later Moschi.

It must also be admitted that the splendour of the surviving rock
monuments near the Phrygian capital is consistent with its having been
the centre of a very considerable empire, and hardly consistent with its
having been anything less. The greatest of these, the tomb of a king
Midas (son not of Gordius but of Atys), has for facade a cliff about a
hundred feet high, cut back to a smooth face on which an elaborate
geometric pattern has been left in relief. At the foot is a false door,
while above the immense stone curtain the rock has been carved into a
triangular pediment worthy of a Greek temple and engraved with a long
inscription in a variety of the earliest Greek alphabet. There are many
other rock-tombs of smaller size but similar plan and decoration in the
district round the central site, and others which show reliefs of human
figures and of lions, the latter of immense proportions on two famous
facades. When these were carved, the Assyrian art of the New Kingdom was
evidently known in Phrygia (probably in the early seventh century), and
it is difficult to believe that those who made such great things under
Assyrian influence can have passed wholly unmentioned by contemporary
Assyrian records. Therefore, after all, we shall, perhaps, have to admit
that they were those same Mushki who followed leaders of the name Mita
to do battle with the Great Kings of Nineveh from Sargon to
Ashurbanipal.

There is no doubt how the Phrygian kingdom came by its end. Assyrian
records attest that the Gimirrai or Cimmerians, an Indo-European
Scythian folk, which has left its name to Crim Tartary, and the present
Crimea, swept southward and westward about the middle of the seventh
century, and Greek records tell how they took and sacked the capital of
Phrygia and put to death or forced to suicide the last King Midas.