Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 2.djvu/279

 General Characteristics of Hittite Civilization. 261 from the inhabitants of Palestine. The opinions of classic writers, so freely expressed, has been impugned on the plea that nice ethnical differentiation was unknown to antiquity. But, even so, the fact remains that the Greeks in very early days penetrated into Cappadocia through Sinope and Tarsus ; nor was their testimony left to take care of itself, as it is abundantly confirmed by the inscriptions on coins, which, until Alexander, were written in Aramaic. Now, a Semitic dialect would not have persisted so long in the eastern portion of the peninsula, amid unfavourable surroundings, had it not been introduced at a remote age, per- haps as far back as when the Hittites crossed the Taurus and became the dominant race in Asia Minor. Their empire fell to the Assyrians, the Medes, and the Persians in turn ; but the bulk of the population, which they had found in possession of the soil on their arrival, remained appreciably the same. On the other hand, by excluding the Hittites from the world of the Semites, we increase the difficulties tenfold ; for the feeble rays yielded by the history of this region are wholly inadequate in helping us to ascertain when the Semites spread in the peninsula and rose uppermost. Had such displacement been effected by other than peaceful means, traces of the inward conflict which reduced the Hittites to a subordinate place or entire extinction would have Amazons established on the Thermodon as "Syrian;" and Stephanus Byzantinus (s. V. XaA.8arot) writes that the appellative was to be found in Sophocles. The coast of the Euxine, between the Thermodon stream and the town of Harmene, was called kavcrvpia by Sylax, the author of the ** Periplus," who lived about 550 B.C. (§ 89). The first time we hear of the Leuco-Syri is in Strabo, who explains the expression on the ground of difference of colour (XII. iii. 5, 9, 12, 25). He may hpwever have borrowed it from earlier writers, perhaps Hecateus of Miletus. These citations might be further extended, but they suffice for our thesis, whilst any one interested in the subject will find an able account of it in Noeldeke's paper, entitled : Ao-orvptos, 5u>os, Svpios, (Hermes, tom. v. 1 87 1, pp. 443-468). In classical times the name of Assyrian or Syrian was indifferently applied to all the popula- tions which were supposed to have lived under Assyrian rule (Ninus, Semiramis), and at first it had but a politico-geographical value for Noeldcke himself. It was only under the successors of Alexander that it came to denote people speaking the Aramaic language. Although fully admitting that a long space of time was requisite to elucidate the somewhat vague notion the Greeks attached to the appellative- even now as clear as murky water— no one will deny that community of blood and speech were the real cause why the name was given to Cappadocians and the natives of Palestine. Decipherment of Hittite inscriptions, or a bilingual tablet by means of which the character of the language spoken on the right bank of the Halys at the time of Croesus, Xenophon, etc., would alone solve the question.