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Updated: May 23, 2025
Pisiris, king of Carchemish, appealed to Mita as his ally, either because the Mushki of Asia Minor sat in the seat of his own forbears, the Hatti of Cappadocia, or because he was himself of Mushki kin. There can be no doubt that the king thus invoked was king of Cappadocia.
When allusions to the Mushki in Assyrian records give any indication of their local habitat, it lies in the east, not the west, of the central Anatolian plain nearly, in fact, where the Moschi lived in later historical times.
A remnant of this race would survive far into historic times as the Moschi of Greek geographers, an obscure people on the borders of Cappadocia and Armenia. But who precisely the first Mushki were, whence they had originally come, and whither they went when pushed back out of Mesopotamia, are questions still debated.
We know it to have been a great centre of Sandan worship, and may guess that its kings were kin of the Mushki race and, if not the chief survivors of the original stock which invaded Assyria in Tiglath Pileser's time, ranked at least among the chief inheritors of the old Hatti civilization.
All these principalities, as their earlier monuments prove, shared the same Hatti civilization as the Mushki and seem to have had the same chief deities, the axe-bearing Sandan, or Teshup, or Hadad, whose sway we have noted far west in Lydia, and also a Great Mother, the patron of peaceful increase, as he was of warlike conquest.
On the whole, whatever their later story, the truth about the Mushki, who came down into Syria early in the twelfth century and retired to Cappadocia some fifty years later after crossing swords with Assyria, is probably this that they were originally a mountain people from northern Armenia or the Caucasus, distinct from the Hatti, and that, having descended from the north-east in a primitive nomadic state into the seat of an old culture possessed by an enfeebled race, they adopted the latter's civilization as they conquered it and settled down.
But these Mushki had so far adopted Hatti civilization either before or since their great raiding expedition which Tiglath Pileser I of Assyria repelled, that their domination can scarcely have made much difference to the social condition of Asia Minor. Their capital was probably where the Hatti capital had been at Boghazkeui; but how far their lordship radiated from that centre is not known.
In the year 722 another victorious general thrust himself on to the throne and, under the famous name of Sargon, set forth to extend the bounds of the empire towards Media on the east, and over Cilicia into Tabal on the west, until he came into collision with King Mita of the Mushki and held him to tribute.
Because of this last fact, the Mushki have been put down as proto-Phrygians, risen to power after the fall of the Cappadocian Hatti. This contention will be considered hereafter, when we reach the date of the first known contact between Assyria and any people settled in western Asia Minor.
A king Mita of the Mushki first appears in the annals of the New Assyrian Kingdom as opposing Sargon, when the latter, early in his reign, tried to push his sphere of influence, if not his territorial empire, beyond the Taurus to include the principalities of Kue and Tabal; and the same Mita appears to have been allied with Carchemish in the revolt which ended with its siege and final capture in 717 B.C. As has been said in the last chapter, it is usual to identify this king with one of those "Phrygians" known to the Greeks as Midas preferably with the son of the first Gordius, whose wealth and power have been immortalized in mythology.
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