Читать книгу The History of the Ancient Civilizations - Duncker Max - Страница 45

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The peninsula of Asia Minor is a table-land of about 750 miles in length by 400 in breadth, lying between the Black Sea, the Ægean, and the Mediterranean. This table-land reaches its highest level in the south; here run along the Mediterranean, from east to west, parallel ranges of mountains, the chain of Taurus, and under the snow-clad heights lie green Alpine pastures, while the slopes are filled with the most beautiful wood. Under these mountains on the sea we find here and there narrow and hot but fruitful plains, which are separated into several sharply-divided districts by the spurs of the Taurus, which run athwart them into the sea. Northward of the peaks of Taurus the soil gradually sinks to the Black Sea, so that while the southern coast possesses only short streams, with the exception of the Sarus and Pyramus, the larger arteries of the land empty into the Black Sea—the Iris, the Halys, the Billæus, the Sangarius, and the Rhyndakus. These rivers take their course, partly through rocky districts, partly through extremely fruitful valleys. The centre of the land, from the middle course of the Halys to the Sangarius in the west, is taken up with a wide treeless desert, the great Salt-steppe, the edges of which are formed by a mass of volcanic craters, by deep ravines and large lakes. Further to the west the waters streaming from the table-land find their way to the Ægean, down a series of mountain terraces, so that the valleys of the Mæander and the Hermus are at the same time the highways which connect the coast with the interior. These terraces sometimes advance to the western shore, with steep limestone rocks and precipitous promontories running out into the bright blue sea; at other times they approach the coast with softer outlines; in one place broader, in others narrower plains are left, which, owing to the great fertility of the soil, are covered with orchards and vineyards. Further inland, on the rising heights, is a splendid forest of oaks, firs, and planes, broken by mountain pastures, over which rise the jagged rocks of Ida, Tmolus, Messogis, and Latmus; in the far distance the snow-capped peaks of Taurus fill the horizon. On the western coast the proximity of the ocean softens the heat of summer and the cold of winter; and the combination of sea and mountain, of ocean breezes and upland air, the connection opened to the table-land on the east by the Hermus and Mæander and the calm sea on the west, which forms a passage to a number of adjacent islands—make these districts on the shore of the Ægean Sea the favoured home of civilisation in Asia Minor.

On the north-east, where the peninsula joins the broad mountain land of the isthmus between the Black Sea and the Caspian, around the sources of the Euphrates and Tigris, on the course of the Araxes, which falls into the Caspian Sea, and the high table-land of Lake Van, lay the home of the Armenians. According to Strabo, their customs were like those of the Medes, who were the neighbours of the Armenians, to the east of the Lake of Urumiah, and at the mouth of the Araxes. And if, according to the same evidence, the Armenians paid the greatest reverence to the goddess Anaitis,[688] the goddess Anahita held a prominent position in the worship of the nations of the table-land of Iran. Moreover, even in modern Armenian, the affinity with the Iranian languages is predominant; and there is therefore no doubt that the Armenians belong to the Indo-Germanic stock, and are a nation of Aryan descent.

On the southern slope of the group of mountains which they possessed south-east of the Lake of Van, on the upper course of the Great Zab, lay the district of Arphaxad, with which we have already become acquainted from Semitic sources; south of the lake lay the Carduchi, whom the later Greeks call the Gordyæans and Gordyenes; but among the Armenians they were known as Kordu, among the Syrians as Kardu.[689] These are the ancestors of the modern Kurds, a nation also of the Aryan stock, whose language is even nearer to those of Iran than the Armenian. Westward of the Carduchi, at the confluence of the two streams of the Euphrates, we again meet with a Semitic race.[690] The north-western slope of the Armenian mountains, as far as the Phasis and the Black Sea, was the home of the Muskai of the Assyrian inscriptions, the Mesech of the Hebrews, the Moschi of the Greeks. Beside them, further to the west, on the coast, were the Tabal of the Assyrians, the Tubal of the Hebrews, the Tibarenes of the Greeks; westward from these, as far as the mouth of the Iris, were the Chalti of the Armenians, the Chalybians (Chaldæans) of the Greeks. Of the origin and language of the Moschi and Tibarenes we know nothing further; the genealogies of the Hebrews placed Mesech and Tubal among the sons of Japhet.

The territory of the Armenians round Lake Van lies 5,000 feet high. The only extensive plain among the mountains which are the home of the Armenians is the valley on the middle course of the Araxes, which is separated from the district of the Van by the range of the Masis (Ararat). The highest peak of this range, a mighty cone of dark rock, veiled by wide glaciers, rises to a height of 16,000 feet. Only the valley of the Araxes allowed agriculture on any extensive scale; it only brought forth abundant produce. Other more protected and warmer depressions, though small in extent, on the southern slopes, permitted the culture of the vine. The inhabitants of the heights followed a pastoral life, and the mountain pastures supported splendid horses and mules.

Moses of Chorni (Khorene), who wrote the history of Armenia in the years 460–480 of our era,[691] tells us as follows:—Japhet, the third son of Noah, had a son Gomer; Gomer's son was Thiras; Thiras had a son Thorgom; Thorgom's son Haik, together with his son Armenak and all his family, emigrated from Babylon to the plain of Airarat, in order to escape the tyranny of Belus, the king of Babel. This plain Haik then left to Cadmus, his grandson, the son of Armenak, and himself, with Armenak, passed on to the west, and founded Haikashen. But when the army of the Babylonians marched out to attack Airarat, Haik came to the assistance of his grandson, and defeated Belus on the shore of Lake Van. Then Armenak marched eastwards from Haikashen into the plain at the foot of the Aragazd, where at a later time Armajis, the son of Armenak, built the city of Armavir. The son of Armajis was Amasiaj, and of Amasiaj, Arast. The grandson of Arast was Aram, who undertook distant campaigns, and subjugated Syria and Cappadocia to his rule. With him Ninus, king of Assyria, out of respect to his power and bravery, made a league. Aram's son and successor was Araj, whose beauty inflamed Shamiram (Semiramis), the queen of Assyria. When Araj resisted her inclinations, Shamiram, at the head of her army, invaded Armenia, but, before the battle, she bade her soldiers spare Araj. The Armenians were defeated, and in spite of the command of Shamiram, Araj was slain in the mêlée, and she attempted in vain to resuscitate the corpse by magic arts. Then Shamiram caused builders to come from Assyria to Armenia, and with the help of these she erected a splendid city, Shamiramakert (city of Semiramis), on the shore of the lake of Van, in order to dwell in the cool air of the mountains during the heat of the summer months; and the throne of Armenia she gave to Cardus, the son of Araj. But he rebelled against her, fought without success, and, like his father, fell in battle. At last the Medes rebelled against Shamiram, and after defeat she fled to Armenia. On the shores of Lake Van she was overtaken by her pursuers, and when she had thrown her necklace and her ornaments into the water, she was slain. Then her son Zames (Ninyas) ascended the throne of Assyria, and for twenty-six generations the descendants of Cardus were vassals of the kings of Assyria.[692] After these twenty-six kings, whose names are given by Moses, when Nineveh had fallen, Barbakis (Arbaces) the Mede, crowned Baroir king of Armenia, and his descendants ruled as independent princes. The ninth successor of Baroir was Tigran (Tigranes). He conquered Azdahag (Astyages), the king of the Medes, and pierced him through with his lance in the battle. Owing to Tigran's bravery and victory, the prince of the Persians became the lord of the Medes.[693]

We can trace the elements out of which this account has arisen. The names Japhet, Gomer, and Thiras are borrowed from the Hebrew scriptures, from the genealogy of the Japhetic nations in Genesis; but the order of succession is altered. To the same book belongs Thorgom, the son of Thiras, and father of Haik; in the Hebrew his name is Torgarmah. Torgarmah was the name of Armenia among the Syrians;[694] the Hebrews appear to have used the word to denote the district of Van. The native name of the Armenians was Haikh, and of the land, Haiastan. From these names is derived Haik, the son of Thorgom, the progenitor of the race. The emigration from Babylon is no doubt an invention arising out of some early contact, out of the trade of Armenia with Babylonia, and intended to give the Armenians a share in the splendour of that ancient centre of the civilisation of Hither Asia, from which, as a fact, they derived such important elements of culture as their system of writing. Eastward of Lake Van Haik defeats the Babylonians, for here lay Haik's fortress; in Armenian Haikabjerd, i.e. fortress of the Armenians, and Hajots-dsor, i.e. valley of the Armenians. Northeast of this lake lies the canton of Harkth, i.e. the fathers, the canton of the fathers;[695] and in this, on the Eastern Euphrates, is Haikashen, i.e. Haik's building, which Haik is said to have founded, and where his grave was reported to be. As the name of Haik, i.e. the name of the nation, clings especially to the neighbourhood of Lake Van, so are the names of his supposed successors, his son Armenak, and grandsons Cadmos and Amajis, attached to the district of Airarat, to Mount Aragadz, and the city of Armavir. The land of Airarat, i.e. the fruitful plain, on the middle course of the Araxes, was, as we have heard, the first object of the immigrants, who must have come, not from the south, as the story represents, but from the east, from Media, and must have reached the valley of the Araxes from the shore of the Caspian Sea. As Haikh is the name by which the Armenians called themselves, so Armenak is obviously formed from the name Armina, which the Medes and Persians gave to the Armenians. Cadmus, the son of Armenak, is inserted in the story; and has been borrowed, as the form of the name shows, from Grecian sources, perhaps to represent the Semitic population in the South of Armenia. That in this learned construction of the Armenian myth the eastern, and not the southern, district of Armenia is given to Cadmus, is due, no doubt, to the fact that the Semitic word kedem could hardly have any other meaning than that of "the East." Armenak's grandson and great-grandson, Amasiaj and Arast, represent respectively the mountain chain of Masis and the river Araxes; in old Armenian the name of the latter was Eras'ch.[696]

The division of the two centres of the Armenian land and Armenian life—the land in the East and the land in the West, the land of Ararat on the Araxes, and the district of Van—is strongly marked in this tradition, and not less so in the Assyrian inscriptions and the scriptures of the Hebrews. The first text of the Pentateuch represents Noah's ship as landing on Mount Ararat, and this text or the second mentions Togarmah beside Gomer. The prophet Ezekiel speaks of the horses and mules which came from Togarmah, the land of mountain pastures, to Tyre.[697] The Assyrian inscriptions mention the land of Van (mat vannai) beside the land of Urarti, i.e. Ararat; each is ruled by its own prince.

King Aram represents the land of Aram, the Aramæans, whose neighbours the Armenians were, and with whom they came into frequent contact. The oldest historical recollections of the Armenians might perhaps go back to the times when the kings of Assyria made an inroad into their mountains and reduced their princes to tribute and obedience. But when Moses of Chorni tells us of the meetings of Aram, Araj, and Cardus with Ninus, Semiramis, and Ninyas, of the twenty-six kings who governed under Assyrian dominion, and of the liberation of the land by Arbaces, these supposed names of the Assyrian riders are enough to prove that the narratives were framed upon the accounts of the Greeks, especially the Greek chronographers.

On the other hand, the story of the city of Semiramis on Lake Van is grounded upon the Assyrian images and ruins, which are still found in various parts of Armenia, especially at Van, Bitlis, Karkar, Egil, and Achlat, as also upon monuments of the Persian kings, and Xerxes in particular; but no doubt it is due in the greatest extent to the monuments of the native princes, of whom inscriptions are in existence belonging to the end of the seventh and the sixth century B.C. Later historians knew nothing of these princes, and were unable to read the inscriptions. The long list of Armenian kings in Moses of Chorni does not contain a single name of the Armenian princes mentioned in the inscriptions of the Assyrian kings, or in the native inscriptions of these princes.

