PREHISTORIC MAN IN THE EASTERN 

 MEDITERRANEAN. 



PART III. 

 MEDITERRANEAN ETHNOLOGY, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 



THE last preceding section of this discussion closed with 

 the question how far recent anthropological and 

 archaeological inquiries affect the validity of the Hellenic 

 tradition, and of certain mainly philological conclusions 

 which were commonly accepted until recently as fixing the 

 ethnological position in early times of the inhabitants of the 

 coasts of the v^Egean and of the Eastern Mediterranean in 

 ofeneral. 



68. The Greeks themselves seem to have elaborated 

 already in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. a rationalised 

 and on the whole consistent theory of their own origin, from 

 what data we can only indicate in outline. In an explicit 

 summary, Herodotus distinguishes four criteria of nationality : 

 common descent, common language, common religious 

 belief and ritual, and a common mode of life in things 

 secular. Of the use of all these classes, examples are 

 abundant already in his own pages, in those of Thukydides, 

 and in surviving fragments of the rationalistic historians of 

 the fourth century B.C. 



69. But it must be remembered that to a Greek historian 

 " community of descent ' : meant similarity of traditions of 

 descent, unverified either by contemporary documents, or by 

 more than the most superficial comparison of physical types : 

 " community of language " was determined by equally super- 

 ficial resemblances of individual words, traced without 

 knowledge of phonetics, and in many cases without a work- 

 ing acquaintance with the non- Hellenic languages in ques- 

 tion, or even with the remoter dialects of Greek; "com- 

 munity of religion," and "community of modes of life," 

 seldom presupposed more than a certain similarity of non- 

 essential names and forms, or such broad identity of funda- 



