Media, Babylon and Persia : including a study of the Zend-Avesta or religion of Zoroaster, from the fall of Nineveh to the Persian war . uch scraps as the few inscriptions havepreserved, although they can be deciphered with butlittle difficulty, owing to the familiar alphabet, havenot been reconstructed to any satisfactory extent,mainly from scantiness of material. Even theseslender resources, however, establish the existenceof at least two different groups among the languagesof ancient Asia Minor in historical times: those ofPhrygia, Mysia, and others in the west and thenorthwest are found to
Media, Babylon and Persia : including a study of the Zend-Avesta or religion of Zoroaster, from the fall of Nineveh to the Persian war . uch scraps as the few inscriptions havepreserved, although they can be deciphered with butlittle difficulty, owing to the familiar alphabet, havenot been reconstructed to any satisfactory extent,mainly from scantiness of material. Even theseslender resources, however, establish the existenceof at least two different groups among the languagesof ancient Asia Minor in historical times: those ofPhrygia, Mysia, and others in the west and thenorthwest are found to incline towards a very ancientAryan philological type, the Pelasgic, from whichthe Greek language is descended, while there is greatuncertainty about those of Lycia and the neigh-boring Caria.* 8. It is evidently impossible, from such slight andscattered data, to gather materials for any thing thatcould be called history, yet perhaps not quite ini- * Professr A. 11. Saycc, in one of his latest works, positively de-clares that the I^ycian language is not Aryan, in spite of all theatlenipts that have been made to show the O H u?o 0^ 198 MEDIA, BAliVLON, AND PERSIA. practicable to reconstruct, in very broad outlines, theperiods of formation through which Asia Minor musthave passed before it stands out in the full lit,dit ofhistory, with its division into numerous more or lessindependent states, its mixed population, its compli-cated combination of religions and cultures as differ-ent as the races which originated them. The oldesttraditions, repeated by the writers of classical an-tiquity, represent all Western Asia—of which AsiaMinor is undoubtedly a part—as having been occu-pied, in immemorial time, during a number of centu-ries, by Turanians; a report which modern sciencesees little reason to dispute/ The immense chasmbetween this remote, misty past and the dawn ofrecorded historical times, though still greatly mixedwith myth, we can partly bridge over, owing to
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