasion of Alexander the Great.
Artabazus' son Pharnabazus may or may not have been satrap. His grandson Pharnaces was satrap by 430, when he tried to open talks with Sparta to involve himself in the political side of the Peloponnesian War, but this initiative went nowhere. Pharnaces remained in office at least until 422 and possibly later. His son Pharnabazus II succeeded him before the winter of 413-12, when he and his rival, Tissaphernes of Lydia, tried separately to ally themselves with Sparta against Athens. Again, little was accomplished due to Athens' naval supremacy until Cyrus the Younger became involved, but this subject falls outside the scope of this article.
Pharnabazus was ruler when the survivors of the Ten Thousand passed through there in 400 on their way back to Greece, when Tissaphernes of Lydia redirected a campaign by Spartan king Thibron in 399 and by Agesilaus II in 396-95; Pharnabazus then campaigned in the Aegean with the Athenian admiral Conon during the Corinthian War. As a result of his and the empire's gains in this conflict, he was assigned to reconquer Egypt, but failed to do so though he tried repeatedly.
In the meantime, his son Ariobarzanes (*Ariyabrdna) succeeded him as satrap. He joined the Revolt of the Satraps in 366, receiving aid from Sparta when Caria and Lydia attacked him, and in recognition of his opposition to the great king, Athens made him an honorary citizen, but his son Mithradates betrayed him to the king in 363 or 362, leading to his crucifixion.
His brother Artabazus II succeeded him and likewise decided to rebel after the death of Artaxerxes II in 358, hiring Athenian mercenaries who defeated an imperial army sent against Artabazus in 355. But Artaxerxes III was able to intimidate Athens into recalling its forces by threatening to send the Persian navy to support Athens' own rebellious territories in the Social War. Artabazus was forced to flee to Macedon in 353.
Hellespontine Phrygia was given to Arsites, who led the satraps at the Battle of the Granicus in 334 and committed suicide after their defeat. Alexander appointed his general Calas as the first Macedonian satrap. Upon the partition of Babylon it was given to Alexander's bodyguard Leonnatus, while Greater Phrygia remained with Antigonus.
Although now part of the Hellenistic world, at least some Phrygians spoke their own language until the fifth century AD. In the third century BC, Hellespontine Phrygia was invaded by a Celtic people whom the Greeks called Galatai, and with the spread of their language the region became known as Galatia. Greater Phrygia also suffered from these invasions, which destroyed Gordium. In 188 it came under rule of the Greek Attalid dynasty of western Anatolia, which Attalus III left in his will to the Roman republic. As such, the name of Phrygia was retained for administrative purposes from 133 BC until the final end of Byzantium in AD 1453.
Language
The Phrygian language is scarcely attested from two bodies of inscriptions, one dating from the turn of the ninth century BC and after, the other from the turn of the first century AD. It was an Indo-European language bearing some similarities to Greek and the two may form a subfamily.
The earlier group of inscriptions were written in a particular script derived from Phoenician which may or may not have come through Greek. The latter were written in the Greek alphabet.
Religion
The Phrygians worshiped a wide variety of their own gods and Anatolian ones. Their (apparent) supreme gods were Sabazios, the sky god and horseman whom the Greeks equated variously with Zeus or Dionysus, and the native Anatolian mother goddess Cybele (Phrygian Matar Kubileya), identified strongly with the Anatolian wilderness. Like the Lycians, the Phrygians tended to carve shrines and idols directly into living rock.
Clothing
Phrygian clothing was similar to Medo-Persian, with snug-fitting (probably footed) trousers and long-sleeved tunics covered in bold patterns. The Phrygian cap was similar to a tiara but lacked earflaps and had a tall, stiff peak curling forward (Phrygians also sometimes wore tiaras with earflaps).