The narrative of king Tigran appears to be of an earlier date than the rest of the material from which Moses of Chorni compiled his history of Armenia in the older period. Tigran is said to have ruled over Armenia at the time of Cyrus, with whom he entered into a league; he overcame Astyages (Azdahag) of Media in battle, and slew him in single combat. The first wife of Astyages and a number of his children, together with other captives, Tigran then conducted to Armenia, and there he settled them in the neighbourhood of Koghten. In the songs of the people of Koghten the descendants of Astyages are "allegorically" spoken of as the descendants of the dragon, "for Azdahag," Moses adds, "signifies a dragon in our language."[698] Hence it is clear that the Armenians claimed the glory of having conquered the Medes and overthrown their supremacy. And if they called the descendants of Astyages the descendants of the dragon, they obviously contracted the old cloud-demon of the Avesta, Azhi-dahaka, into Azdahag, and confounded him with Astyages. Xenophon in his romance of Cyrus calls Tigranes the son of the king of Armenia, and represents him as paying the most considerable services to Cyrus. It may have been the case that Xenophon in his march through Armenia, when he crossed the snowclad heights of this mountain region, and entered the mud huts of the mountaineers, and was hospitably entertained by them with barley-wine, i.e. with beer, heard the name and deeds of Tigranes.[699]

The kings of Assyria at an early period turned their arms to the North. On the Zibene-su, the eastern source of the Western Tigris, the likeness of Tiglath Pilesar I. (1130–1110 B.C.) has been found engraved on the rocks at Karkar. The inscription tells us that he had overcome the land of Nairi, i.e. in all probability the land of the rivers (Euphrates and Tigris), and that he had defeated the Muskai (p. 512), who had not paid their tribute for fifty years, and had invaded Kumukh (Commagene). More than 200 years later, Tiglath Adar II. (889 to 883 B.C.) caused his image to be hewn in the rocks here beside that of the first Tiglath Pilesar. Tiglath Adar's successor, Assurnasirpal (883–859 B.C.), made repeated campaigns against the Nairi, destroyed 250 of their towns, slew many of their princes, and set up his image beside those of Tiglath Adar and Tiglath Pilesar. In his tenth campaign he took Amida (Diabekr) on the Tigris. Below this city, at Kurkh, there is a second image of this king. His successor also, Shalmanesar II. (859–823 B.C.), fought against the Nairi, set up his image at the source of the Tigris, and in the year 843 defeated the king of Urarti. In the year 831 his troops again defeated a king of Urarti, of another name than the first; in the year 828 B.C. they laid waste the land of king Udaki of Van, and in the following campaign fifty places in Urarti were burnt. Bin Nirar III., king of Asshur (810–781 B.C.), marched twice against the district of Lake Van, and seven times against the Nairi; he boasts that he has taken possession of the land of the Nairi throughout its whole extent.[700] Shalmanesar III. (781–771 B.C.) led his army six times against Urarti. Then Tiglath Pilesar II. (745–727 B.C.), in the year 742, defeated king Sarda, or Sarduri, of Urarti, with his confederates; in the year 728 B.C. removed Vassarmi from Tubal, and placed Chulli on the throne in his stead. In the time of Sargon of Assyria (722–705 B.C.), Aza, the prince of the land of Van, who, like his predecessor Iranzu, was a tributary to Assyria, was murdered. His brother Ullusun, whom Sargon put in his place, combined with Urza, prince of Ararat, and the prince of Mount Mildis against Assyria. Sargon was victorious; Ullusun submitted (716 B.C.); but Urza maintained himself in Ararat, and although Sargon boasts to have burnt fifty of his townships, he combined with Urzana of Musasir, i.e. probably of Arsissa on Lake Van, with Mita, prince of the Moschi, with Ambris, prince of Tubal, the son of Chulli, whom Sargon had allowed to succeed his father on the throne of the Tibarenes, and to whom at the same time he had entrusted the sovereignty over Cilicia, and had given his daughter in marriage.[701] The confederates were defeated; Ambris was carried prisoner to Assyria, a part of his nation were transplanted to Assyria, and Assyrians settled at Tubal in his place. Mita submitted. Arsissa was captured; 20,000 prisoners, their treasures, the gods Haldia (?) and Bagamazda (?), with the holy vessels, were carried away. When Urza perceived this, he took away his own life (714 B.C.).[702] In the seventh century Esarhaddon of Assyria had to fight against the Cilicians, the Tibarenes, and the Mannai; the last name seems to denote the Armenian district of Minyas, on the upper course of the Eastern Euphrates, of which the chief city was Manavazakert; Manavaz, the son of Haik, is said to have built this city.[703] Against the Mannai, or the Minni of Ezekiel, Esarhaddon's successor, Assurbanipal (668–626 B.C.), also directed his weapons. In the course of this war Asheri, the prince of the Minni, was slain by his own dependents, and his son Ualli submitted; the previous tribute of the Minni was raised by thirty horses; and Mugalla, king of Tubal, and Sandasarmi of Cilicia voluntarily submitted to Assurbanipal.[704]

The mountains of Armenia, as these narratives prove, were divided into several principalities. The Assyrians first attacked the land to the south of the high mountain-range, i.e., in the first instance the land of Ararat, the most powerful of these Armenian principalities. On either side of the mountain, in the basin of Lake Van, and in the valley of the Araxes, the Armenians made a vigorous resistance, so that the obedience of the Armenian chieftains never seemed to be secured for any length of time. In spite of this resistance, the civilisation of the Assyrians exercised great influence on the Armenians. This is not merely shown in the adoption of the system of cuneiform writing on the part of the Armenians; Sargon caused the capture of Arsissa to be represented in his palace at Khorsabad. If these reliefs are true representations, the style of architecture and the plan of the Armenian temples were not essentially different from the Assyrian. The altars also, the ornaments, and the weapons appear to be similar.[705] On the other hand it would admit of no doubt that the Armenians, in spite of this influence, retained the worship of their Iranian gods without any foreign admixture, if the name of that Armenian deity Bagamazda, i.e. the great god, were read correctly. That deity would at the same time afford a new proof that the deities of Iran were worshipped in Armenia also. Strabo, as already (p. 512) remarked, gives an account of the worship of Anaitis, the water-giving goddess, the Anahita of the Iranians, among the Armenians; and the name of this goddess is found, in the form "Anaid," in the cuneiform inscriptions of the Armenian princes. Unfortunately these inscriptions, which mainly belong to the land of Van, have not as yet been sufficiently deciphered. The names of the kings, from which they come, are read as Bagridur, Isbuinis, Minuas, Argistis II. and Bagridur II.[706] These kings reigned successively; each calls himself the son of his predecessor. An older Argistis of Ararat is mentioned after the time of Urza in an inscription of Sargon, king of Assyria, belonging apparently to the year 708 B.C. The inscriptions of the kings of Armenia from the first to the second Bagridur are filled with the wars which they carried on, the numbers of the slain, of the captives, the cattle in the spoil, the towns and temples destroyed. As Asshur is mentioned in the inscriptions of Argistis II., and in those of his successor Bagridur II. a war against Babylon is narrated,[707] these two kings must have been contemporaries of the last ruler of Assyria, Assuridilili (626–606 B.C.), and Nebuchadnezzar II. of Babylon (604–568 B.C.), and their three predecessors contemporaries of Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Assurbanipal.

The central plain of the table-land of Asia Minor, from the valley of the Halys and the great salt lake to the Cadmus and the Mysian Olympus, north-westwards as far as the coasts of the Propontis, was inhabited by the Phrygians. According to Herodotus the Thracians asserted that the Phrygians had once dwelt in their land under the name of Briges. Hence they had passed through Thrace to Asia, though a part, who still preserved the name of Briges, had remained behind in Thrace. Of those who arrived in Asia, some passed still further to the east; and the Armenians were colonists of the Phrygians.[708] In Strabo also the Phrygians are immigrants, and come from Thrace.[709] In any case the Bithynians, who were settled on the lower course of the Sangarius from the mouth of this stream westward as far as the Bosporus, were of Thracian descent; they are said to have emigrated from the Strymon to Asia.[710] On the other hand, the Phrygians themselves maintained that they were not an offshoot from the Thracian Briges, but the Briges in Thracia had emigrated from them.[711] If the affinity of the Armenians, the Phrygians, and Thracians is established, the Phrygians must be considered in the right. These migrations could not have proceeded from the Strymon, they must rather have taken place from the east to the west, from Armenia to Thrace, and the Thracians rather than the Armenians were the last link in this emigration. As the modern science of language finds Indo-Germanic roots in the slight remains of the Phrygian language which have come down to us,[712] we must assume that the progenitors of the Phrygians and Thracians passed from the Armenian mountains in the east towards the west. The ancestors of the Phrygians remained on the table-land of Asia Minor, those of the Thracians went further to the north-west, towards Bithynia, over the Bosporus, which the Greeks named after the Thracians; and beyond the strait they inhabited the land under the Balkan from the Black Sea to the shores of the Adriatic. The character of the language of the Thracians and Illyrians, remains of which are preserved in Rumanisch and Albanian, places it in the Indo-Germanic family.

The Phrygians are said to have been a very ancient nation.[713] According to the accounts of the Greeks, the legends of the Phrygians began the history of their country with Gordius and Midas. Gordius, it was said, was a poor farmer, who possessed only two yoke of oxen. At that time the Phrygians were divided by factions, and in order to restore peace, the deity commanded that they should elect as king the man whom they first met on a waggon on the way to the shrine of Zeus. Then they met Gordius on his waggon and greeted him as king. Gordius built the city of Gordium at the confluence of the Scopas and Sangarius, and dedicated in the temple of Zeus on the citadel of Gordium the chariot which carried him to the throne. After Gordius's death the throne descended to his son Midas, to whose lips, when a boy, ants had carried grains of corn. Midas is said to have founded the city of Gordiutichus in the south of the land, on the borders of Phrygia, and Ancyra in the north: at Pessinus on the slope of Mount Agdus he built a temple to the goddess of Phrygia and established the sacrifices.[714] He was the richest king who ever lived. Everything that he touched turned to gold. Once he bathed in the Pactolus, and ever since the sands washed down by the river became sands of gold. When Pan blew his shepherd's pipe, and Apollo touched his lyre, Midas preferred the music of Pan. In revenge, Apollo caused asses' ears to grow upon Midas, and he covered them with a tall cap. But the barber of Midas knew the secret, and told it into a pit; and some rushes grew in the pit, and whispered "Midas has asses' ears."[715]

The gold of Midas and his power of changing everything into that metal comes from the Greeks, whose legends desired to celebrate and explain the ancient wealth of the kings of Phrygia. From the same source are the asses' ears and the whispering rushes. The use of the pan's pipe, though not of the shepherd's pipe, was learnt by the Greeks through their colonists in Asia Minor from the Phrygians. The reed (or flute) was called "eleg" among the Armenians: its notes first accompanied the Elegies of Callinus of Ephesus, and Archilochus of Paros, to which it gave the name. Among the Greeks many judges, and those by no means of the least reputation, gave the most decided preference to the music of the cithara, the lyre of Apollo, over the flute. In the same feeling which prompted this judgment, the want of taste in finding the tones of the flute more beautiful than those of the cithara is visited by a punishment which at the same time is intended to explain the origin of the tall Phrygian cap. The reeds belong to a brook in the vicinity of Celænæ in Phrygia, which the Greeks called "the flute-spring" (Aulokrenê) because the reeds growing on the shores were used as wind-instruments. There is another story in which the Greeks have expressed the contrast between the quiet and composed tones of the cithara, and the wild music of the Phrygian flutes—the Phrygian harmonies to which they ascribed the power of rousing the feelings into a passionate excitement of pain or delight.[716] The music of the flute was introduced into choric poetry in the first half of the sixth century by Polymnestus of Colophon, and Sakadas of Argos. Among the Phrygians, Marsyas, a faithful and chaste companion of their national goddess, was the genius of flute-music.[717] A brook which flowed into the Mæander through the city Apamæa Cibotus, in the neighbourhood of Celænæ, was named after Marsyas. The Greeks had a story that their god Apollo had overcome with his cithara the flute-player of the Phrygians, and had flayed him in punishment for his presumption in entering on the contest. At Celænæ a bottle of Marsyas was exhibited, on which the story of the flaying of Marsyas may have been founded.[718]

After removing the fictions and additions of the Greeks, the characteristic trait of the Phrygian story still remains, that their monarchs arose out of the agricultural class, that grains of corn were carried into the lips of the son of the first ruler, and that the king of Phrygia loved the pan's pipe of the shepherds. Elsewhere also the respect of the Phrygians for the agricultural life is brought into prominence. Nicolaus of Damascus tells us of a law of the Phrygians by which the slaughter of the ploughing ox, or the theft of agricultural implements, was punished with death.[719] In the fourth century B.C. the waggon of Gordius was still standing on the citadel of Gordium. The yoke was bound so fast to the pole with the bark of dog-wood—the knot is reported to been tied by Gordius himself—that it was said in Phrygia that the man who should untie this knot would rule over all Asia. The name Gordius should apparently be traced back to the Armenian "gords," i.e. labour, or "day labour."[720] That side by side with these traits the national tradition ascribed the erection of the ancient cities and temples, the building of Gordium, Gordiuteichus, and Ancyra to the earliest princes, is only natural. The names of the cities Manegordum (near Ancyra) and Midaëum also point to these.

