Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/80

 The People. 59 louna or laouna with the Persians, and Ouinin with the Egyptians. It was a collective name, under which were gathered all the sea- faring populations settled on the western shores of Asia Minor and the islands off its coasts, and which gradually spread to the West, when Greece and her populations became better known.^ By a singular phenomenon this name, which thus early began to be applied by the Asiatics to the whole Hellenic race, IS still used in the same sense by a people which, though stationed in Europe, still preserves certain Asiatic traditions. In their diplomatic transactions, the consecrated term employed by the Turks to designate the Government having its seat at Athens, is ** lounan Delveti," Ionian power. Deductions drawn from a correct reading of names, e,g. louanim instead of Toursha and Aquaiousha, and the conclusions arrived at from study of data gleaned in Greek writers, are in perfect agreement with each other. All the former had to tell in regard to the beginnings of the Hellenic race rested on no better authority than oral tradition ; nevertheless, on the information they supply, modern historians did not hesitate to place in this same period the budding forth, of the brilliant Ionian culture. This it is which forms the great interest attaching to information drawn from sources to w^hich modern science had no access until a very recent date. If the Egyptian and the Semite alike stood too far off to get a clear vision of Hellas, and if consequently a precise or cir- cumstantial account is not to be expected of them, anything they have to say, even by way of allusion, is nevertheless of the highest importance. Nearly all the facts recorded by the ancients had an air about them which did not invite confidence as to their trustworthiness, interwoven as they were with a tissue of fables which Greek fancy built up for centuries into a very complicated fabric, to please their vanity ; yet it unex- pectedly turns out that some of these supposed idle tales are confirmed by contemporary and disinterested witnesses. This coincidence strengthens the hand of higher criticism, which in the past more than once was sorely tempted to reject the whole evidence as unreliable ; it warns it that these myths, the cause of so much faint-heartedness, contain a substratum of historical truth. Of course, considering the uncertainty of Egyptian and ^ E. CuRTius, Greek History.