THE PRIMITIVK HOME OF THE ARYANS. 483 



the number of languages lie has to compare the sounder will be his 

 inductions; but the primacy which was once supposed to reside in Asia 

 has been taken from her. It is Greek, and not Sanskrit, which has 

 taught us what was the primitive vowel of the reduplicated syllable of 

 the perfect and the augment of the aorist, and has thus narrowed the 

 discussion into the origiu of both. 



Until quite recently however the advocates of the Asiatic home of 

 the Indo-European languages fouiul a support in the position of the 

 Armenian language. Armenian stands midway, as it were, between 

 Persia and Europe, and it was imagined to have very close relations 

 with the old language of Persia. But we now know that its Persian 

 affinities are illusory, and that it must really be grouped with the lan- 

 guages of Europe. What is more, the decipherment of the cuneiform 

 inscriptions of Van has cast a strong light on the date of its introduc- 

 tion into Armenia. These inscriptions are the records of kings whose 

 capital was at Van, and who marched their armies in all directions dur- 

 ing the ninth, eighth, aud seventh centuries before our er>i. The latest 

 date that can as yet be assigned to any of them is u. c. 040. At this 

 time there were still no speakers of an Indo-European language in Ar- 

 menia. The language of the inscriptions has no connection with those 

 of the Indo-European family, and the personal and local names occur- 

 ringin thec(-)untries immediately surrounding thedominions of the Van- 

 nic kings, and so abundantly meutioued in their texts, are of the same 

 linguistic character as the Vannic names themselves. 



The evidence of classical writers fully bears out the conclusious to be 

 derived from the decipherment of the Vannic inscriptions. Herodotus 

 (VII. 73) tells us that the Armenians were colonists from Phrygia, the 

 Phrygians themselves having been a Thrakian tribe which had migrated 

 into Asia. The same testimony was borne by Eudoxos,* who further 

 averred that the Armenian and Phrygian languages resembled one 

 another. The tradition must have been recent in the time of Herodotus, 

 and we shall probably not go far wrong if we assign the occui)ation of 

 Armenia by the Phrygian tribes to the age of upheaval in Western Asia 

 which was ushered in by the fall of the Assyrian Empire. Professor 

 Fick has shown that the scanty fragments of the Phrygian language that 

 have survived to us belong to the European branch of the Indo-European 

 family, and thus find their place by the side of Armenian, 



Instead therefore of forming a bridge between Orient aud Occident, 

 Armenian represents the furthermost flow of Indo-European speech 

 from West to East. And this flow belongs to a relatively late period. 

 Apart from Armenian we can discover no traces of In do European 

 occupation between Media and the Halys until the days when Iranian 

 Ossetes settled in the Caucasus and the mountaineers of Kurdistan 

 adopted Iranian dialects. I must re iterate here what I have said many 

 years ago: if there is one fact which the Assyrian monuments make 



•According to Eustathios {in Dion, v. 094). 



