Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/22

 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. writers who start from the above data, was not considered as an event which belongs to fabulous ages, and is lost in the twilight of time. Strabo, as we have seen, confines himself to saying that the tribes in question entered the peninsula before the Trojan war. At no time were the Phrygians, Mysians, and Bithynians, regarded by the ancients as the primitive inhabitants of Asia Minor, autocthones, to use the Greek expression. 1 Strictly speaking, the witness borne by instances such as these might be questioned, but what enhances their weight is the fact that they coincide with the views suggested to the historian by monuments discovered within this century by Leake, Stewart, Texier, and Ramsay, on this very soil of Phrygia. 2 Crowded in a narrow space, these memorials belong one and all to the region 1 The saying To. NawaKov, in the time of Nannakos, has been advanced in proof of the contrary hypothesis, as shadowing very far-off days ; for old King Nannakos was represented as the Noah of Phrygia, and as having rescued his subjects from the Deluge. The coins of Apamoea Kibotos are witnesses to the popularity of similar legends in a portion of the peninsula during Roman domination ; but earlier writers make no allusion whatever to the deluge in question. The oldest text in which it is mentioned is ascribed to Hermogenes, who wrote in the first, perhaps in the second century of our era (MULLER, Frag. Hist. Grcec., iii. p. 524). The dictum, " to weep over the days of Nannakos," is indeed found in a Iambic poet, one Herodas, Heroudas (BERGK, Poetce lyrici Greed, torn. ii. p. 796) ; but no one knows where he lived, nor is there aught to indicate the meaning he attached to the words To. NavvaKou. When Strabo (XII. viii. 13) tells us that kibotos, casket, coffer, was affixed to Apamoea of Phrygia, he does not in any way connect the surname with a deluge. It may be questioned whether the tradition of the Phrygian flood is in truth very old, and was not an importation of the Jews, who in very early days would have entered the country through Cilicia, and spread in the townships of the central plateau. The Acts of the Apostles show that Hebrew communities were established in Lycaonia in the opening years of our era. NOLDEKE (Untersuchungen zur Kritik des alien Testaments, 8vo, 1886, pp. 154, 155) and FR. LENORMANT (Les Origines, 2nd edit., torn. i. pp. 440, 441) admit that traditions of a local deluge, akin to those which in Greece were connected with Deucalion, may have been current in Phrygia, but they acknowledge at the same time that such myths could not acquire any importance before the second century A.D., and were brought about by infil- tration of Jewish and Christian ideas. This is proved in the name of NOE, NO, engraved on native coins and clearly foreign to Phrygian myths. 2 W. MARTIN LEAKE, Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor, 8vo, London, 1824. His journey was undertaken in 1800, in which year he visited the monument which bears the name of Midas written upon it. He was the first European who saw and made a drawing of the fagade. An abridged account of his travels appeared in Walpole's Memoirs, under the title " Travels in Various Countries of the East." JOHN ROBERT STEWART, A Description of Some Ancient Monuments ivith Inscrip- tions, etc., London, 1842. The letter-press is indifferent, and the plates, taken