The Phrygians obeyed a dynasty which saw its ancestors in the kings Gordius and Midas, and called themselves alternately by these names. The first king of whom we have any more definite information was Midas, the son of Gordius, who ascended the throne of Phrygia in the year 738 B.C. according to the date of Eusebius. His wife was Damodice, the daughter of Agamemnon, the king of the Greek city of Cyme, who is said to have been a woman distinguished by beauty and wisdom.[721] The seat on which he used to dispense justice, a work well worth seeing, as Herodotus says, he consecrated at Delphi. When Phrygia was attacked by the first great invasion of the Cimmerians, he took away his own life by drinking bull's blood (693 B.C.).[722] Of a third Midas, who reigned apparently about a century later, we learn that his tomb was adorned with the image of a maiden in brass, and that a Greek poet composed as an inscription for this monument the following verses:—

"I am a maiden of brass,

I lie on the tomb of Midas;

While waters flow, and tall trees grow,

On Midas' tearful tomb I lie.

I say to every passer by,

'Here Midas sleeps in earth below.'"[723]

With the descendants of this Midas, Gordius and his son Adrastus, this dynasty came to an end in the sixth century B.C.[724]

Between Prymnessus and Midaëum (Jazili Kaja and Sidi Ghazi), in the valley of Doganlu, lie the tombs of these kings, sepulchral chambers, which are hewn in the perpendicular walls of red sandstone. On the face of the rock there is no trace of any entrance; and the corpses must have been lowered down behind the exterior front. The walls of rock are changed into sculptures, in imitation of the outlines and rudiments of a light wooden building. In low relief a framework of beams is sketched, and over this a low-pitched gable rises. Such are the simplest of these façades, which apparently we must also consider the oldest. Others display a frieze of palm leaves in the upper field of the framework. Others again put the figures of animals in the gable, e.g. two horses, between which is an obelisk, and exhibit traces of Hellenic influence, while another presents a perfect imitation of the Doric arrangement of pillars. Among these sepulchres may once have been the tomb with the maiden of brass. The inscriptions found on some, or in the neighbourhood, are Phrygian, but written in Greek characters. The most important tomb is that of a more ancient Midas at Kümbet. The façade of this monument, which is in framework of the Phrygian style, covers about sixty square feet of the hundred feet of the rock. The space in the field of the framework is entirely filled up with rectangular ornaments and a kind of scroll, while the tympanum of the gable is covered with a key pattern.[725]

Other remarkable remains of buildings are found in Phrygia. Strabo tells us of a tribe on the borders of Cilicia who lived in the arches and hollows of the rocks above the fruitful valley which they cultivated; till conquered by the Romans the tribe was considered invincible, and Vitruvius remarks that the Phrygians excavated the natural hills, cut passages in them, and extended the spaces into dwellings as far as the nature of the place allowed.[726] On the Rhyndakus, in the district of the ancient Prymnessus, at Beibazar, on Lake Egerdir, to the east near Iconium, numerous habitations are found excavated in the rocks, so that it really seems that the Phrygians dwelt in the walls of their mountains.[727] Lofty walls of rock, thousands of isolated cones, and some mighty mountain summits are excavated into dwellings, into rock cities—a task which was rendered easier by the softness of the stone (peperino and tufa). Steep and at times wonderfully jagged rocks, overhanging picturesque valleys, are chiselled out for one or two hundred feet in height in such a manner that several galleries of habitations lie one upon the other. These are lighted by openings in the front, and connected with each other by shafts and staircases: of seats, hearths, or couches there is no trace whatever—only niches and recesses are found. Yet in some of the rock cities an advance may be observed. In these the entrances to some extent exhibit indications of pillars, architraves, portals, and the like, so that the habitations of this kind seem to have been built at a later period. The ruins of the cities of the Phrygians, the remains of Gordium, Midaëum, Pessinus, Prymnessus, and Ancyra allow us to see the so-called Cyclopian style.[728]

Our knowledge of the religious rites of the Phrygians is extremely scanty. They are said to have invoked the god Men, or Manes under various titles,[729] and the names of the cities Manegordum and Manesium seem to go back to this deity. Whether this is the god whom the Greeks called the Phrygian Zeus is not clear. The goddess, whom the Greeks called Rhea or Cybele, Dindymene, Agdistis, after the mountains sacred to her, is said to have been called Amma by the Phrygians.[730] The chief home of her rites was that sanctuary on Mount Agdus near Pessinus, which the first Midas is said to have dedicated to her (p. 525). Here she was worshipped in a shapeless stone of no great size, not larger than a man could lift. At the side of her statue in the temple lions and panthers are said to have stood.[731] Her priests were eunuchs, who waited on the goddess in gaily coloured vestments. The chief priest at Pessinus, or Archigallus, is afterwards found holding a princely position. At the festivals of the goddess, which were celebrated every year, it was the custom for young men to make themselves eunuchs with a sharp shell, crying out at the same time, "Take this, Agdistis." Then they went round the country asking alms in the name of the goddess, and they were known to the Greeks as "Metragyrtes," i.e. "beggars of the mother;"[732] for the goddess, whose priests were eunuchs, and whose service demanded the sacrifice of sex, was called by the Greeks the "Great Mother," the "Mountain Mother," the "Nourishing Earth," the "Giver of all." She must, therefore, have been regarded as the maternal power of the earth, the power of nature, which gives life. It is especially stated that she gave increase to the flocks,[733] and since she was named after different mountains we may assume that high places and mountains were the chosen seats of her worship. In Greek and Roman art the Phrygian goddess is represented as sitting on a chariot drawn by lions and panthers, with a cymbal in her hand, and wearing on her head the mural crown as the goddess of the earth which supports cities.

By the side of the Great Mother stands the god Atys, whom Herodotus calls a son of Manes.[734] He grew up with the shepherds among the goats of the forest. The goddess loved him, but he fled away into the mountains, and there, under a fir-tree, into which his spirit passed, he made himself an eunuch. In search of him Amma roams over the hills in frantic grief, and carries into her cave the tree into which his spirit passed. The emasculation and death of Atys, as also his resurrection, were celebrated by the Phrygians.[735] At these festivals a fir-tree was felled, crowned with violets, twined with garlands, and carried into the sanctuary of the goddess. Afterwards Atys was sought in the mountains with wild music and frenzy, as Amma had sought him. The third day of the festival was "the day of blood," i.e. of the mutilation and death of Atys, who was bewailed with despairing grief, amid rending of the hair and beating of the breast. Then followed a happier scene, the festival of "the resurrection," and the washing of the stone of the goddess.[736] We learn further that Atys was also called Papas among the Phrygians. He is also entitled the goat-herd and neat-herd; the plastic art of Greece and Rome represents him as a youthful shepherd with the Pan's-pipe, and by his side is a pine and a ram. According to later accounts he was the "shepherd of the bright stars."[737] Hence we must assume that in Atys the Phrygians personified the youthful bloom of nature, the bloom of the spring, and they mourned the disappearance of this, just as, according to the Greeks, they sang a piercing wail—the Lityerses—at the time of corn-cutting. They lamented the death of the spring, and the fall of the fruit; the youthful god had resigned his own power; the creative vigour continued only to exist in the tree of Atys, the ever-green fir. In the spring time it awoke again; this was the day of the resurrection with its joy and pleasure. This orgiastic worship, and roaming with wild cries over the heights and in the ravines of the mountains, sometimes in wailing and lamentation, sometimes in joy, is peculiar to the religion of the Phrygians.

The central point of the Phrygian kingdom lay westwards of the great salt plain in the region between Gordium and Ancyra, between Midaëum and Pessinus in the valley of the Sangarius, on whose banks the Homeric poems place the Phrygians, who are the possessors of "well-walled cities."[738] If the majority of the Phrygians remained farmers and shepherds, they nevertheless arrived at an early date at a monarchy, and under this they reached a civilisation by no means contemptible, a national culture, with an architecture and music of their own. On the religion of the Phrygians the rites of their Semitic neighbours on the north and south no doubt exercised a strong influence. The combination of the creative power and the power hostile to procreation into one deity, and the custom of mutilation, are conceptions and rites unknown to the Aryan nations. But they are closely connected with the forms and worship of Astarte-Ashera, just as Atys resembles the Adonis of the Syrians. On the other hand, as was remarked above, the Phrygians adopted the Greek alphabet on their monuments, and Greek verses were composed for the tomb of Midas (p. 528). In return the Greeks adopted the Phrygian flute, and along with it the form of the elegy and the Phrygian harmonies. Nor were these all. The wild roaming, the unchecked sorrow and joy, the tambourines and drums of the Phrygian festivals passed without doubt in the first instance to the Greek colonies in the Propontis, and more especially to Cyzicus, and from thence to the mother country at the celebration of certain festivals of Demeter and Dionysus. "Take," says Euripides in the Bacchæ, "take the drums, the invention of the Phrygians and the mother Rhea. Long ago the Corybantes (the attendants of the Great Mother) devised the mighty circle of the stretched hide and placed in Rhea's hand, with the loud, sweet-sounding tone of Phrygian flutes, the thunder for the festal song."[739]

Towards the east, the south coast of Asia Minor was inhabited by the Cilicians and the Solymi. To the former belonged the slopes of Taurus and the coast to the right bank of the Kalykadnus. Towards the west came the Solymi, in a wild and broken mountain country. They took their name from the Solyma mountains (sallum = steps), which they inhabited, and according to Chœrilus of Samos, they spoke the language of the Phenicians.[740] "The pass," so Xenophon tells us, "which leads to Cilicia (from the interior of Asia Minor) is very steep, and only broad enough for a single waggon. On descending from it you come into a well-watered plain by the sea, which is inclosed from one end to the other by lofty and precipitous mountains. But the plain itself is large and beautiful, and filled with trees of every kind, and with vines. It produces much sesame, wheat, millet, and barley."[741] In addition to these advantages the slopes of Taurus offered splendid pastures for horses, and on the coast were excellent harbours. The inhabitants of this favoured land, known in Assyrian inscriptions as Chillakai, and on the coins of the district from the Persian times as Chelech,[742] belonged, like their neighbours on the Orontes and on the Upper Euphrates, to the Semitic stock. This is proved by the names of their districts and places of their gods, and by the inscriptions on their coins. The Semitic stamp of names of places like Amanus (amana, firm), Adana (eden, delight), Mallus (maa'la, height), Tarsus (tars, dry) is beyond a doubt.[743] Herodotus tells us that the Cilicians wore woollen clothes, and peculiar helmets of ox-leather, and carried swords and spears like the Egyptians, and he maintained that they were descended from Cilix, the son of Agenor, a Phenician. Their princes were always styled Syennesis.[744] This standing name was, without doubt, the title given by the princes of Cilicia to themselves: it must have been schu'a nasi, i.e. "noble prince."[745] Hellanicus tells us that of the two kings of the name of Sardanapalus, who ruled over Assyria, one had built the two cities of Tarsus and Anchiale in Cilicia in one day.[746] On the other hand Berosus informs us that Sennacherib (705–681 B.C.) had heard in Assyria that an army of Greeks had landed in Cilicia; against this he marched and defeated it, but with heavy loss. As a memorial of this victory he caused his image to be set up there, and afterwards the city of Tarsus was built in such a way that the Cydnus flowed through the middle of it. The temple at Anchiale (west of Tarsus, on the sea) was also founded by Sennacherib.[747] When Alexander of Macedonia reached Cilicia his attendants found that the circuit and towers of the walls of Anchiale proved that the city was planned on a large scale. Near the walls they saw the statue of an Assyrian king. His right hand was raised, and the inscription in Assyrian letters is said to have called him Sardanapalus, the son of Anakyndaraxes.[748]