Weapons
Herodotus' Phrygians are armed "like the Paphlagonians," with woven helmets, small shields, short spears, javelins and daggers (VII.72). I suppose it is not impossible that the woven helmets were in fact tiaras or Phrygian caps, though it would be an unusual choice of words on Herodotus' part. The small shields were, I suspect, most likely crescents, given that these were used both in West Asia and to the north in Thracia.
Showing posts with label cybele. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cybele. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Peoples of the empire: The Cilicians
While the Cilicians are a significant and interesting people, certain gaps in my knowledge leave me unable to advise on creating a Classical Cilician "kit." I don't know the name in Old Persian, and can't find any art that unambiguously shows Cilician clothing or arms.
Geographical definition
Cilicia lay on the southern coast of Anatolia, along the top edge of a corner of the Mediterranean north of Syria. It is surrounded on the northwest by the Taurus Mountains (modern Turkish Toros Dağları), the north by the Antitaurus (Aladağlar) and the east by the Nur Dağları, which separates this part of Turkey from the Middle East. Greek writers referred to the western region dominated by the Taurus as Kilikia Tracheia ("rugged Cilicia") and the eastern plains as Kilikia Pedias ("flat Cilicia"), which Xenophon described as "a large and beautiful plain, well-watered and full of trees of all sorts and vines; in produces an abundance of sesame, millet, panic, wheat and barley..." (Anabasis, I.2). These two areas roughly correspond to the ancient kingdoms of Khilakku or Hilakku and Quwê.
History
Khilakku and Quwê were Neo-Hittite kingdoms formed after the collapse of the Hittite empire in the late Bronze Age. Quwê was twice conquered by the Assyrians in the 8th and 7th centuries BC, and Khilakku submitted to them in the mid-7th century in exchange for protection from the Cimmerians. The two Cilician kingdoms were reunited under Khilakku after the end of the Assyrian empire. The new kingdom's capital was Tarsus (Tarša), which in Xenophon's day was a large and wealthy city. Its kings were called suuannassai ("belonging to the dog"... huh?), which the Greeks rendered syennesis. Herodotus uses Syennesis as the proper name of the Cilician king who, together with Labynetus of Babylon (probably an anachronistic placement of the later king Nabonidus), brokered the treaty between the Lydians and Medes which drew the famous dividing line between the two empires at the Halys River in 585.
While the peoples of Kilikia Tracheia and Pedias were all Luwian-speakers, Lendering notes that the differing lifestyles of mountain herdsmen and plains agriculturalists (as well as that all of Cilicia's major cities were in Pedias) seems to have caused a rift between the two regions, and there are records of fights from the 4th century that probably continue a state of conflict from centuries earlier.
It is not known when Cilicia became part of the Persian empire, but it probably occurred during Cyrus' campaigns in the 540s, or around the same time he conquered Lydia. Initially, the syennesis was retained as a vassal king Herodotus says that Cilicia gave the empire 360 horses and 500 talents of silver in tribute.
The Persians maintained military bases along the coast. In the Histories, the Cilicians are said to have sent 100 ships to Xerxes' invasion of Greece, though Herodotus has Mardonius accuse the Cilicians, along with the other seafolk in Xerxes' forces (for the Persians, being landlocked, had no ships) of doing "less than brave men should" at the disaster of Salamis (VIII.100). The syennesis at the time (named as a "Syennesis son of Oromedon") acted as a commander in the Persian navy, and gave his daughter's hand in marriage to Pixodarus, a Carian noble (not to be confused with the later Hecatomnid Pixodarus).
The last-known syennesis (again known as "Syennesis" in Greek history) was in 401 BC pressured by Cyrus the Younger and his massive personal army to join his insurrection against his brother Artaxerxes II. According to Xenophon, this Syennesis' wife Epyaxa traveled with Cyrus for part of his march and it was rumored that the two had an affair before he arrived in Tarsus, from where the syennesis and all the city's inhabitants had temporarily retreated until Cyrus could convince him to join. Cyrus' defeat seems to have led to the great king dethroning the native Cilician royal line and replacing them with appointed satraps.
