Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/369

 HISTORY. 353 purposes of trade, which it has always followed and will continue to follow to the end of time. Lycian valleys, not excepting those of the Xanthus basin, appear short and narrow, as against those of the Maeander, the Cayster, the Hermus, and the Sangarius. Their precipitous sides and gullies become so many brawl- ing torrents in the rainy seasons, rendering them impassable during many months in the year ; so that they can never serve as ways of communication between the seaboard and the central plateau of Asia Minor. The country is thus reduced to its own resources, but these are sufficiently great to provide the elements of a brisk trade. As we have seen, only a small portion of the soil is under cultivation ; but even when every foot of ground was made productive, it can barely have yielded grain enough for home consumption. The rearing of cattle and the timber of the forests must at all times have been the sole industrial means of the country. Its exports at the present day are still sheep and oxen, which are shipped off to Rhodes; and wood, whether for combustible or building purposes, which finds its way to Smyrna, Beyrouth, notably Alexandria. In such narrow conditions as these, it was yet possible for the native population to live a happy, though frugal and humble life. The fact of their having been squeezed in between their elevated narrow valleys cannot but have fostered a conservative turn of mind ; hence it is that we find them retaining longer than any of their neighbours on the Asiatic coast, the use of an alphabet and a language peculiar to them, along with institutions such as the " matriarchate," which elsewhere disap^ peared much sooner. Then too, even when conversant with all the arts of Greece, they for centuries went on repeating in their necropoles forms suggested by the only style of architecture they had known at the outset that which, in building the house, used none but squared and unsquared pieces of timber. 2 A