Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/20

 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. dialect; "the Phrygians," it has been said, "are eastern Greeks," a term of comparison fully justified by the close relations which existed between the Thracians and the ancestors of the Hellenes in continental Greece. The witness borne by all antiquity was to the effect that the Greeks were indebted to Thracian tribes established in the valleys of Olympus and Pindus for the religious rites of Dionysus and the Muses. Orpheus was a Thracian bard. We have still to consider the question of date. When did the migration take place which brought these Thracian tribes, so nearly allied to the Greeks, to the very heart of Asia Minor ? To fix the year, or even the century, when the first of these clans crossed the straits is not once to be thought of. Thus stated, the problem would be insoluble ; on the other hand, a highly probable solution may be reached by confining ourselves to determining the position that ought to be assigned to the Phrygians among the many peoples that succeeded each other in Asia Minor at any rate, those who, thanks to the superiority of their culture, swayed their neighbours and played a leading part, each in turn. Of all the nations who figured on this scene, first in chronological order are the Hittites. The literary documents of Egypt exhibit them, in the days of Thothmes, Seti, and Ramses, as not only supreme masters of Northern Syria, but as wielding enough of authority over the peninsula to have induced innumerable hosts to cross the Taurus in order to fight for the kings of Carchemish and Kadesh against the Pharaohs in the valley of Orontes, and later, in the reign of Menephtah and Ramses III., to have threatened the Egyptian frontiers as well. Is it not likely that, had the Phry- gians then inhabited the peninsula, they must, willingly or unwill- ingly, have been drawn into the general ferment impelling the native populations across the mountains on to Syria ? Now, in the long list of nations banded together under the leadership of the Khetas, including the tribes called somewhat later, by the Theban scribes, " seafaring people," we look in vain for the name of the Phrygians. If contemporary texts containing the recital of these stirring events make no mention of the Phry- gian group, was it not simply because the populations composing it had not yet abandoned their Thracian and Mysian cradle-land, nor crossed the straits, but still dwelt in Europe, where the bulk of the nation preserved their individual life and independence down to the Roman conquest ? This hypothesis, the cumulative know-