No king of the name of Anakyndaraxes or Sardanapalus ever ruled over Assyria, unless perhaps by the latter is meant Assurbanipal (Assurbanhabal), the son of Esarhaddon. On the other hand, the inscriptions of Shalmanesar II. of Asshur (859–828 B.C.) mention the fact that he had overcome "Pikhirim the chief of the land of Chilakku (Cilicia)," and Sargon, king of Assyria (722–705 B.C.), tells us that the Cilicians had not been subject to his father, and that he had transferred the dominion over Cilicia to Ambris, king of Tubal. Hence Cilicia must have become subject to Sargon in the earliest years of his reign. In consequence of the revolt, which Ambris undertook with Urza of Ararat, and Mita, the king of Moschi, as we saw above (p. 520), Ambris was taken captive and dethroned in the year 714 B.C. Sennacherib, the successor of Sargon (705–681 B.C.), informs us that in the very first years of his reign he had caused rebellious Cilicians to be removed: the inscriptions of the later years of his reign remark that the cities of the Cilicians were destroyed and burnt, and the Cilicians in the forests were reduced. After this the inscriptions of Esarhaddon (681–668 B.C.) assure us that he reduced the Cilicians; and Assurbanipal recounts that Sandasarmi of Cilicia, who had not submitted to the kings his fathers, and fulfilled their commands, sent his daughter with many presents to Nineveh for the harem of Assurbanipal, and kissed his feet.[749]

The fall of the Assyrian kingdom restored their freedom to the Cilicians, and they appear to have maintained it till the times of Cyrus. After that time the princes of Cilicia were merely the viceroys of the kings of Persia. To these sovereigns Cilicia paid each year 500 Babylonian talents of silver and 360 selected horses. The harbours, which carried on a lively trade, were able, at the beginning of the fifth century B.C., to equip and man a hundred ships of war (triremes).[750]

The coins which have come down to us from the supremacy of the Persians allow us to form some conclusions about the religious rites of the Cilician cities. They represent Baal, the sun-god of the Syrians, on the throne, with grapes and ears of corn in his right hand, and sometimes an eagle at his side. Others exhibit Heracles attacking a lion with his club. The inscriptions name the god thus represented Bal Tars, i.e. Baal of Tarsus. A coin of Mallus also exhibits Heracles strangling the lion, i.e. the beneficent sun-god who overcomes the terrible sun-god in the sign of the lion, the consuming glow of the sun. On other coins we can trace the war-goddess, on others the birth-goddess of the Syrians, or her cow; some coins of Celenderis exhibit the goat of this goddess.[751]

The land of the Cilicians must at one time have stretched northwards over the Taurus range to the inner table-land as far as the sources of the Sarus, to the watershed between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, or even further. Sargon could not have transferred the sovereignty over Cilicia to the king of Tubal if his territory was not contiguous to Cilicia. And if we assume that the land of Tubal reached at that time as far as the Taurus, we are met by the objection that even Herodotus represents the Halys as passing through the land of the Cilicians on its way from Armenia.[752] Hence the land afterwards called Cataonia, between Taurus and Antitaurus and the northern spur of the latter range, must, even in the time of Herodotus, have belonged to Cilicia.

On the north-western slope of the Armenian mountains toward the Black Sea we have already found the Moschi and Tibarenes, whom the Hebrews counted among the sons of Japhet. The western neighbours of the Tibarenes on the coasts of the Black Sea were the Chalybians. It is the land of the Chalybians of which the Homeric poems speak, when they mention the city of Alybe—"where is the birth of silver."[753] But it is not only the obtaining of silver that is ascribed by the Greeks to the Chalybians; they are also the discoverers of the working of iron; and steel, which the Greeks obtained from this coast, was named after the Chalybians. Æschylus calls the Chalybians "barbarous workers in brass, men averse to foreigners."[754] In the scriptures of the Hebrews Tubal-cain, a name of which the first part seems to denote the Tibarenes, is the father of the smiths in brass and iron. Hence it is clear that the mines of ore and iron in the land of the Tibarenes and Chalybians must have been opened at a very early period. As a fact the ore lies at a very slight depth in the mountains. Even now large masses of copper are discovered along the coast to the west of Trebizond; beside copper, the mines of Gümüsh Khane, two days' journey in the interior from Trebizond, even now yield lead containing silver, which is also found in the mines of Baibut and Tokat, further to the south.[755] Hence these districts could furnish not only iron and steel, but silver also; elsewhere silver was only to be got in the mines on Mount Ida till the Phenicians imported this metal in large quantities from Tartessus.

Westward of the Chalybians on the Thermodon, the Iris, and the lower course of the Halys, dwelt a population which, setting aside any later admixture, were of Semitic origin. Herodotus calls the inhabitants of the land which reaches from Armenia on the east to the Halys on the west, from the coast of the Black Sea southwards as far as Cilicia, Syrians, and remarks that this was the name of the people in use among the Greeks.[756] Pindar speaks of "a spear-armed Syrian host" on the mouth of the Thermodon.[757] The Greek colony of Sinope west of the mouth of the Halys is said to have been founded in the land of the Syrians of noble stock.[758] A promontory running into the sea to the north of Sinope is called Syrias.[759] The Greeks derived the people in this district from Syrus, a son of Apollo.[760] Scylax of Caryanda names the coast of the Black Sea, from the Chalybians to Armene, westward of the promontory of Syrias, Assyria.[761] Strabo states that these Syrians, who extended from the Taurus northwards as far as the Pontus, were named Leuco-Syrians, i.e. white Syrians, to distinguish them from the true Syrians, and that the Cataonians (p. 538) spoke the same language with them.[762] The coins struck at Sinope (Sanab), Side and Kotyora (Gazir), in the fourth century B.C., have Aramaic legends, and we can trace on them the name and form of the god Baal.[763] The Persians called these people Cappadocians (Katapatuka), and extend the name to Cilicia also. If the Phrygians when marching westwards from Armenia not only traversed but took possession of the land, the Phrygians who remained in the country must have retired to the west before the Semitic tribe, which forced its way from Cilicia and the Upper Euphrates, or have been absorbed by them.

In the eighth century B.C. the Syrians between the Lower Halys and Armenia received a peculiar admixture. "On the shore of the Pontus, where the Scythians now dwell"—such is the account of Herodotus—"it is said that the territory of the Cimmerians lay, and in Scythia the Cimmerian Bosporus and Cimmerian walls and harbours remain, and a region which is called Cimmeria. When the Scythians who once dwelt in the east were driven out by the Massagetes or the Issedones, they came into the land of the Cimmerians. The latter took counsel on the river Tyras, and one part were inclined with the kings to fight against the Scythians, but the others wished to abandon the land. Thus a strife arose between the two parties, and those who wished to retire from the land defeated the king and all who were of the same opinion with him, and buried the slain on the Tyras, where their grave is still to be seen. Then the remainder fled before the Scythians along the sea to Asia, and settled on the peninsula, where Sinope, the city of the Greeks, is now built. But the Scythians took their land in possession, and, led by their king Madyas, they pursued the retreating Cimmerians, but missed them, as they took the upper road, which is far longer, and keeps the Caucasus on the right."[764]

We shall return to the Scythians again; for the present we may leave them out of the question. In Homer the Cimmerians, "miserable men, who are veiled in cloud, darkness, and night, and are never illuminated by the sun," dwell "at the end of earth and Oceanus, where is the opening of the entrance into the under-world."[765] As guardians of the under-world Aristophanes calls them after the dog of Hades, Cerberians.[766] Following the guidance of the Homeric poems, the Cimmerians were sought in the west, where the sun sinks, and the entrance to the under-world was supposed to be; they were placed in the neighbourhood of the Italic Kyme.[767] When the Milesians, about the middle of the eighth century, discovered the north shore of the Black Sea, they found in the extreme north, at the end of the earth, a nation whom the Greeks called Cimmerians. Thus the entrance into Lake Mæotis obtained among the Greeks the name of the Bosporus of the Cimmerians, in contrast to the Bosporus of the Thracians. At a later time the Cimmerians were identified with the Germanic Cimbri and the Celtic Kymri.

Hence the decision would seem to be correct that the Cimmerians ought to be struck out of history as a mythical nation and a mythical name, which was perhaps intended to correspond to the misty, wintry nature of some remote lands, did not the poet Callinus of Ephesus, whose date falls about the year 700 B.C., speak of "the approaching army of the Cimmerians, who achieved mighty deeds:" did not Herodotus himself tell us that the expelled Cimmerians "settled on the peninsula at the place where the Greek city of Sinope now stands"; and also narrate that the Cimmerians, while king Ardys ruled over the Lydians (654–617 B.C.), invaded Lydia, and captured Sardis, the metropolis, except the citadel; and that Alyattes king of Lydia (612–563 B.C.) first expelled the Cimmerians entirely out of Asia Minor:[768] did not Aristotle tell us that the Cimmerians had been settled for a hundred years in Antandros, on the Trojan coast, and Scymnus of Chius, that the Milesian Abron, who founded Sinope, was said to have been slain by the Cimmerians, that Coes and Cretines founded the city anew, "after the Cimmerians, when their array traversed Asia"?[769]

The Cimmerians then were not a legendary fiction: the Cimmerian Bosporus really owed its name to a people who called themselves, or were known to the Greeks, by this name, as also the hamlet of Cimmerikum on the Crimea, and Cimmerium on the peninsula of Kertch. Strabo, the best authority on the Eastern districts of Asia Minor, of which he was a native, says: "The wanderings of the Scythian Madys (it is the Madyas of Herodotus) and of Kobos the Trerian are unknown to most people. The Cimmerians, who are called Treres,[770] or a tribe of them, dwelt on the gloomy Bosporus. They came from a far distant region, and are said to have been driven out by the Scythians. They have often attacked the right side, i.e. the eastern side of the Pontus, and fought against the Cappadocians, Paphlagonians, and Phrygians;[771] they crossed the Halys, and forced their way as far as the Ionian cities.[772] Their first invasion is placed by the chronologers in the time of Midas, who put an end to his life by drinking bull's blood, i.e. as we saw above (p. 528) in the period from 738 to 693 B.C., or according to others, in the time of Homer, or shortly before him.[772] But Lygdamis, with a horde of his own, forced his way to Lydia and Ionia, and conquered Sardis, though he remained in Cilicia.[773] Callisthenes says that Sardis was first taken by the Cimmerians, then by the Treres, and finally by Cyrus. The first capture is also proved by Callinus. At length the Treres, under Kobos, are said to have been driven out by the Scythians under Madys."[774]

From this account it is clear that the Cimmerians, or a part of them, were called Treres, a name also given to a Thracian tribe between the Skomius and Hebrus, on the Bistonian Lake;[775] that they made at least two invasions into the west of Asia Minor; that the second of these, which in Strabo is undertaken under the command of Lygdamis, is the same as the invasion of the Cimmerians which Herodotus places in the time of king Ardys of Lydia. In both writers this invasion extends to Sardis and to some of the Greek cities on the coast, and Plutarch expressly establishes the identity of the invasion of the Treres under Lygdamis with that of the Cimmerians in Herodotus, on ancient authorities.[776] Justin calls the Cimmerians a part of the Scythians, who, owing to their internal contentions, migrated under the leadership of Ilinus and Scolopitus, and established themselves on the coast of Cappadocia.[777]