The second-to-last of these satraps was Mazaeus, who reigned from 361-336. In 333, Alexander the Great entered Cilicia and stayed in Tarsus while recovering from an illness. Evidently he found the mountain Cilicians troublesome, and launched a raid in the Taurus. That November he faced and defeated Darius III at the Battle of Issus in eastern Cilicia near the feet of the Nur Dağları. About 23 miles south of the site, he founded Alexandria or Alexandretta, modern Iskenderun. He appointed a new satrap, Balacrus, who remained under orders to attack the mountainfolk.
Cilicia was fought over by the Seleucids and Ptolemies for two centuries, during which the land became mostly Hellenized. Like many other nations, Cilicia began to disappear except as a traditional placename, though the mountain people, still maintaining a degree of independence, would turn to maritime piracy until finally conquered by the Romans in the 1st century BC.
Language
Cilicians spoke Luwian, an Indo-European language of the Anatolian family widespread in western Anatolia since the late Bronze Age. By the turn of the 2nd century BC it had been mostly replaced by Greek.
Religion
Cilicians followed various religious customs. At Castabala, a shrine was maintained to Cybele, the mother goddess of many Anatolian religions, while at Mallus on the coast was an oracle that the Greeks said had been founded by the mythical Greek seer Amphilochus, one of the Epigoni.
Clothing
Herodotus simply describes their clothing as "woolen tunics." The same image from the Persepolis Apadana that Nirupars identifies with Syrians (which I have gone over in my article on the Assyrians) is sometimes identified as Cilicians - some sources incorrectly identify these as Sogdians, but Sogdians were Eastern Iranians and wore equestrian clothing. It is, of course, possible that Cilicians dressed in a similar manner to their neighbors to the south.
Weapons
Herodotus describes the Cilicians' equipment as "their native helmets,... bucklers of raw oxhide for shields... two javelins and a sword very close in style to the knives of Egypt" (VII.91, tr. Godley; the word he translates as "bucklers" is a declension of aspis, generic for "shield"). Not much to go by, although it does indicate that shields should be rawhide, not tanned leather. A sheathed Egyptian longsword may be seen on the tomb of Darius the Great, with its pommel shaped like a ring missing the top, a short grip, apparently a long point and a flared chape.
Geographical definition
Cilicia lay on the southern coast of Anatolia, along the top edge of a corner of the Mediterranean north of Syria. It is surrounded on the northwest by the Taurus Mountains (modern Turkish Toros Dağları), the north by the Antitaurus (Aladağlar) and the east by the Nur Dağları, which separates this part of Turkey from the Middle East. Greek writers referred to the western region dominated by the Taurus as Kilikia Tracheia ("rugged Cilicia") and the eastern plains as Kilikia Pedias ("flat Cilicia"), which Xenophon described as "a large and beautiful plain, well-watered and full of trees of all sorts and vines; in produces an abundance of sesame, millet, panic, wheat and barley..." (Anabasis, I.2). These two areas roughly correspond to the ancient kingdoms of Khilakku or Hilakku and Quwê.
History
Khilakku and Quwê were Neo-Hittite kingdoms formed after the collapse of the Hittite empire in the late Bronze Age. Quwê was twice conquered by the Assyrians in the 8th and 7th centuries BC, and Khilakku submitted to them in the mid-7th century in exchange for protection from the Cimmerians. The two Cilician kingdoms were reunited under Khilakku after the end of the Assyrian empire. The new kingdom's capital was Tarsus (Tarša), which in Xenophon's day was a large and wealthy city. Its kings were called suuannassai ("belonging to the dog"... huh?), which the Greeks rendered syennesis. Herodotus uses Syennesis as the proper name of the Cilician king who, together with Labynetus of Babylon (probably an anachronistic placement of the later king Nabonidus), brokered the treaty between the Lydians and Medes which drew the famous dividing line between the two empires at the Halys River in 585.
