Midas ruled Anatolia; his language hugged Greek close
Phrygia occupied west-central Anatolia around the Sangarios, with capital Gordion on a harsh plateau. Myth gave the world Gordias's knot and gold-touch Midas; history's King Midas in the late eighth century BC rivaled Assyria before independence ended. Greek writers said Phrygians were once Balkan Bryges.
Geography runs from dry steppe watered by Sakarya and Porsuk near Dorylaeum and Gordion, through tuff hills at Midas City, marble country at Docimium, and Maeander valleys holding Laodicea and Hierapolis. Hot summers and bitter winters rule out olives, so the heartland mostly fed herds and barley. Homer places Phrygians as Trojan allies. Classical authors link them to Mygdones and Bebryces; Strabo bundles several northwest Anatolian groups as Balkan migrants. Some modern scholars call the Bryges story folk etymology and prefer a twelfth-century BC arrival amid Hittite collapse, perhaps among Sea Peoples, with knobbed handmade ware as a ceramic clue.
Phrygian speech lasted into the sixth century AD though its alphabet faded earlier. A Homeric Hymn says it was not mutually intelligible with Trojan; Gordion inscriptions show an Indo-European tongue with Greek-like vocabulary and no kinship with neighbouring Hittite. Once misclassed as satəm beside Armenian, it is now generally treated as centum and especially close to Greek: of 36 recorded Phrygian isoglosses, 34 are shared with Greek and 22 with Greek alone, feeding a proto-Graeco-Phrygian hypothesis.
The historical Midas of the late eighth century BC held most of western and central Anatolia and contested the east with Assyria and Urartu. He was also the last independent king: Cimmerians sacked Gordion around 695 BC. Lydia, Persia, Alexander, the Seleucids, Pergamon, Rome and Byzantium followed as overlords, and over those centuries Phrygians turned Christian and Greek-speaking. After the Turkish conquest in the late Middle Ages, the regional name itself dropped out of use.
Source: Phrygia
