Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. And one of the things that I really enjoy when I study history are those moments where the things that are legends that came up in like, I don't even know, Scooby-Doo cartoons or some book I read as a kid, or it's just, you know, it's in the ether, these legends, these myths, these stories, these little cultural nods that you you have no idea when it was thought of or where it comes from, but kind of everybody's heard of it. I love it when I'm studying history and I find out that oh, that thing I've always heard of, it's from right here. I had no idea. That is kind of how Phrygia is for me. It's a gold mine of that kind of thing. And maybe the reason that it's such a gold mine and there's so much gold of that type in Phrygia is because that is where the legendary King Midas, who whatever he touched, turned to gold is from. I thought that was kind of artful. I had fun with that one. No, the King Midas thing. Everybody's heard of the Midas touch, right? I mean, Midas is a brand. What do they do? Breaks and stuff? I don't know. In my experience, that hasn't always turned to gold for me, but Midas, I mean, still a brand name in our country today. So clearly, this character from history from somewhere casts a very long shadow. And everybody's heard of the Midas touch. That's still an expression that we use for somebody who it just everything works out for them. Whatever they touch, it just turns to gold, right? And we never forget the second part of that myth, that legend where it's cautionary. It's like, well, you can't hug your daughter anymore. Oh, yeah, well, that part's sad. But get me back to the part where I get the gold. Midas was an actual dude, an actual king from the golden era. There, another pun. I don't know if that one was on purpose or not. I sometimes I can't even search my motives. But he was from the golden age of the golden ancient kingdom of Phrygia. Phrygia took up like the middle chunk of modern-day Turkey back in the day. Now, this is interesting to us because another reminder of how much boundaries change over time. In the last season on the book of Galatians from the New Testament, we spent so much time talking about the geography of central Turkey as it pertains to this region in Roman times called Galatia. Now, Galatia is an hour-shaped Roman province at the time of the New Testament, so the first century A.D. And that hourglass-shaped Roman province, the northern clump outcropping of that, is historic ethnic Galatia, probably named for the Celtic Gauls, Frenchies, who moved down there into northern Turkey, I don't know, maybe around the time of Alexander the Great. Maybe it was part of that shakeup in the 300s BC. I don't think we ever nailed it down for sure. And then southern Galatia isn't really ethnic. That Roman southern half of the hourglass-shaped province is made up of a bunch of different ancient ethnic people groups, but Rome just kind of lumped it all together into an administrative state, and you got a whole bunch of people from a whole bunch of different backgrounds in there with prominent communities like Lystra, Derby, Pisidian Antioch, and Iconium, modern-day Turkish Conya. Well, historically, Iconium, at least, isn't really Galatian at all. Ethnically, it isn't Galatian. The people of Iconium aren't descended from the Gauls, the Celtic Gauls who migrated centuries before the time of Jesus in the New Testament. Iconium historically, ethnically, is the same thing as Colossae, the city that we have in view this season. It's Phrygian, and really a lot of the people of central Turkey to this day, I suppose, are Phrygian. Phrygia is the first meaningful, identifiable people group with a name and a heritage and writing and artifacts that lived in this very prominent cultural junk of land in the history of planet Earth. And like I was saying at the beginning, there's a whole bunch of myths and legends and cool stuff that you have heard of from Phrygia, but that you just didn't know were Phrygian. And it can be really easy to lump all of this together with other things around this part of the world in ancient times and just be like, well, the Phrygians, they were just kind of another brand of Greeks, but they weren't, really, they weren't. Homer tells us in the Iliad that there were characters from around Gordium, that there were characters who were Phrygian. And in the Iliad, maybe the Odyssey, the writings of Homer, the language of the Trojans is not intelligible to the language of the Phrygians. That is, they can't talk to each other. So right there, we've got a firsthand account saying these people didn't speak Greek. The Phrygians didn't speak Greek. They were close to Greek culture. They had some bleed over and overlap, but in this golden age of Phrygian history, the second of the flags over Colossae, they were truly a very set apart, different people group with a language that I understand was spoken to some degree all the way up until like the sixth or seventh century AD, but that worked in terms of pronunciation and alphabet, if you can even call it that, very differently than how Greek worked. Well, their capital was in Gordium. And maybe some of you were here for the last season on Galatians. Remember, well, wait a minute, Gordium is a city we talked about last season. That was in Galatia, not Phrygia. What are you talking about, Matt? Well, remember, Phrygia as a first century Roman province does not correspond with the historic homeland of the Phrygians. It's smaller and it