While the peoples of Kilikia Tracheia and Pedias were all Luwian-speakers, Lendering notes that the differing lifestyles of mountain herdsmen and plains agriculturalists (as well as that all of Cilicia's major cities were in Pedias) seems to have caused a rift between the two regions, and there are records of fights from the 4th century that probably continue a state of conflict from centuries earlier.
It is not known when Cilicia became part of the Persian empire, but it probably occurred during Cyrus' campaigns in the 540s, or around the same time he conquered Lydia. Initially, the syennesis was retained as a vassal king Herodotus says that Cilicia gave the empire 360 horses and 500 talents of silver in tribute.
The Persians maintained military bases along the coast. In the Histories, the Cilicians are said to have sent 100 ships to Xerxes' invasion of Greece, though Herodotus has Mardonius accuse the Cilicians, along with the other seafolk in Xerxes' forces (for the Persians, being landlocked, had no ships) of doing "less than brave men should" at the disaster of Salamis (VIII.100). The syennesis at the time (named as a "Syennesis son of Oromedon") acted as a commander in the Persian navy, and gave his daughter's hand in marriage to Pixodarus, a Carian noble (not to be confused with the later Hecatomnid Pixodarus).
The last-known syennesis (again known as "Syennesis" in Greek history) was in 401 BC pressured by Cyrus the Younger and his massive personal army to join his insurrection against his brother Artaxerxes II. According to Xenophon, this Syennesis' wife Epyaxa traveled with Cyrus for part of his march and it was rumored that the two had an affair before he arrived in Tarsus, from where the syennesis and all the city's inhabitants had temporarily retreated until Cyrus could convince him to join. Cyrus' defeat seems to have led to the great king dethroning the native Cilician royal line and replacing them with appointed satraps.
The second-to-last of these satraps was Mazaeus, who reigned from 361-336. In 333, Alexander the Great entered Cilicia and stayed in Tarsus while recovering from an illness. Evidently he found the mountain Cilicians troublesome, and launched a raid in the Taurus. That November he faced and defeated Darius III at the Battle of Issus in eastern Cilicia near the feet of the Nur Dağları. About 23 miles south of the site, he founded Alexandria or Alexandretta, modern Iskenderun. He appointed a new satrap, Balacrus, who remained under orders to attack the mountainfolk.
Cilicia was fought over by the Seleucids and Ptolemies for two centuries, during which the land became mostly Hellenized. Like many other nations, Cilicia began to disappear except as a traditional placename, though the mountain people, still maintaining a degree of independence, would turn to maritime piracy until finally conquered by the Romans in the 1st century BC.
Language
Cilicians spoke Luwian, an Indo-European language of the Anatolian family widespread in western Anatolia since the late Bronze Age. By the turn of the 2nd century BC it had been mostly replaced by Greek.
Religion
Cilicians followed various religious customs. At Castabala, a shrine was maintained to Cybele, the mother goddess of many Anatolian religions, while at Mallus on the coast was an oracle that the Greeks said had been founded by the mythical Greek seer Amphilochus, one of the Epigoni.
Clothing
Herodotus simply describes their clothing as "woolen tunics." The same image from the Persepolis Apadana that Nirupars identifies with Syrians (which I have gone over in my article on the Assyrians) is sometimes identified as Cilicians - some sources incorrectly identify these as Sogdians, but Sogdians were Eastern Iranians and wore equestrian clothing. It is, of course, possible that Cilicians dressed in a similar manner to their neighbors to the south.
Weapons
Herodotus describes the Cilicians' equipment as "their native helmets,... bucklers of raw oxhide for shields... two javelins and a sword very close in style to the knives of Egypt" (VII.91, tr. Godley; the word he translates as "bucklers" is a declension of aspis, generic for "shield"). Not much to go by, although it does indicate that shields should be rawhide, not tanned leather. A sheathed Egyptian longsword may be seen on the tomb of Darius the Great, with its pommel shaped like a ring missing the top, a short grip, apparently a long point and a flared chape.
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