Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/25

 HISTORY AND ORIGIN OF THE PHRYGIANS. 9 the "island syllabary." The few short inscriptions of Thera (Santorin) are considered as the oldest in the Greek language, and in them the shapes of the letters still closely resemble Phoenician characters. Nobody has ever believed that these texts could be led back beyond the ninth century B.C. ; 2 indeed, they are referred as a rule to the eighth, and sometimes as low down as the seventh. 3 We will stretch a point and accept the earliest date, though in all probability much too old ; even so we shall be obliged to suppose an interval of many years, perhaps a whole century, between the Thera inscriptions and those of the Phrygian necropoles. A century at least was needed to effect the work of elaboration and adaptation, during which the sense of the writing underwent a change ; the value of some of the characters preserved was modified, others were discarded, and not a few were created. 4 Finally the Greeks must be allowed time in which to transmit, some way or another, the use and practice of the alphabet to nations who, like the Phrygians, were not their immediate neighbours, but whom many natural obstacles separated from the Ionian and Doric cities of the seaboard. We are thus led back towards the end of the eighth century ; and we reach the same conclusion through a correspondence that furnishes, so to speak, the proof of the operation, by collating and sifting the scanty data to be gleaned in history, intermingled with the brilliant tissue of fables, inseparable from Midas and Phrygia, as presented by the rich and capricious fancy of the Athenian dramatists. Thus Herodotus, in his narrative of the events which caused the throne of Lydia to pass from the Heraclidse to the Mermnadae, has the following : " The founder of the new dynasty, Gyges, at first met with much resistance on the part of the friends of the old family ; but the Delphic oracle having 1 At first Professor Ramsay thought that the Phrygians had received their alphabet from the Greeks of Sinope (Historical Relations of Phrygia and Cappa- docia, p. 27) ; and later, that they had derived it from the Phoca;ans and Cymseans, with whom intercourse was frequent and continuous (Athenaum, 1884, pp. 864, 865). There is this difficulty, that the Ionian syllabary would seem to have had no F, a letter largely used in all Phrygian inscriptions ; hence Lenormant prefers to ally the Phrygian alphabet to that of the " islands," which would have entered the peninsula via Rhodes, where it was employed. 2 LENORMANT, art. "Alphabet," p. 195. 8 S. REINACH, Traite d'epigraphie grecque, p. 181. 4 AD. KIRCHHOFF, Studien zur Geschichte des Griechischen Alphabets, 3rd edit., 1887, p. 53.