XIII.] THE CAUCASIC PEOPLES. 503 



of the Semitic family. Even here a reservation has to be made, 

 for we now know that there was really but one evolution, that of 

 Yahveh, the adoption of the idea embodied in Allah being histori- 

 cally traceable to the Jewish and Christian systems. 



Should the Hittites prove to be a Semito-Armenian blend, in 

 them will be found a direct transition between the 

 eastern and western populations. On the Semitic g i ans e 

 side they range to the Persian Gulf and Irania, 

 while the Armenian element connects them with the aborigines 

 of Asia Minor Cappadocians, Lycians, Carians, Leleges, perhaps 

 Lydians and Phrygians. With these last we pass through the 

 Troad and the Propontis to the kindred Thracians, Paeones, 

 Tyrrheni, Illyri and other pre- or proto-Hellenic peoples, grouped 

 by some authors collectively as " Pelasgians." Invented, as has 

 been said, for the purpose of confounding future ethnologists, these 

 Pelasgians certainly present an extremely difficult racial problem, 

 the solution of which has hitherto resisted the combined attacks 

 of ancient and modern students. When Dionysius tells us bluntly 

 that they were Greeks 1 , we fancy the question is settled off-hand, 

 until we find Herodotus describing them a few hundred years 

 earlier as aliens, rude in speech and usages, distinctly not Greeks, 

 and in his time here and there (Thrace, Hellespont) still 

 speaking apparently non- Hellenic dialects 2 . Then Homer 

 several centuries still earlier, with his epithet of SZoi, occurring 

 both in the Iliad and the Odyssey* t exalts them almost above the 

 level of the Greeks themselves. But perhaps in these seeming 

 contradictions we may have a key to the puzzle, one which will 

 also fit in both with Sergi's Mediterranean theory, and with the 

 results of recent archaeological researches in the ^Egean lands. 

 If the pre-Mykenaean culture revealed by Schliemann and others 

 in the Troad, Mykenae, Argos, Tiryns, by Mr A. J. Evans in 

 Crete, by Cesnola in Cyprus, be ascribed to a pre-Hellenic rather 

 than to a proto-Hellenic people, then the classical references will 

 explain themselves, while this pre-Hellenic race will be readily 



1 To rdv IleXacn/tDi' yevos ' 



2 I. 57. '' II. 10, 429; Od. 19, 177. 



