was not wholly dependent upon the traditions the immigration might have left among the tribes established in the valleys of the Hermus and along the upper course of the Mæander; it rested also upon the fact that, many centuries after the separation, names of clans and localities were found east and west of the Hellespont, with scarcely any difference between them, beyond light shades of pronunciation. Nor is this all; the new country was sometimes called Asiatic Thracia, to distinguish it from Thracia proper. The like comparison was not possible between Phrygians and Armenians, albeit a close relationship was affirmed to exist between them. Herodotus, writing of the various nations which composed the army of Xerxes, says, "The Armenians are 'a Phrygian colony'[1] equipped like the Phrygians, and when under arms obey a common chief." The little we know of their language would not belie the comparison thus instituted.[2] The terms, however, used by the historian imply an hypothesis unacceptable to our better informed judgment, since it is difficult to admit that the populations of Armenia were composed of tribes that had come from the west.[3]
- ↑ Φρυγῶν ἄποικοι, Herodotus, vii. 73. Cf. Eudoxus, Stephanus Byzantinus, s.v. Ἀρμενιοι, and Eustace's Commentary, 694. They went so far as to regard the appellatives Armenians and Phrygians as synonymous terms (Cramer, Anecdota Graca Oxoniensia, iv. p. 257). Josephus (Ant. Jud., i. 6) identifies the Phrygians with the descendants of the Togarmah of chapter x. of Genesis. Togarmah is generally taken to denote the Armenians.
- ↑ "__p2r2 The relationship between the Phrygian and the Greek tongue was noticed by the ancients (Plato, Cratylus, p. 410 A). Consult also Lassen, Zeitschrift der Deutschen, etc., tom. x. p. 369 and following.
- ↑ "__p2r3" Fr. Lenormant, Les Origines de l'histoire, tom. ii. pp. 373-379. Consideration of the earliest Armenian traditions has led him to the conclusion that the Armenians entered the country we now call Armenia from the west, and that when the Assyrians reached it for the first time, the people in possession were not Armenians, but Urartai, Urartū, Alarodians. On this hypothesis the Thracian emigrants who pushed furthest east would be Armenians. Duncker (Geschichte der Alterthums, tom. i. p. 383) whilst admitting the kinship between Phrygians and Armenians, holds the opposite view. He refuses to accept the testimony of numerous ancient texts, in which the migration of the Phrygians from Europe to Asia is stated, and holds it worthless. In his estimation it was just the reverse. If the same names are met with in Phrygia and Thracia, this, he holds, was because the parent tribes of both Phrygians and Thracians, coming from the east, left in Armenia a first colony; a
the western coast of Asia had induced great similarity in their dialects and usages. Differences, no doubt, existed between them, but, though distinctly made out by natives, were not detected by strangers. Any one interested in the subject will find more texts in support of the Thracian origin of the people under discussion in F. Lenormant, Orig. de I' hist., torn. ii. pp. 366-37 1, and D'Arnois de Jubainbille, Les Premiers habitants de l'Europe, p. 168 and following.
