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.
LONDON:
R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS,
BREAD STREET HILL,
QUEEN VICTORIA STREET.
