7. Interesting and important as these sepulchral monuments are, they do not supply us with what we seek. We find no clue to help us date the most archaic of them, as these are not generally furnished with inscriptions. Many of the late ones, indeed, make up for it by presenting us with a double set, what has been called "bilingual inscriptions," i.e., inscriptions in two languages-the native, and Greek. From these we see that the alphabets used for the two languages have much resemblance. The same remark applies to such Phrygian inscriptions as have been discovered. The languages of this group of nations, i.e., such scraps as the few inscriptions have preserved, although they can be deciphered with but little difficulty, owing to the familiar alphabet, have not been reconstructed to any satisfactory extent, mainly from scantiness of material. Even Even these slender resources, however, establish the existence of at least two different groups among the languages of ancient Asia Minor in historical times: those of Phrygia, Mysia, and others in the west and the northwest are found to incline towards a very ancient Aryan philological type, the PELASGIC, from which the Greek language is descended, while there is great uncertainty about those of Lycia and the neighboring Caria.*

8. It is evidently impossible, from such slight and scattered data, to gather materials for any thing that could be called history, yet perhaps not quite im

* Professr A. H. Sayce, in one of his latest works, positively declares that the Lycian language "is not Aryan,' in spite of all the attempts that have been made to show the contrary."

practicable to reconstruct, in very broad outlines, the periods of formation through which Asia Minor must have passed before it stands out in the full light of history, with its division into numerous more or less independent states, its mixed population, its complicated combination of religions and cultures as different as the races which originated them. The oldest traditions, repeated by the writers of classical antiquity, represent all Western Asia-of which Asia Minor is undoubtedly a part—as having been occupied, in immemorial time, during a number of centuries, by Turanians; a report which modern science sees little reason to dispute.* The immense chasm between this remote, misty past and the dawn of recorded historical times, though still greatly mixed with myth, we can partly bridge over, owing to Professor Sayce's Hittite discoveries. He has shown, by a comparative study of the peculiar rock-sculptures at Boghaz-Keui in Cappadocia, at Ibriz in Cilicia, at Karabel, near Smyrna, and in many more places of Asia Minor, with their inscriptions in characters identical with those found at Hamath,† that this powerful and gifted Hamitic race, the Hittites, at one time covered and ruled the whole of the region between the Black and Mediterranean seas, as far east as the Halys, and probably somewhat beyond, leaving their traces not only in those sculptures, but in several sanctuaries of their religion, devoted to the worship of the nature-goddess common to them and their Canaanitic and Semitic brethren, and whose * See " Story of Chaldea,” Chapter II., especially pp. 136–139. See "Story of Assyria," ill. 5, p. 36.