Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/229

 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PHRYGIAN CIVILIZATION. 2 1 3 and religious ideas of the conquered. It is even possible that certain groups of the old population kept their ground in the neighbourhood of the sanctuaries they had consecrated, and that with revolving years they mixed and were so intimately fused with the new-comers, as to be undistinguishable from them. As we have just said, they transmitted to the younger nation their idea of the divine principle, the practices with which the gods were honoured and the symbols that served to translate their notions of them. The legacy handed down by an alien race was the basis upon which Phrygian genius worked, but which it seems to have enriched and unfolded in such a manner as to deserve to have its name linked with that religion and cultus of Cybele and Atys, to which the Graeco- Roman world reserved so long and brilliant a career. Types and emblems such as these were probably not the only means of expression the Phrygians received from the primitive owners of the land. When they wished to fix their ideas, the only possible system of signs offered to their use were Hittite hieroglyphs, whose finest specimens occur in the inscriptions found in the valley of the Orontes. If writing was known to the subjects of Tantalus, these were the characters they employed. Was theirs the hand, or that of the preceding generations, that engraved in the flank of Sipylus the hieroglyphs still to be seen near the Pseudo-Sesostris and the so-called Niobe ? We incline to the latter hypothesis, and ascribe to the Hittites the few cognate signs met with in the very heart of Phrygia, close by long inscriptions in Greek letters. 1 What cannot be attributed to a people whose writing was little more than a string of images are those characters we discovered upon a tomb which, like the Delikli Tach example, unquestionably belongs to the Phrygian series of monuments (Fig. 57). The letters in question belonged to one of those Asianic alphabets, derived, as the Cypriote, from Hittite hieroglyphs through a method analogous to that which gave birth to the Phoenician syllabary. 2 Consequently there was first a Phrygian alphabet before that represented by the inscrip- tion of the Midas monument and others of the same type, in common use at the time when the Phrygians had no teachers outside their eastern neighbours, the Cappadocians. 3 1 Hist, of Art, torn. iv. Fig. 553. 2 Ibid., p. 519. 8 We are at one with M. Hirschfeld in considering Cappadocia in the light of