Phrygian rock cut shrines, most famously at Midas City, carve Cybele's Phrygian name and title, Matar Kubileya, directly into the monument alongside her image, giving her cult a documented Anatolian origin independent of anything Greek or Roman sources later say about her. Greek cities that received her cult from around the sixth century BCE identified her with Rhea and absorbed her into existing religious life with varying degrees of comfort, since her cult's ecstatic, drum accompanied character sat awkwardly beside more restrained civic religion in some cities even as it was formally tolerated.
Rome's adoption in 204 BCE, during the Second Punic War and on the instruction of the Sibylline Books consulted in a moment of national crisis, brought her sacred black stone from Pessinus in Asia Minor to the Palatine Hill, where her temple stood beside an annual April festival, the Megalensia, that included games, theatrical performances and a ritual washing of her image, the lavatio, carried out in the Almo river outside the city. The Roman state kept the cult under unusually direct control for a foreign import, restricting Roman citizens from serving as her priests for a long period and confining the more ecstatic elements of her worship, the drumming, self wounding and public procession her Anatolian and Greek forms could include, largely to designated festival days rather than allowing them as ongoing public practice.