Date
4-17-2024
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)
Chair
Christopher Sneeringer
Keywords
Phrygian ethnonym, Bryges, free
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Education
Recommended Citation
Quattlebaum, Ava Anne, "The Iconography of Phrygia and the Phrygian Ethnonym as the Hypothetical Cognate of “Free”" (2024). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 5392.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/5392
Abstract
For the word ‘free’ to truly be a cognate of Phrygia, they must share the same Indo-European (PIE) root which is *priya (‘love, dear one’) from which the cognates ‘friend,’ ‘frou’ and goddesses ‘Frigg’ and ‘Freyja’ (goddesses of ‘love’) are derived. However, ‘Phrygia’ is not yet proven to be a cognate with the same root *priya. Its etymology is relatively unknown and yet this research has discovered that the Phrygian ethnonym is indeed reported to mean ‘free men’ in the Macedonian language. If this is true, then the meaning of ‘free’ may be more related to the Phrygian ethnonym than previously believed. Recent studies by Milena Anfosso looking at the primary monument of their chief goddess, Cybele (the Magna Matar and goddess of ‘love’ and of weaving) confirm in the knot metaphor the rare gloss by Hesychius (5th c.) who reports the Bryges meant “free men.” Her independent study is synchronized with four other sources to discover the meaning of “free” as it appears to have descended from the Macedonian language. The Macedonian marriage knot of Hercules, the god of Alexander the Great, combined with the Gordian Knot and Celtic knot provides evidence to confirm the 1793 English Etymology. Emile Benveviste tells us that “free” and “liberty" took parallel paths from Celtic and Latin respectively. This is compared to the Phrygian goddess versus the later Greek preference for Zeus. In an especially telling and rare definition, Rev. George W. Lemon defines ‘free’ in kinship or feudal terms. Strabo and Herodotus 7.73 explain the Bryges changed their name to Phryges, but some histories record the sudden change was due to a female, a ‘frou’ or the river Phryx. The effeminate and egalitarian nature of the Phrygian culture further suggests this possibility to be a fact lost to history and difficult to prove in the face of what Ilija Casule considers a Greek bias. Casule’s recent findings comparing the Phrygian language with that of the Burushaski tribe in the Himalayas warrants a fresh look at the relationship between the Phrygians whose literature is found only in Homer, Aesop's fables, and their famous iconography in the form of a red woolen cap symbolizing armed rebellion, slavery and freedom as paradoxical as the Gordian Knot. Other than that, their language is deciphered in the Lexicon of Phrygian Inscriptions of which no word (of about 200 words) includes ‘free’, yet Areyastis (the epithet for their chief goddess) resembles Ariadne, (with root ari, ‘noble, free’) fortifying the web as a motif. The English Etymology by George Lemon suggests that the Phrygian ethnonym Bryges is related to ‘free’ by its definition, lending ample cause for the hypothetical relationship between the Phrygian oronym and the liet motif of the complex knot, a cosmological symbol more ancient than the Greek paradigms. The Macedonian term ‘free’ is hypothetically older than ‘liberty’, (as Phrygia predates Hellenism) rooted in the prototypical mother goddess and personification of an abducted Helen (later Libertas), although both words unite in the kinship terms of the PIE language. If the sources discovered here are to be believed, the term ‘free’ as defined by the knot, lies in the iconography of Phrygia, and their language may be less “Pre-Greek” as described by Claude Brixhe, and more Macedonian or Khotanese. The Tibetan *briya refers to a message within a knot and reaffirms the claims of Phrygians to be among the most ancient people of the world, of Thracian decent. Onomastics, Comparative philology, iconography and mythology are used to find the oriental origins of English language recognized formally by Sir William Jones. The extremes which Alexander traversed from Siwa to Punjab, cutting or loosing the Gordian Knot in 333 BC, places Phrygia as the lynchpin to understanding its meaning.