The incursion of the Scythians into Media, with which Herodotus has combined the migration of the Cimmerians, took place, as we shall show from Herodotus' own statement, about the year 630 B.C. But if Alyattes of Lydia was the first to expel the Cimmerians from the west of Asia Minor after they had been settled for a century in Antandros, these Cimmerians must have been in Asia at least as early as 663 B.C., since Alyattes reigned till 563 B.C. Further, if Herodotus only mentions the destruction of Sardis, which took place about 630 B.C., and is wholly silent on the first destruction by the Cimmerians, this first capture must have taken place before the time from which he commences his accurate account of Lydian history, i.e. before the accession of Gyges in the year 689 B.C., or, according to the data of Herodotus, even before 719 B.C. This capture of Sardis is the only one which could have been known to Callinus. Further, the Cimmerians are said to have invaded Phrygia at the time of that Midas who put himself to death in the year 693 B.C. Hence they must have been in Asia Minor before this year, and if they overpowered Phrygia, they could easily at the same time have forced their way as far as the western coast. Moreover, Strabo remarks that the Milesians built Sinope, when they had become acquainted with the favourable position of the place and the weakness of the people, but the people were not weak after the Cimmerians had occupied the mouth of the Halys. The first foundation of Sinope under Abron must therefore be placed before the arrival of the Cimmerians in Asia Minor. The ancient Sinope founded the city of Trapezus in the year 756 B.C.,[778] and therefore that city must have been founded at least ten years earlier, and its destruction by the Cimmerians must be placed after the year 756 B.C. Hence the Cimmerians might have reached the mouth of the Halys about 750 B.C., though they cannot have come along the coast from Colchis, but over the sea. With this agrees the statement that the Cimmerians forced their way into Asia Minor in the year 782.[779]

From this investigation it follows that the Cimmerians once possessed the north shore of the Black Sea on the straits from Kaffa, westward perhaps as far as the mouth of the Danube. Since the Treres, a Thracian nation, are always mentioned in connexion with the Cimmerians, and it is ascertained that Thracian tribes possessed the western coast of Pontus from the Thracian Bosporus northwards as far as the mouth of the Danube, and as the Agathyrsi in Transylvania are also called Thracians, there can hardly be any doubt remaining that the Cimmerians were of Thracian origin, or at least nearly related to the Thracians. According to the account of Herodotus the Cimmerians held a consultation on the Tyras (Dniester), their kings were said to have been killed there, and in confirmation of the story he appeals to the tumuli which were still to be seen on the Dniester. The only certain conclusion to be drawn from this statement is that mounds on the Dniester were shown to Herodotus as coming down from an older population of those districts. The Cimmerians, who arrived in Asia Minor (the Tauri, on the peninsula which was named after them, appear to be a remnant of this nation, who maintained their old settlements, and the modern name Crimea goes back to the Cimmerians), must have been a numerous and martial people, if they were able not only to establish themselves firmly in the East on the Halys, but also to force their way to the western coast, there to settle down in several places and maintain themselves in these, and to capture twice the fortified metropolis of the Lydians, the most warlike nation in Asia Minor.

According to the genealogy in Genesis, Gomer is the eldest son of Japhet. This name is without doubt the Semitic term for the population on the north shore of the Pontus, who were known to the Greeks as Cimmerians. In the sixth century B.C. the prophet Ezekiel mentions Gomer beside Togarmah.[780] Esarhaddon, king of Assyria (681–668 B.C.), tells us that Tiuspa from the distant land of the Cimmerians (Gimirai) submitted to him with his army. Assurbanipal (668–626 B.C.) relates: "The Cimmerians were not afraid of my fathers or of me, and would not take the yoke of my sovereignty. Gugu (Gyges), king of Ludi (Lydia), a land beyond the sea, a distant region, of which my fathers had not heard the name, sent a messenger into my presence, in order to implore my friendship and kiss my feet. From the day on which he accepted my yoke, he took Cimmerians, desolators of his land, alive in the battle with his own hand. From the number of the captured leaders he bound two with strong fetters of iron, and sent them with numerous presents to Nineveh, the city of my dominion. He constantly sent messengers to ask for my friendship. He omitted to do so when he disregarded the will of Asshur, the god, my creator, trusted to his own power, and hardened his heart. He sent his forces to aid Pisamilki (Psammetichus), king of Egypt, who had thrown off the yoke of my sovereignty. I heard this, and prayed to Asshur and Istar thus: May his body be cast out to his enemies, and his servants be carried away captive. Asshur answered me: His body shall be cast out to his enemies, and his servants carried away captive. The Cimmerians, whom he had brought under his feet by the renown of my name, conquered and laid waste his whole land. His son (Ardys) sat upon his throne. He sent to me and received the yoke of my supremacy, saying thus: I am thy subject and servant, and my people will do all thy will."[781]

Thus the account of the Greeks is completely established. To be subjugated by Esarhaddon the Cimmerians must have been in Asia Minor in the first decades of the seventh century B.C., they must also have got the upper hand here to such a degree that Gyges, king of Lydia, found it impossible to defend himself against them without the help of the Assyrians. The first capture of Sardis must have taken place before the accession of Gyges, on that campaign which the Cimmerians made in the year 693 B.C. to Phrygia. On the other hand it may be that the Cimmerians had got possession of the city of Antandrus in the reign of Gyges. When Gyges had repulsed the Cimmerians he thought that he had no longer any need of Assyria. For this, according to Assurbanipal, he was punished by a second invasion of the Cimmerians, who desolated his land; he lost his life in the battle, of which the Greeks know nothing, and his son and successor Ardys was again forced to submit to Assyria. That Ardys had to fight severe battles with the Cimmerians is proved by the second capture of Sardis, which took place in his reign about the year 630 B.C. While the Cimmerians were thus engaged in the West, the city of Miletus, or some exiled Milesians, seized the opportunity to re-found Sinope. Alyattes succeeded in forcing back the Cimmerians and attacking them with such vigour that they were no longer able to undertake any invasions to the West. Even Sinope had no more to fear from them, although their settlements lay in the neighbourhood of this city. At a subsequent period in the third century B.C. the invading Celts threw the whole of Asia Minor into a panic, and plundered it, until they were confined to Galatia; and the invasion of the Cimmerians appears to have taken a similar course. The Celts, however, maintained themselves within a limited district; the Cimmerians disappeared so entirely among the Cappadocians, that Syncellus calls Gomer the progenitor of the Cappadocians, and the Armenians denote the Cappadocians by the name Gamir.[782]

In Cappadocia also, rock tombs, sculptures, and fragments of buildings have been discovered, the authors of which and the date of their erection we cannot ascertain even approximately. Near Amasia, on the middle course of the Iris, we find graves hewn in the rocks, of which those lying nearest the city may have belonged to the first kings of Pontus. Near Aladja also the façade of a large rock-tomb may be seen. Near Uejük, on an elevated terrace, are the ruins of a palace, the lower part of which is formed by great blocks worked and joined in the Cyclopian style, and the blocks are in part covered with sculptures. In the middle of the south front is a spacious doorway guarded by two pairs of lions; one pair is detached, the other is worked out of the stone posts of the doorway, like the protecting figures in the palaces of Nineveh.[783] Near Boghaskoi, which is perhaps the site of the ancient city of Pteria, at the foot of a lofty limestone plateau, overhung by cones of rock, in the fork of a mountain stream which flows northward to the Halys, are the remains of a building about 200 feet in length and 140 feet in breadth. A broad staircase leads from the river to a terrace, on which rises the palace surrounded by a wall. As at Uejük, the lower part of the structure consists of Cyclopian blocks of fifteen to twenty feet in length, and some six feet in depth. About thirty chambers, greater or smaller, surround the court of this structure. The ground plan is like that of the palaces of Nineveh; in the sculptures a resemblance has been traced to the reliefs of the buildings of the Achæmenids. Pteria was afterwards the abode of a Persian commander. On the rocky plateau over the palace we see the remains of two citadels, surrounded by lines of fortification, of which the Cyclopian foundations may still be traced.[784] Two miles and a half to the north-west of the ruins of the citadels, in the rocks surrounding the plateau, remarkable sculptures have been discovered. In a deep recess of the rocks the rough walls, which have been but slightly hewn and smoothed, are covered with reliefs. There are two rows of figures which meet each other. They advance from the outer curve of the niche along the side-walls, on the right and left, towards the back wall. While the figures in these rows are only from two to three feet high, the shapes on the back wall, which form the centre of the picture, are of the size of life, and indeed the main figure is even larger. All the figures are in profile. The main figure, which moves from left to right, as does the long row of figures following it on the left side of the niche, is a bearded warrior, who steps over, or even upon, two bending figures with high and pointed caps, falling over in front, and in garments which fall in folds from the girdle. In his right hand he carries a sceptre, the left hand, which is not very distinct, holds a flower out of which peers a circle, or an oval ring. His doublet hardly reaches to the knee; the head is covered with a tall conical cap, and on the feet are pointed shoes. He is followed by two male figures suitably clothed, who stand on mountain summits; then between two winged genii are two figures with round caps, who carry bowls, and behind them a form in a long garment, with a bent staff in his hand, and a winged circle on his head. Then follow warriors armed with sabres, or clubs, in the same short doublet and the same pointed shoes as the three leaders, and between them are two demons, the only figures presenting a full face, with round, broad faces, who carry two segments of a circle, one upon the other. They were followed by warriors and two priests with pointed caps falling over in front. The end of the row on the left entrance is formed by a series of twelve warriors, who march on without armour, close together, and with even step. On the right side of the niche is another row, coming to meet the row described. Opposite the leader of the warriors, in the middle of the north wall, is a large female figure, who advances from the right to the left on a lion or leopard, whose feet rest on four mountain summits. She wears a long robe falling in folds to her ankles; her hair streams down, and upon it is a cylindrical head-dress; the right hand carries a staff, while the left, which holds something similar to the ring already mentioned, is held out towards the outstretched left hand of the leader of the warriors. Behind her, on a smaller scale, but also riding on a lion with the feet resting on mountain summits, is a youthful warrior, without a beard, in the clothing of the main figure; the head is covered with a lofty pointed cap, the shoes are also pointed; in the girdle is the two-edged bill, in the left hand a long battle-axe, and in the right a staff. He is followed by two female figures above a double eagle, in the dress of the main female figure; behind them come thirteen more female figures of a similar kind, with staves or harps in their hands. The whole picture contains more than sixty figures. In a niche receding to the back we find, beside a demon of remarkable shape, a young beardless man with an exceedingly tall conical cap; in his outstretched right hand he appears to carry the picture of a temple; and with his left he embraces the neck of a very youthful female form, whose head-dress and robe fall down in numerous folds. Beside them march twelve warriors with lower caps than those in the main recess, and scythe swords in their right hands; the left arm is raised as high as the shoulder, since they are treading on the left heel, and the top of the right foot.[785]

If this great rock picture is not intended to represent some act of religious worship, it might depict the conclusion of a treaty between two nations. In this case it might belong to the period in which Media, under Cyaxares, extended her borders to the Halys, and came into fierce conflict with the Lydians. This war was brought to an end by a treaty of peace, accompanied by the betrothal of the daughter of Alyattes of Lydia to the son of Cyaxares. The picture might be explained in reference to this treaty and betrothal, did not the style and manner appear closely allied to the figure near Smyrna (p. 151), and a relief not far from Ancyra.[786]

As to the religious rites of the Cappadocians, we know that they worshipped the god Men, who is called a moon-god, and a female deity, Mene, or Ma. On the Lycus, an affluent of the Iris, at Cabeira, stood the sanctuary of Men in the middle of large precincts; the sanctuary of Mene was at Comana, on the Iris, and was the oldest, richest, and most important sanctuary in the land. Ma, or Mene, was a war-goddess whom Greeks and Romans called Enyo and Bellona; to Strabo she is known as Artemis, and this name is evidence of her relation to the moon, no less than of her position as a war-goddess. That relation is confirmed by further evidence. Comana, says Strabo, is thickly populated; but the inhabitants are effeminate; the greater part are fanatics or religious maniacs, and there is also a number of women who serve the goddess with their bodies, of whom the greater part are dedicated to the temple. Here, twice in the year, the "Exodus of the Goddess" was celebrated. To this festival pilgrims, male and female, came from every side, and in frenzy and ecstasy performed certain sacred customs, which consisted partly in wounding themselves with swords, and partly in sensual excesses. In the south of Cappadocia, on the upper Sarus, there was a second city of Comana, which also possessed a sanctuary of Ma. Here, as at Comana on the Iris, six thousand servants are said to have attended upon Ma.[787] We know the tendencies of the Syrian worship, to bring man, by means of certain services, nearer to the deity to whom the services are performed, and make him resemble the peculiar nature of the deity whom he worships. The maidens who served the maiden goddess in her temples on the Pontus carried weapons like the goddess, and honoured her by dancing in armour.

