Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/35

 HISTORY AND ORIGIN OF THE PHRYGIANS. 19 commanded at once the fertile valleys of the Hermus and the tranquil waters of a bay never stirred by the breeze. The advantages of such a situation as this ensured prosperity to the new kingdom, which was further increased by the winning of rich ores from rocks upheaved and fashioned by Plutonic agency. The wealth of Tantalus, rumour said, had been due to the mines of Sipylus. 1 The art of mining and working metals was not learnt in Asia by the Phrygians ; when they quitted Europe they were still a barbarous race. Those tribes that were left in the parent home of Thracia, around the Pangseus and Haemus, were little better than savages at the time of the Roman conquest. If matters took a different turn with the children of that family who had settled in the Anatolian peninsula, it was because they were from the outset brought in contact with a more advanced people, one with the command, in part at least, of the processes that had long been the boast of the Egyptian and Chaldaean civilizations. These intermediate initiators and teachers were no other than the Hittites; those brave soldiers and ready inventors who had carried their arms and the use of their writing from the banks of the Euphrates and Orontes to those of the ^Egean, from Carchemish and Hamath, even to the regions where later rose Smyrna and Sardis, Ephesus and Miletus. On many a point of the vast tract comprised within these boundaries, we have found unmistakable traces of the military power and creative energy of the Hittites; in Cappadocia and Lycaonia, for instance, are notable remains often of gigantic size, and in Phrygia and Lydia isolated figures carved on the native rock, with short inscriptions as yet undeciphered ; everywhere, in short, east and west of the peninsula, we met with small objects, trinkets and seals, on which appear forms and types derived from Northern Syria. Instances such as these prove that Syro-Cappadocian culture, after having opened up the western highways with might and main, used these strategic routes for the purposes of trade, and guarded them by means of fortified posts, as we have seen at Ghiaour Kalessi. 2 One of these roads, taken by caravans, led to 1 CALLISTHENES, Fragm., 29 (Scriptores rerum Alexandri, collected by Ch. Miiller, and placed at the end of Arrian's work, collect. Didot). Hence the Greek dictum, TavroAou raAavra (Thesaurus, S.v. ravrXi^cu). 2 Hist, of Art, torn. iv. vol. ii. p. 714, Figs. 351, 352.