Anatolia

The Anatolian plateau and coastline held a great variety of peoples from 1200 ВС onward. Among them were the Phrygians, who lived in much the same area as the old Hittite Empire. The Phrygians seem to have emerged just as the Hittites disappeared in Southwest Asia.

The Phrygian capital was located at Gordium, asite 50 miles from mod­ern Ankara, Turkey. One of its early kings, Gordius, is reputed to have tied his cart to a pole with a knot so difficult to loosen that a story went out that whoever untied it would rule Asia. Phrygian importance peaked under its king, Mida (in Greek, Midas), who was reputed to be the richest man in the world. Everything he touched turned to gold, even his food, a problem that came close to killing him. He ruled from about 725 to 675 ВС.

Mida was buried in a structure that still stands. It may well be the old­est wooden tomb extant in the world and is built inside a mound 150 feet high and 900 feet in diameter. About 700 ВС Cimmerian tribesmen fell upon Phrygia dealing it a devastating blow.

The Phrygian legacy is sparse because no archives have yet been found and the burial mounds of its kings have yet to be thoroughly excavated. A peculiar type of headdress, the Phrygian cap, a close fitted cone with a peak curling toward the front, was worn by freed slaves in Roman times. It was later revived during the French revolution.

The Lydians were another people of Anatolia, succeeding the Phry­gians when they went into decline after 700 ВС. The Lydian capital was at Sardis, where their best remembered king, Croesus, was also their last. It was his wealth, like that of Mida, that gave Croesus his reputation.

The Lydian claim on history derives from the nation's invention of money. As far as is known, the first coins minted with the image of a king come from Lydia. The metal used was electrum, a combination of gold and silver. Aesop, famous for his animal stories, was probably a Lydian.

Lydia fell first to the Persian king Cyrus and later to Alexander the Great. In Hellenistic times, the rulers of Pergamum were its governors.

One other people was found in Anatolia, the Greeks who lived along the Aegean Sea coast and on the Black Sea shores. Those on the Aegean were known as Ionian Greeks, since most of them spoke this dialect of ancient Greek.

In fact, one of the first recollections of the Greeks dealt with the city of Troy and the conflict that took place between their warriors and the Trojans. Homer's epic, the Iliad, tells the story of that war. If he drew on historic facts, then an attack on Troy fits well into the declining years of Mycenaean Greece, sometime before 1200 ВС.

The Ionian Greek cities filled with immigrants from the Balkans and the Aegean islands. It was in these cities that Greek science was born. In many ways the cities of Ephesus, Smyrna, and Prirene rivaled those of the homeland.

The coming and going of empires in Southwest Asia demonstrates how difficult it was for this part of the world to find stability, until the creation of the Persian Empire. Too many people with different cultures and religions lived in a very small part of the world. When one group attained as­cendancy for a while, another was in the wings awaiting its moment. At the same time advances were present. City life and its privileges extended to a larger number of people, and alphabetic writing became common as did coinage.