Out of these armed maidens in the temples of Ma there grew up among the Greeks a peculiar and widely-developed legend—the legend of the warlike tribe of the Amazons. When the Greek colonists landed on the western coast of Asia Minor, they found, in the land of the Lydians, where they built Smyrna, Cyme, and Ephesus, seats of the worship of a goddess whom they compared to their Artemis, and whose attendants were eunuchs and armed maidens (p. 556). They next perceived that similar seats of worship were to be found in the East also, on the coasts of the Pontus. Thus the Homeric poems already placed the "Amazons equal to men" on the east of the Phrygians, and represented king Priam as meeting them with his men on the banks of the Sangarius.[788] As natives of Asia Minor the Amazons must have fought with the Trojans against the Greeks. Arctinus represented the Amazons as coming to Troy after the death of Hector, and distressing the Greeks till Achilles slew their queen, the beautiful "Penthesilea, the daughter of the dread, manslaying Ares." The cyclic poets knew the abode of the Amazons more accurately than Homer; they place them at Themiscyra, on the Thermodon;[789] and at this place Pindar represents them as drawing up their army. Æschylus also places the Amazons on the Thermodon;[790] according to Pherecydes the war-god begot the Amazons with Harmonia on the Thermodon.[791] We have seen that the Greeks gave the name Harmonia to Astarte, the moon-goddess of the Phenicians. When the Greeks at the time of Arctinus had founded Sinope and Trapezus in those regions, they believed that they were in the land of the Amazons; and Sinope was thought to have been previously inhabited by the Amazons.[792] The places at which the Greeks here founded a new home were thought to have been named and sanctified long before their arrival, not only by the voyage of the Argonauts, for Heracles, Theseus, and Peirithous were said to have set foot there, in order to perform their mighty deeds against the Amazons. At the command of Eurystheus Heracles had been compelled to bring the girdle from Hippolyte, the queen of the Amazons, for Admete. Theseus and Peirithous had carried off Antiope. Among the Phenicians, as we have seen, Baal-Melkarth looses the girdle of the moon-goddess; the Greeks transferred the legend of Melicertes to their Heracles. Even as early as the thirteenth or twelfth century B.C. the ships of the Phenicians had probably brought the worship of the warlike moon-goddess to the coast of Attica. At any rate, at a later time, tombs of the Amazons, i.e. abandoned seats of the worship of the Artemis of Syria and Asia Minor, were shown there. After the Attic territory was united under the rule of a military monarchy, of which, among the Ionians, Theseus was the embodiment, the Phenicians were driven back from the coasts of the Greeks: Theseus was said to have conquered the Minotaur and the Amazons. In order to establish the existence of Amazons in Attica, Theseus was said to have carried off Antiope. To avenge this wrong, the Amazons marched from their distant home on the Thermodon to Attica; and the Athenians considered it one of their greatest services towards their common fatherland that they had conquered the Amazons, "an enemy who threatened all Hellas."[793]

Out of these elements the Greeks framed a circumstantial history of the Amazons. Even among the historians, their home is the land of the Thermodon. Here the Amazons dwelt, according to Herodotus, Diodorus, and Strabo, and here, as Diodorus tells us, they offered splendid sacrifices to Ares and Artemis Tauropolus. Their first queen is said to have been the daughter of Ares, and she built the great city of Themiscyra; the second queen extended the dominion of the Amazons as far as Syria; and finally queen Myrina reduced the whole of Syria, and received the voluntary submission of the Cilicians.[794] It is obvious that the Amazons founded all the cities where the worship of the maiden war-goddess flourished or had ever existed. Roused by the crime of Theseus, they marched to the west, founded the sanctuary of Ephesus, where "they set up the image of the goddess under the trunk of an elm, and, armed with shields, danced the war-dance, so that their quivers sounded."[795] Then they marched to the north, and founded Smyrna, Myrina, and Cyme.[796] Analogous rites proved that they were also in Lesbos and Samothrace. Through Thrace and Thessaly, and finally across Eubœa, they are said to have marched to Attica; tombs of the Amazons were shown at Scotussa and Cynoscephalæ, in Thessaly, and at Chalcis, in Eubœa.[797] After returning home, the Amazons next marched to the aid of the Trojans, and were conquered by Achilles. When the Greeks had founded Cyrene on the coast of Attica, and found, among the Libyan tribes of the surrounding district, the worship of a female war-goddess—when they found the Libyan women wearing corslets of goatskins, they came to the conclusion that the Amazons once dwelt on the Tritonian lake in Libya.[798]

A nation of heroines was certainly never found by the Greeks on the Thermodon. On the other hand, they received accounts of the warlike queens of the Saces and Massagetæ, of Zarinæa, Sparethra, and Tomyris, who fought against the Medes and Persians; and on the coasts of the Black Sea, in the colonies of the Milesians, they heard of the riding, the archery, and hunting of the women of the Sauromatæ. Hence the Greeks resolved to make the Amazons the ancestors of the Sarmatians. They were represented as taking ship from the Thermodon across the Black Sea to the coast of the Mæotis, because here, in the Crimea, on the "promontory of the maiden," a cruel maiden goddess, who was also called Artemis Tauropolus by the Greeks, was worshipped. Herodotus, and after him Ephorus, tells us that the Amazons fled over the Pontus from the Thermodon, and landed on the shore of the Mæotis. Here they took the young men among the Scythians, who, according to Herodotus, were settled between the mouths of the Danube and the Don, as their husbands, and with them marched eastwards over the Tanais (Don), beyond which river and north of the Caucasus lay, according to Herodotus, the dwellings of the Sauromatæ, whom later writers call the Sarmatians. Hence the Sarmatian women still preserved the customs of the Amazons; they carried bows and javelins, and wore the same clothing as the men, sat on horseback, and rode with or without their husbands to the chase or to battle, and no maiden married till she had slain an enemy; "so that some never married at all, because they were unable to satisfy this rule." The language of the Sauromatæ was the same as the language of the Scythians, but they spoke it badly, because the Amazons had never perfectly learned it. These statements, and especially the assertion that the Sarmatian women fought as long as they were maidens, were repeated by Greek writers—in other respects very trustworthy—in the fifth and fourth century B.C. Others also maintained that the women were rulers among the Sarmatians.[799] Poetry and plastic art had stamped the legend of the Amazons so firmly on the Greeks that they could not break loose from it. Several of the historians of Alexander of Macedon tell us that the queen Thalestris, with 300 Amazons, sought out Alexander from a great distance, and made a proposal of marriage to him, on his return from Hyrcania,[800] a story which has perhaps arisen out of the fact that the satrap Atropates of Media sent 100 mounted women to Alexander.[801] When at a later time Pompey fought in the Caucasus, and women were found among the wounded, it was thought that the real Amazons were at last found;[802] and the story was now told that the Amazons dwelt northward of the Gelen (in Ghilan), on the southern foot of the Caucasus. In order to solve the difficulty of their propagation of the race, the story was invented that for two months in the spring they met the Gargareans—a neighbouring tribe—on the mountains by night, and associated with them, as accident might determine. The boys were then sent to the Gargareans, who brought them up in common; the daughters were retained by the Amazons.[803] In order to explain the name Amazon, which in Greek can mean "without a breast," the story was invented that they burnt off the right breast of the maidens, so that they might use the right arm better, and draw the bow—a story which Hippocrates had already told about the daughters of the Sarmatians.[804] On the monuments of plastic art the Amazons have both breasts; the older period represents them with a broad girdle, an ample robe, and a Phrygian cap, a crescent shield (the symbol of the moon-goddess), a bow, and a battle-axe. In later sculptures the Amazons, when they had been connected with the Scythians and the Sarmatians, were generally represented on horseback, in a Doric tunic, with naked arms and thighs, a helmet on the head, and a spear in the hand.

On the western slopes of the table-land of Asia Minor, in the river valleys of the Hermus and Mæander, the Lydians were settled. Their land reached from the sources of the Hermus in Mount Dindymon to the Ægean sea, from Messogis and Cadmus in the south to the Temnus range in the north. The valley of the Hermus was exuberantly fertile, and still more luxuriant was the vegetation in the district round the Gygæan lake. The mountain pastures supported herds of powerful horses and numerous flocks of sheep. The Pactolus brought sands of gold down from Tmolus; in the rocks of this range and its western continuation, Sipylus, rich veins of gold are said to have been found.[805]

But little has been preserved of the legendary accounts of the Lydians about their rulers in the earliest times. About the middle of the fifth century B.C. the Lydian Xanthus, the son of Candaules, wrote the history of his people in four books, in the Greek language. Of this some fragments have come down to us, which can here and there be supplemented by the statements of Herodotus. From both we learn that the Lydians traced back the origin of their royal house to the gods. Atys, the son of the god Manes, was the first sovereign of the Lydians; after him came his son Lydus, who gave the name to the people. From the brother of Lydus, whom Xanthus calls Torrhebus, and Herodotus Tyrsenus, the tribe of the Torrhebians or Tyrsenians was derived. The territory of the Torrhebi lay on the upper Cayster. From Asius, the son of Cotys, the son of Atys, sprang the tribe of the Asionæans, who inhabited the Asian meadow.[806] From Atys, their progenitor, the first king, his successors, the first house of Lydian kings, were called Atyads. Among the successors of Lydus the most pious and just was Alkimus. During his reign there was peace and quiet in Lydia; every man lived securely and without fear, and all things prospered. After him reigned king Akiamus, who sent Ascalus with an army to Syria. There Ascalus founded the city of Ascalon. After this, as Herodotus narrates, a lion was born to king Meles from his concubine, and this lion, in obedience to an oracle, he caused to be carried round the walls of Sardis, his metropolis, in order that they might be impregnable.[807] According to Xanthus, Meles, who was a tyrannous and cruel king, was overthrown by Moxus, a very just and brave man, after he had vowed to the gods that, in gratitude for their deliverance, the Lydians should henceforth offer to them a tenth of all their animals. Then Moxus marched to Syria, and there took Atargatis captive, with her son Ichthys (fish). As a punishment for her rebellion she was thrown into the lake of Ascalon, and eaten by the fish. Then king Cambletes reigned, who sacrificed his wife, and ate her, and then slew himself with his sword before all the people. After him Jardanus, who had been an enemy of Cambletes, ruled over Lydia.[808] Jardanus was followed by his daughter Omphale.[809] To avenge the insult which had been paid to her before she ascended the throne of Lydia, she compelled the maidens of the land to give themselves up to the slaves at an appointed place, and slew the strangers whom she entertained, when she had lain with them.[810] After Omphale, Tylon reigned, who died from the bite of a snake, but was again restored to life by a marvellous herb.[811] But with the slave-girl of Jardanus, according to Herodotus, or, according to others, with Omphale, Heracles begot Alcæus; the son of Alcæus was Belus; the son of Belus was Ninus, and the son of Ninus was Agron. With the accession of Agron the dominion of the Atyads came to an end, and that of the Heracleids commenced, who then continued to rule over Lydia for 505 years.[812]

Manes and Atys are already known to us as deities of the Phrygians; they must therefore have been worshipped by the Lydians also. Lydus, the second king of the land, is taken from the name of the nation. The prosperous, peaceful reign of the good king Alkimus is no doubt founded on some conception of an early happy age. The story of the lion of Meles obviously goes back to the relations in which the lion was placed, in the religious rites of the Syrians, to the sun-god, who was also worshipped with zeal by the Lydians. We learn from a Lydian that the name Sardis was given to the city in honour of the sun-god.[813] The coins of Sardis which have been preserved regularly present the image of a lion and a bull.[814] The vow of Moxus is intended to explain the blood-tithe, which we have already found in use among the tribes of Syria. Still more definite are the references to Syrian rites in the supposed marches of Moxus and Ascalus to Syria, and the prominent position of Atargatis[815] and the temple of Ascalon, and the children of Atargatis, the fish. We know Atargatis, the Astarte of the Assyrians, as transformed into Hera, and the temple at Ascalon, the city of the Philistines, as the oldest and most famous sanctuary of the Syrian goddess of fertility. The name of the king Jardanus does not differ from "jarden" (river), and if Omphale is said to have forced the maidens of the land to prostitute themselves at a fixed place, we have already found this prostitution in the worship of the Syrian goddess of birth and the Babylonian Mylitta. The new dynasty which ascends the throne of Lydia after the Atyads with Agron is again derived from a god, according to the accounts of the Greeks, from Heracles and Omphale. The Greeks narrated that Omphale carried the lion's skin and club of Heracles, and that she clothed the hero in a transparent female robe of scarlet, and caused him to card wool and spin as her slave.[816] Lydian coins exhibit a female form with the lion's skin and the bow.[817] It was shown above that the Greeks connected Melkarth (Melicertes) with their Heracles, and that according to the mythus of the Syrians, the sun-god finds and overpowers the moon-goddess; that after the holy marriage, the god on his part succumbs to the goddess, and changes his nature with her; he assumes the female nature, she the male; she carries the weapons, while he performs woman's work. We saw that the Syrians symbolised the pre-eminent nature, the unity of the deity, in this amalgamation of the sexes—this female manhood and male womanhood. Johannes Lydus tells us that the Lydians worshipped the sun-god under the name Sandon, and adds, that because Sandon had lived as a woman, the men at the mysteries of the god clothed themselves in women's clothes, and put on transparent crimson garments, coloured with vermilion.[818] Thus the Greeks put their hero in the place of the Lydian sun-god, who overwhelms the lion, and changes his nature with the goddess; and if they farther tell us that Omphale gave her love to strangers, but also slew all who lay with her, this also is a trait which had already met us in the Syrian Astarte, in the nature of Ashera-Astarte, which at one time grants the enjoyment of love, and at another brings destruction.