kind of sits away from the historic capital of the Phrygians, which was Gordium. And I think that's kind of fun if you were here for the last season again, because it means that some of the work we did last time around, talking about Anchara and Gordium up north in the northern part of the hourglass of the Roman province of Galatia, actually kind of preps us for what we're talking about this season with the history of the Phrygian people. Well, King Midas was king up there, and surely the legend of everything he touched turned to gold was born out of some sort, I mean, is rooted in some kind of reality about how wealthy he was and how great they maybe did at business. The Phrygians apparently were really good at wool, and they were apparently really good at red dyes. All of the, not all, but a lot of the ancient art depicting the Phrygians, if it's at all well preserved, you can still see any of the paint on it, it's always red. Red is a fairly common color, but also, I mean, it's distinctive. There's an identity with that, right? Like when you think red college football teams, uh, does Alabama count as red? I guess that's kind of crimson. Nebraska, go big red. They're red. I mean, think of it, you know, the baseball teams. Uh, the red team is, I suppose it's the St. Louis Cardinals, right? When you think about, oh, hello, somebody came to visit me. It's Camilla. The sky's really pretty right now. Do we have northern lights? Hang on a second. I'm gonna go look at the northern lights. One sec, I'm coming back. Y'all are missing out. It was worth it. My wife knows that if I'm recording things, you know, we got a little light. It just means like I'm recording stuff. I'll talk to you when I'm done recording things. I've been talking to my internet friends right now. So I know if she's interrupting me, it's an emergency or it's something awesome. And wow, the those are the best northern lights I've ever seen from in town ever. So, speaking of big red, beautiful things, go northern lights. I'm gonna I'm gonna publish what I just saw on Patreon. You don't have to pay for Patreon to see the stuff that we publish over there, by the way. You can go over there and I'll just share it with you. It'll be part of our discussion over there. At any rate, Phrygia. They're associated with red, so that apparently they had some kind of trick for making red dye that looked real cool. It was kind of their calling card visually, as well as I just think this is adorable, a certain kind of floppy hat. The Phrygians had a little hat that they wore. Probably they were red hats. It's the hat that you associate maybe with like a smurf. If you can picture that, kind of rolled over like a cursive K, the bottom half of a cursive K. It's like that shaped hat. Or French revolutionaries, they called it a revolutionary cap. It was all stylish and edgy for the young people back then who were throwing revolutions and whatnot. The floppy cap that was the symbol of Phrygia. I don't know why they wore it, but I think it looks pretty cool. I guess maybe now that I've seen that Phrygia and Colossae were kind of mountain y and stuff, you know, maybe it was like a little floppy little toque or beanie or something. Whatever the case, the Phrygians had their own look. They had their own feel. They had their, oh, they had their own sound. Yeah, they had their own scale. They even had their own musical sound that people in the ancient world considered the sound of like militaristic, powerful music. I mean, this is what they always taught us when my parents taught me music and stuff. They were like, this song right here is the Phrygian dominant scale example song. Hava nagila hava nagila hava nagila. That one. Yeah, I mean, it's not Phrygian in terms of the lyrics or whatever, but I mean, that song, if you can picture that one, that's like the most famous example of the Phrygian sound. Maybe it's kind of laughable to picture the floppy capped red wearing Phrygians marching off to war to something that sounds like Harry Belafonte singing Havanagilla, but hey, whatever. It gives you a picture, right? Like we're seeing them more in 3D, though, instead of just as some vaguely Greekish thing from Turkey a long time ago. This stuff that you and I are learning here together, this is this is the stuff of legend. This is the stuff of ethnic heritage that made Philemon and Onesimus and the characters that we encounter in Colossians and Philemon in the New Testament. This is the stuff they had rattling around in the back of their head. This is the stuff that made their identity what it was. This is the stuff that got replaced when Persia came to town, when Alexander came to town, when the Romans came to town. And also, well, I think there were probably a few people who wondered if when Christianity came to town, if it was gonna replace some of these things. Yeah, the better we understand this, the better we understand the people we're talking to, the better we understand the letter that was written by Paul to them. And we're gonna keep looking at these various flags that flew over Colossae and Phrygia moving forward. Thanks for letting me take a quick break there and run out and look at the northern lights. That was pretty rad. These pictures are amazing. I'm going to go drive out into the country now and I will share them with you on Patreon so that you can see them too, and we can mentally high-five over the internet. Okay, more Colossae and Phrygian history. Next time around, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.