... The names of Phrygian kings which occur in the Homeric poems, such as Phorkys, Askanios, Dymas and his son Asios, Otreus and Mygdon, show no connexion with the later dynasty of Midas and Gordios.  In the next period Phrygian art was at its best, and is an improvement on that of the Hittites.  The most important works are a considerable number of rock-cut tombs, of which the most characteristic decoration is a sort of chessboard pattern on the facade, but there are sometimes sculptures in relief or in the round.  There are also important remains of cities and fortresses largely cut in the rock near the "tomb of Midas" (identified by an inscription), and at Pishmish Kaleh, and most, if not all, the few extant Phrygian inscriptions in an alphabet of Greek origin are of the same date.  To this period we may probably assign the powerful dynasty of kings styled alternately Midas and Gordios, of which the Greeks had some slight knowledge.  Their greatest prosperity was probably between B.C. 800 and 670, when the Phrygian state suffered so terribly from the invasion of the Kimmerians that King Midas slew himself, and Phrygia never recovered its independence, but became first a vassal state of the Lydians, still under the house of Midas, and then a satrapy of the Persian empire... (The English Historical Review, Creighton, v.10, 1895)