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. * 66 temples, with their crowds of ministering women, gave rise to the Greek legend of the Amazons.* The fabled empire of these much-famed warrior-women -the head-quarters, so to speak, of the legend-was placed on the banks of the THERMODON, at no very great distance from the present ruins of Boghaz-Keui, and we know that the goddess, here named MÂ, had one of her principal temples served by no less than 6,000 women, in that same neighborhood, at KoMANA in Cappadocia, a province which in very olden 26. GRANARY IN MODERN LYCIA. times stretched farther towards the Black Sea than at a later, classical period. The Amazons were said to have founded cities. Wherever this is the case, we may be sure that ancient Hittite sanctuaries existed. Ephesus, Smyrna, Kymê, and several other places along the Ionian coast come under this head.† 9. It is probable that the Hittite rule and culture reached their widest westward expansion soon after * See "Story of Assyria,” pp. 30, 36, 205, 206, and 360–367. + See A. H. Sayce's "Ancient Empires of the East," p. 430. |