Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/357

 HlSTORV. 341 some of which are of considerable extent ; that of the Xanthus obelisk having no less than two hundred and fifty lines. The words of these texts are separated by dots, so that it is easy to make out the different parts of speech, which bilingual inscriptions, Lycian and Greek, help further to elucidate, and if the vocabulary is all but undeciphered, some notion of the nominal and verbal inflections has been gained. These enable us to guess at an ex- ceedingly peculiar idiom, which most philologists class in the Aryan family of speech. But what place should be assigned to it in the family unit, and to which of its groups it should be allied, is a question regarding which prudent critics do not care to commit themselves. 1 As will be remembered, no such difficulty exists lor Phrygia, whose language closely resembles Greek. The marked originality of the Lycian idiom is in itself a strong presumption of remote antiquity. If the Lycians are indeed allied to the Indo-European stock, they must have separated from their congeners long before the Italiote, Greek, and Thracian tribes left their primeval home, in that their respective tongues offer among themselves striking analogies on the one hand, whilst on the other they have distinct correspondences with Sanscrit and ancient Persian. Study of the Lycian alphabet leads to the same conclusion (Fig. 246). Like that of Phrygia and Caria, it was derived from the Phoenician syllabary, through the channel of a Greek alphabet which has been recognized as that current in the islands, and which was also in vogue in a district near Rhodes. To judge from the lettering in the vast majority of cases, as found in such inscriptions, as would seem to date somewhere in the interval of two hundred years separating the Persian from the Macedonian conquest, the aspect of the characters is even less archaic than that of Phrygian letters ; their tracing is more regular, and the 1 LASSEN, " Ueber die Lykischen Inschriften und die alten sprachen Kleinasiens," in Zeitung der deutschen morgenlaendischeti Gesellschajt, torn. x. pp. 325-388; MORITZ SCHMIDT, The Lycian Inscriptions after the Accurate Copies of the late Augustus Schonborn, 1868; Ncue Lykische Studien, 1869; WKUS>vxx,,BeitraegezurEntzi/erung der Lykischen Sprachdenkmaeler, Bonn, 1878 ; Beitraege zur Erkldrung der Lykischen Sprache, Bonn, 1878. Carl Pauli, in his dissertation, Eine rorgriechische Inschriftin Lemnys (Leipzig, 1886), touches upon the question of Lycian characters (p. 590 and following). He inclines to connect Lycians and Etruscans with the Pelasgians, whom he considers as neither Semites nor Aryans, and consequently distinct from the Thracians.