The result of these considerations proves that the traits of the Lydian legends, which have been preserved, present us with very little beyond mere mythical elements. The connection of the Lydian worship with the worship of the Syrians comes plainly to the surface, and this connection is confirmed by all that we know from other sources of the rites of the Lydians. The name of their sun-god Sandon[819] recurs on Assyrian monuments, where it appears as Sandan.[820] In the Semitic languages the word means "helper," and is used as an attribute of the god Adar, with whom we are already acquainted as the god of the planet Saturn.[821] It is obvious that the title "helper" could be given not to Adar only, but to any other god, from whom special favour and assistance might be expected. The Lydians gave the title to the good sun-god, who vanquishes the glowing heat—the terrible sun-god—who looses the girdle of the moon-goddess, and changes his nature with her. When the Greek colonists landed on the coast of Lydia, they at first recognised their own Apollo, i.e. their god of light, in the Lydian god. They allowed the sanctuary of the Lydian god at Miletus to remain in the hands of a family of native priests, the Branchidæ. As god of the country and protector of the coast, the Homeric poems give to Apollo the foremost place among the deities who defend Troy. The Lydians also on their side recognised the connection between their sun-god and the Apollo of the Greeks; Gyges and Crœsus send rich presents to Delphi. But when the Greeks of the coast became more accurately acquainted with the nature and the myths of the Lydian sun-god, that side which chiefly corresponded to their Heracles, and the image of Heracles developed under the influence of the Phenician Melkarth, came into prominence. The nature of the female goddess also, whom the Lydians chiefly worshipped, is beyond doubt. Herodotus tells us that all the daughters of the Lydians sold themselves, and in this way collected their dowries; others narrate that they received slaves or foreigners in the groves and porticoes of the temples.[822] As we have seen, tradition connects this prostitution with the rule of Omphale, and Johannes Lydus assures us that the goddess Blatta worshipped in Lydia was the same as the Mylitta of the Babylonians. Hence the worship of Bilit, the Ashera of the Syrians, prevailed also among the Lydians, a fact which the campaigns (already mentioned) of Ascalus and Moxus to the shrine of Derceto at Ascalon also prove. That this goddess of the Lydians was not without her destructive side—the power and nature of Astarte—we could already infer from the bloody acts of Omphale (p. 562). At the mouths of the Cayster and the Hermus the Greeks found the shrines of a goddess, whose priests were eunuchs, and who was at the same time honoured with dances in armour by maidens, as the moon and war-goddess of the Cappadocians.[823] This goddess of the coasts of Lydia was called by the Greeks Artemis, and this name distinguishes her as at once a maiden goddess and the goddess of the moon and of war. And if at the same time the image of Artemis of Ephesus was represented with large breasts, the obvious conclusion is that in the goddess of Lydia, as in the goddesses of Babylonia and Syria, the two opposites, of continence and sensual enjoyment, of fertility and of destruction, were united.

The forms of religious worship also would appear to have been in all essentials the same among the Lydians and the Syrians. Mutilation (which we know was practised very widely among the Lydians),[824] and the prostitution of girls, were common to both countries. We found above that the Arabs and Syrians believed their gods to be present in stones, and prayed to them in that shape. Not far from Magnesia on Sipylus, a stone, some twenty feet in height, juts out of a wall of marble, and this in ancient times must have been regarded with veneration as the idol of a native goddess. Even in the Homeric poems we find mention of this stone, and the legend connected with it by the Greek colonists. "I have seen the stone of Niobe on Sipylus," said Pausanias. "At a near view it is a fragment of stone, which does not look like a woman or a person weeping; but from a distance you might believe that you saw a weeping and mourning woman."[825]

The essential result of the examination of Lydian legend and Lydian worship is the obvious and very close relationship between the Lydian and Syrian deities and rites. Moreover, the mountain range which bounds the valley of the Mæander to the south, bears the Semitic name of Cadmus, i.e. "the Eastern;" and at the foot of the range lies the city of Ninoë (Nineveh, i.e. "to dwell.")[826] Again, from one side the languages of the Phrygians and Lydians are said to be distinctly different; on the other hand, most of the Lydian words which have been preserved to us by the Greeks—it is true they are not numerous—can be traced back to Semitic roots;[827] and the national genealogy of the Hebrews enumerates Lud among the sons of Shem, together with Elam, Asshur, Arphaxad, and Aram. Yet, so far as the Lydian language allows us to form an opinion, elements of a different character are not entirely wanting. The gods Manes and Atys, from whom the first royal house was derived, and after whom it was named, the goddess Cybele, whose temple stood at Sardis,[828] do not belong to the circle of Semitic deities. Manes, as well as Atys, we found in Phrygia. Hence, looking back at the connection between the Armenians, Phrygians, and Thracians, already brought into prominence we may suppose that the original population of the river valley of the Hermus was Phrygian, and that Semitic invaders from the east subjugated these Phrygians and absorbed them; but not without adopting on their part some elements of the Phrygian language and worship.

That a monarchy was in existence among the Lydians before the first Heracleid ascended the throne cannot be doubted. In the time of the Heracleids we find mention made of the descendants of Tylon (p. 562), a king who is said to have belonged to the family of the Atyads. The foundation and fortification of Sardis also seem to belong to the period before the Heracleids, the period of the Atyads. Herodotus tells us that the second dynasty, the supposed descendants of Sandon-Heracles, gave twenty-two sovereigns to the Lydians, who ruled over Lydia for 505 years.[829] However astonishing the pedigree which Herodotus gives to these Heracleids (the son of Heracles, Alcæus, begets Belus, Belus begets Ninus, and Ninus Agron),[830] we may regard his statement of the period for which this dynasty lasted, of which several later members are established, as historical. And since, after the Heracleids, the family of Gyges ruled for 140 years down to the time when Cyrus took Sardis, and since the taking of Sardis fell in the year 549 B.C., the Heracleids must have ascended the throne of Lydia 645 years previously, i.e. in the year 1194 B.C.[831] What degree of civilisation had been reached by the Lydians about the year 1000 B.C. we can only conclude from the fact that the Greek settlers on their coasts found money already coined by the Lydians, and therefore ascribe to them the invention of the art of coining.[832] The art of dying wool also was, in the opinion of the Greeks, an invention of the Lydians; and games at ball as well as at dice were thought to have been learnt from the Lydians by the Greeks.[833] That the Greeks made use of the Lydian flute, and subsequently of the Lydian cithara (both the cithara with three strings and that with twenty strings), and the Lydian harmonies to enrich their own music, is an established fact.[834] The Homeric poems describe the Lydians (Mæonians) as an "armed equestrian people," and mention their trade and wealth.[835]

North of the Lydians, in the river valleys of the Caïcus Macestus and Rhyndacus, were settled the Mysians. According to Strabo, they spoke a language of mixed Phrygian and Lydian elements.[836] It was apparently the Mysian legend which told of king Tantalus, who possessed the greatest treasures, who slew his son and offered him for a banquet, i.e. for a sacrifice to the gods. His grave was shown on Sipylus.[837] Before the Greek colonists took the coasts from them, the Mysians may have risen to the first elements of civilisation; but when they were debarred from the sea, they remained within the limits of their mountains, pursuing an agricultural and pastoral life. About the year 500 B.C. their armour was still a small round shield and javelins, the points of which were hardened in the fire.[838] In spite of these miserable weapons they gave a good deal of trouble to the satraps of the Persian king, and even at a later time desolated the fruitful plains on the coasts by marauding inroads. Of their worship we only know that the Greeks found the rites of a god of light on the coasts at Thymbra, Chryse, and Cilla, who was invoked under the title Smintheus, a word which is said to mean the expeller or destroyer of field-mice;[839] and that a goddess of procreation and fertility was worshipped on Ida.[840] In the Homeric poems it is Aphrodite, by the side of Apollo, who protects Ilium, and favours Capys and the sons of Priam in the dells of Ida.

The coast of Asia Minor, to the south of the Lydians, was in the possession of the Carians. Herodotus tells us that, according to the legends of the Cretans, the Carians were, in the most ancient times, called Leleges, and inhabited the islands of the Ægean at the time when Minos reigned in Crete. They were compelled to man the fleet of Minos. A long time afterwards they were driven out of the islands by the Ionians and Dorians, and migrated to Asia Minor. But the Carians themselves maintained that they had always lived in the land which they possessed.[841] We cannot hesitate to give the preference to the assertion of the Carians. From the numerous harbours of their coast they could easily cross to the neighbouring islands, and thus they could populate Rhodes Samos and Chios.[842] Advancing from one to another in the numerous islands of this sea, they reached the Cyclades and settled there. The most ancient population of Crete, called by the Greeks Eteocretes, may very likely have consisted of Carians only, as is proved by the position which Greek legend gives to the Carians in reference to Minos, as well as by other evidence. This occupation of the islands of the Ægean Sea by the Carians must be placed about the year 1500 B.C. For when the Phenicians colonised these islands in the thirteenth century, they were occupied by Carians. The Carian population became dependent on the Phenicians. Subsequently, about the year 1000 B.C., the Hellenes landed on the islands of the Ægean, and drove out the Carians. The Carians lost even Samos and Chios; they were again confined to their old home, and they could not even maintain themselves in that, for the best harbours of their coasts passed into the hands of the Greeks. Yet the Carians continued to be seamen and pirates. They lay in wait, as before, for the merchants, and overran the rich coast land. Even in the seventh century we meet with Carian pirates and mercenaries, and these not only on the mouths and banks of the Nile; and the Chronographers mention, apparently, a hegemony of the Carians on the sea, which is placed in the interval from the year 731 to the year 670 B.C.[843]

The Carians had no monarchy embracing the whole of their territory. But here also, so far as we can see, princes stood at the head of the various cities. A kind of confederation united the several places. About the year 500 we hear of assemblies of Carians on the banks of the Marsyas near the white pillars, and afterwards we find common sacrifices of the Carian cities, and days of meeting in the temple of Zeus Chrysaor, which was situated in the neighbourhood of Mylasa (now Milas) at Lagina (now Leïna).[844] Among the Carians the Greek colonists found a style of armour superior to their own, and they adopted it. The "Catalogue of ships," in Homer, represents the leader of the Carians as going into battle decked with gold.[845] In Alcæus "the Carian helmet laments," and Anacreon speaks "of putting the hand upon the well-fitted Carian haft." Herodotus tells us that the Greeks learned from the Carians to wear plumes upon their helmets, to paint devices upon their shields, and to furnish them with fixed handles—in Homer the shields are carried over the shoulder by straps. Greaves also are said to have been invented by the Carians.[846]

