Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/19

This discovery does but prove the truth of another of those old Greek traditions which modern criticism had discarded. Strabo long ago declared that Phrygians had once crossed into Mysia out of Thraké, and there taken possession of the site of Troy. The Trojans, as Dr. Karl Blind observes, are called Phrygians by the tragedians of Athens, and the name of Hektor himself, the "stay" of Ilion, is said by Hêsykhios to be but the Greek rendering of the Phrygian Dareios. The Phrygians were called the Briges, or "Freemen," by their Lydian neighbours, and were well known, as Strabo assures us,^[1] to be a Thrakian tribe; the Armenians of later history being, as we learn from Hérodotos, an offshoot of them.^[2]

The researches of the last few years have abundantly shown that all these statements were correct. My decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions of Van has proved that as late as the year 640 B.C. there were as yet no Aryan settlers in Ararat or Armenia, the country being still held by a race which seems to have been the same as that of modern Georgia, and which spoke a language that had no connection with those of the Aryan family. When the Aryan Armenians finally made their way to their new home, they must have marched from the West, and not from the East. Among the hundreds of names belonging to the vast district between Media and the Halys, which occur on the monuments of Assyria, there are none that can be assigned to an Aryan origin, and comparative philology has now proved that modern Armenian, like the scanty relics of the old language of Phrygia, occupies a middle place between the Greek on one side, and the Letto-Slavic on the other. The ancestors of the Armenians and the Phrygians must therefore have once lived in a region which was bounded by Greeks on the south, and by