Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/365

 HISTORY. 349 Xanthus valley, that of Dembre-Tshai, or Myros, was not as thickly populated. It has many windings ; and is squeezed in between rocky walls which, in places, are perpendicularly cut ; with the melting of the snow the waters devastate the land, and leave little that will repay cultivation. Nevertheless, the site of not a few small towns has been traced, whose inhabitants lived on the produce of meadow land and the fine forests stretching away on the neighbouring hills ; these were Arniai, Kandyba, and Phellus, the latter being already mentioned by Hecataeus. 1 Nor should Myra, the most important centre of this district, be left out ; its site is fixed with no less certainty, whilst the ground covered by its necropolis, as well as the shape of the tombs, impart thereto a very primitive aspect. At the entrance of this same valley, between the thick mass and the sea, rose Antiphellus, and Aperlae, and Sura, ever ready to enter upon commercial or piratical emprise as occasion served. Finally, bearing to the eastward, Limyra looked down upon the fertile plain watered by the torrents which fall from the Elmalu plateau and the eastern slopes of Mount Solyma. In this brief enumeration we have omitted more than one town whose name is recorded either by ancient writers or inscriptions, and have confined ourselves to such as contain literary documents, along with monuments whose features are sufficiently distinct to permit us to see in them the representatives of cities travelling back to the days of Lycian independence. Their list will doubtless grow longer, inasmuch as travellers report many other sites where the ruins betray this same stamp of antiquity. For the present the difficulty is to identify them with one or other of the many names of Lycian cities preserved by ancient geographers, notably Stephanus Byzantinus. The internal affairs of Lycia are very imperfectly known, down to the opening years of our era. From that day forward, Greek and Latin documents are plentiful, and furnish us with many a curious detail in regard to the social and political condition of the province. In the preceding epoch Greek inscriptions are little way to the north. The Indus valley, wild and unpopulated, formed a sharply defined frontier between Lydia and Caria. 1 Stephanus Byzantinus, s.v. 4>cXXos. If Hecataeus placed Phellus in Pamphylia, it was because, in his time, the boundaries of the different provinces of the peninsula were as yet undefined. For Hecataeus as for Homer, Lycia, strictly speaking, was the basin of the Xanthus.