We are unable to tell with certainty the origin or the national characteristics of the Carians, though Herodotus maintains that the Lydians, Mysians, and Carians spoke the same language. Of the religious worship of the Carians he tells us that they were the only nation who worshipped Zeus as a warrior. Mylasa was the centre of their worship. On the heights which tower over the plain of Mylasa, in a forest of plane-trees, near Labranda, lay the temple of "Zeus Stratius." The image of the god is said to have carried the double axe. Carian coins of the fourth century B.C. display the image of a god with a double axe.[847] The same axe is also found on the remains of Carian altars. The Greeks even maintain that the god was named after this axe, that his national name was Labrandeus, and that in Lydian and Carian labrys meant a battle-axe. Plutarch says:—Arselis, the Carian of Mylasa, marched to the aid of Candaules, king of Lydia (he ruled about the year 700 B.C.), and afterwards he left the sacred axe of the kings of Lydia to the god of Labranda.[848] This giving up of the battle-axe to the god of the battle-axe allows us to suppose that the god of Mylasa is meant by the Carian of Mylasa; and that Arselis may have been the name or attribute of this god—a supposition which is changed into a certainty by the fact that in Semitic languages, Chars-el means "axe of El," "axe of God."[849] Beside this warrior Zeus, a warlike Aphrodite was also worshipped at Mylasa,[850] and if Strabo calls the goddess of Leïna Hecate, the reason of the name may be the death-bringing power of the goddess Astarte-Ashera. The sacred fish who were to be found in a pool at Mylasa, with gold rings round the neck, would then be evidence of the bountiful, increase-giving side of the nature of this goddess.[851]

East of the Carians, on the south coast, in the valley of the Xanthus, were the settlements of the Lycians. The range of Taurus, which here rises to a height of 10,000 feet, sinks down in fields of snow and Alpine pastures to the course of the Xanthus. The sides of this valley, Mounts Kragus and Anti-Kragus, are beautifully wooded, and traversed by sounding rills. The view extends from the upper course of the river over the luxuriant vegetation of the plain down to the sea.

Herodotus tells us that this district was once known as Milyas, and that the Lycians, who were originally called Termilians, immigrated from Crete. Sarpedon and Minos contended for the throne, and as Minos got the upper hand, Sarpedon went with the Termilians to Asia, and took possession of Milyas. Afterwards Lycus, the son of the Attic king Pandion, when driven out by his brother Aegeus, came to Sarpedon, and from him the Termilians got the name of Lycians. Their laws were Cretan and Carian. They wore hats adorned with feathers, goat skins round their shoulders, sickle-shaped swords and daggers, coats of mail, greaves, bows, and arrows of reeds. They were named after the mother, and not after the father, and spoke of the mothers of their mothers as their ancestors. The son of a free woman and a slave was free and passed for a well-born man; but if a free man, even the first among them, begot children with a foreign woman or a concubine, these were outlaws.[852] Heraclides of Pontus extends these statements so far as to assert that the Lycians from ancient times had been under the dominion of their wives; Nicolaus, of Damascus tells us that the daughters of the Lycians, and not the sons, took the inheritance.[853]

In the Homeric poems, Prœtus, king of Argos, sends Bellerophontes of Ephyra (Corinth) to the king of the Lycians, to be put to death. The king bade him slay the Chimæra, a monster which was a lion in front, a goat in the middle part, and a dragon behind, and when he succeeded in this he sent him to fight against the Solymi and the Amazons. But afterwards he gave him half his kingdom and his daughter, who bore him Hippolochus and Laodameia. The son of Hippolochus was Glaucus, and the son of Laodameia was Sarpedon, the chieftains who led the Lycians to the aid of the Trojans.

Beside the supposed immigration of the Lycians from Crete and the poetry of Homer we know nothing of the history of the Lycians beyond the fact that they did not submit to the army of Cyrus without a most obstinate resistance. And even under the supremacy of the Persians the Lycians managed their internal affairs independently. They formed a federation which was in existence at Strabo's time, and then included twenty-three places. Each city was represented at the assembly; the six larger cities had three votes each, the next largest had two, and the smaller cities had one.[854]

The name Milyas, which, according to Herodotus, was borne by the valley of the Xanthus, clung even in later times to the spur under the ridge of Mount Taurus, which runs out eastward towards Mount Solyma. Hence the Lycians could easily be represented as in conflict with the Solymi. The name Chimæra is given to a high mountain valley on Mount Kragus.[855] If the Greeks call the inhabitants of the valley of the Xanthus Lycians, the name has not arisen among them from the supposed Lycus, the brother of Ægeus, but rather from the Grecian god of light, Apollo Lyceus. According to the mythus of the Greeks, Apollo Bellerophontes (who was worshipped at Corinth), dashes down from his cloud-horse and with his crown of rays breaks through the thick clouds which obscure the sun; he overcomes Bellerus, the spirit of darkness. In the mind of the Greeks, Lycia was free from the clouds of winter; and, as a fact, the climate of the valley of the Xanthus is excellent. Into this bright land, therefore, the god was thought to have marched when he had become a hero; here he overcame the Chimæra, the creature of mist and cloud. The Greeks went still further in this conception. The east, the land of sunrise, was in itself the land of light, of the god of light, Lyceus. The god of light was thought to pass the winter in the brighter east, in the home of the sun. When the Greek colonists had settled on the western coasts of Asia Minor, they regarded the valley of the Xanthus as the eastern land of light, they gave it this name, and supposed that Apollo passed the winter in Lycia, and gave oracles during the six winter months at Patara in Lycia.[856] In spite of the eastern situation and the climate of Lycia, this idea would hardly have taken root had not the Lycians at Patara, and probably at other places in Lycia, worshipped a god in whom the Greeks could recognise their own god of light. The Homeric poems place the Lycians in the closest connection with the Teucrians. There is a Xanthus in Lycia and in the Troad, and the name Tros seems to be identical with the name of the Lycian city of Tlos, which lies high up in the valley of the Xanthus under Taurus. In any case, from this close combination of the Teucrians and Lycians in Homer, we may conclude that with the Greeks of the coast the Lycians passed for a tribe who had already been for a long time in possession of their settlements. None but native Asiatic tribes could be represented as fighting beside the native Teucrians as their closest confederates.

The Lycians developed a peculiar civilisation and a peculiar art, of which numerous monuments, and many of them accompanied by inscriptions, have come down to us. The alphabet in these inscriptions closely resembles the Greek. With the aid of some inscriptions written in the Greek and Lycian languages, scholars have succeeded in fixing the value of the Lycian letters—of which there are ten for vowels and diphthongs, and twenty for consonants.[857] By this means we have become acquainted with the name by which the Lycians called themselves. They were not merely called Termilians, as Herodotus supposed, in the most ancient times, but even in their own inscriptions they call themselves Tramele. The city which the Greeks calls Xanthus is in the language of the Tramele, Arna; the city of Patara is Pttarazu; Pegasa is Begssere.[858] In fixing the character of the Lycian language, it was at first supposed that the Lycians might have been a branch of the Phrygians, who had forced their way over the Taurus to the south coast—an assumption which seems to be supported by the fact that the Lycian monuments resemble the Phrygian in plan and style; and that the Lycians, like the Phrygians, loved to excavate walls of rock and that in Lycia, as in Phrygia, the influence of the Greeks was felt at an early time. But the Lycian idiom, so far as the remains of it have been examined at present, was distinctly different from the Phrygian language. While some of our scholars find in the Lycian language words and inflexions allied to the Albanian, i.e. to the remains of the language of the ancient Illyrians, others are more inclined to place the Lycian in close connection with the Iranian languages.[859] In either case the Lycians, like the Armenians and Phrygians, belong to the Indo-Germanic stock, and not only the Armenians and Phrygians, but along with them the forefathers of the Lycians came into Asia Minor from the north-east.

The Lycians were settled in a region of strong natural boundaries, and of a very defined and picturesque form. The position of their land, protected as it was by strong natural boundaries, secured for them a more undisturbed development than was possible to the other tribes of Asia Minor. Their cities and towers, Xanthus, Phellus, Myra, Telmissus, Patara, Pinara, and Tlos were surrounded by strong walls of Cyclopian architecture, and the splendid remains are evidence of great skill in masonry. The noble ruins of Xanthus, not far from the mouth of the river of the same name, still proclaim, even at a distance, the ancient metropolis of the Lycians. How far back the monuments of Lycia extend cannot be determined as yet. The oldest of which the date can be fixed go back to the reign of Darius II., the Itariayush of Lycian inscriptions. The reliefs exhibit the Chimæra, as described in Homer; and they repeatedly exhibit a lion slaying a bull.[860] The Lycians themselves are represented in long garments, just as in works of Greek art; and even to this day the peasants on the Xanthus are to be seen in the caftan.[861] Pictures of battles, of agricultural and pastoral occupations are frequent on the monuments; but so far as the inscriptions have been deciphered at present, they afford no single instance in support of the statement of Herodotus that the Lycians were not named after the father, but after the mother.[862] The most important remains are the tombs, which are evidence of the great industry and care which the Lycians devoted to the repose and memory of the dead. A considerable number of these tombs lie within the walls of the city, and are surrounded by the ruins of other buildings. Hence the dwellings of the dead and of the living were not separated among the Lycians. Besides sarcophagi, made of blocks brought for the purpose, we also find detached rocks, which are changed into great sarcophagi, rocky peaks transformed into sepulchres, and extensive walls of rock, in which grave-chambers have been cut. The face of the rocky wall, thus hollowed out for tombs, is provided with façades which rise up in rich variety to the number of many thousands, over and alongside of each other, sometimes advancing, sometimes receding, according to the nature of the rock. The style of these tombs, which is for the most part very delicate and slender, is an imitation of a kind of wooden structure, which must have been common in Lycia in ancient times, and the simplest forms of which are still in use among the peasants of the region which corresponds to Lycia;[863] sometimes the structure is simpler, at others more complicated, and the effect is strengthened by delicate and luxuriant ornamentation. The faces of the rock-tombs sometimes end with a flat framework of beams, at others with a gable in low relief. The detached sepulchres exhibit the same imitation of a wooden building. Many of these sepulchres are obviously intended for three corpses; in the single chamber included in them are generally found two stone benches in the sides and at the back a receptacle for a corpse in a recess.[864] The detached sarcophagi are the most numerous. On a sub-structure, or immediately on the ground, stands a long stone coffin, closed by a high massive cover, the section of which exhibits a Gothic pointed arch. On these sarcophagi also the ornamentation is almost always rich, and carried out with neatness even to the smallest detail. Beside the sarcophagi we also find pillars and obelisks among the ruins. The tympana, friezes, and surfaces of all these monuments are covered with reliefs, which represent with much truth and liveliness the life of animals as well as the life of men. Evident remains of colouring on all the monuments show us that a layer of lively and even startling colours was laid upon these buildings. The reliefs also were painted, and some are treated almost as pictures. The inscriptions upon the tombs prove that the Lycians erected these tombs in their lifetime for themselves, wives, and children, and that this was done by several families in common; they invoke the anger of a goddess Phate—whom the Greeks call Leto—on those who might dare to violate them. From the nature and solidity of these tombs and sarcophagi, it is clear that the Lycians were almost at as much trouble to give a secure resting-place to their dead as the Egyptians were to give rest to their mummies, while the ornaments show that the Lycians must have regarded the life after death as a state of peaceful repose; the sculptures on the tombs invariably represent friendly scenes of family life, of occupation in the country, of social life or festal enjoyment. We see mothers with their children, carriage journeys, riders, processions, banquets, and feasts, and finally battle-pieces, in which the combatants are partly armed as Lycians and partly as Greeks. Nothing, not even in the pictures of battles, reminds us of the horrors of death, or of a judgment in the under world. The monuments of Lycia prove that the supremacy of the Persians did not interrupt the progress of Lycian art. But the creations of the later period enable us to see that Greek art, in her bloom, obtained and exercised the strongest influence over the Lycians. The most beautiful monument of Lycia, the tomb of Harpagus, the Persian satrap, which belongs to the first half of the fourth century, exhibits a preponderance of Greek forms.