Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/37

 HISTORY AND ORIGIN OF THE PHRYGIANS. 21 because of the inscription accompanying it. It would have been wiser, perhaps, not to have detached it from the monuments that constitute the Sipylus unit, a group that would represent the effort and legacy of the first civilized state ever planted on the western coast of Asia Minor, within easy reach of the Archipelago, having the Hellenic peninsula right opposite. Of course, the Phrygians of Sipylus were not the first inhabitants of the line of coast that faces towards Europe. Before the influence of Eastern arts and industries had travelled thither, the physical and climatic conditions of this favoured land had attracted around the springs and mouths of rivers populations made up of pretty closely packed settlements. To inquire their name and origin would be vain, since history, nay, not even tradition itself, could travel so far back. The existence of these truly " prehistoric " populations, in the fullest sense the term implies, has been revealed to the world by the recent excavations of Dr. Schliemann in the Troad. From the bottom of the trenches opened in the sides of the hill at Hissarlik, was brought out a "stone civilization," if the expression may be allowed. Now, among the implements of every description that lay heaped together in the lower strata, dropped there by each generation in turn, no metal has been found ; at least so rarely, that where its presence has been detected, we may reasonably set it down to accident either some mistake in making up the journal from the notes, which may have got confused, or the falling in of a portion of an upper layer or crust, causing the regular order to be disturbed, so that articles that properly belonged to recent, or at least much later times, would be found in the lowest layers amongst the primitive ones. As to celestial types and ornamental forms of Egyptian and Chaldsean origin to be found almost everywhere, both on the coasts and the Mediterranean islands (whither they were carried by the Phoenicians), or distributed in the interior of Syria and Asia Minor by other intermediaries, they are non-existent at Hissarlik; at any rate, in pieces of genuine antiquity, such as unquestionably belong to the lowest strata. Here art and industry, though rude, betray independent effort ; an effort akin to that which inspired the populations of the /Egean coast in their first struggles to emerge from barbarism, ere a double set of influences borne by land and sea put them in continuous touch with the civilized nations of Further Asia. A careful