ORIENTAL RESEARCH BREASTED 413 



the European Hercules, bids fair to emerge at last as a remote city 

 king of early Babylonia, who gained a reputation for his prowess in 

 war till he became the typical and proverbial strong man of all ages. 



The crowning disclosure in this unprecedented series of un- 

 expected revelations has just come from Asia Minor. Nearly 20 

 years ago the German Assyriologist, Hugo Winckler, visited the 

 mounds of Boghaz (or Boghaz Koi — " Boghaz village") in central 

 Asia Minor. As he walked over the ruins he kicked up with his 

 boot heel several cuneiform tablets, lying practically on the surface. 

 Below were piled the clay tablet archives of the Hittite I'oreign 

 Office, the earliest of which had been lying here at the capital of the 

 Hittite Empire since the middle of the second thousand years before 

 Christ. The result has been the decipherment of ancient Hittite or 

 rather a whole group of Hittite dialects. The Great War has inter- 

 vened and since Winckler's death the progress of examining this 

 enormous body of archives has unavoidably been very slow. We 

 owe a great debt especially to Hrozny and Forrer for the invaluable 

 disclosures which they have wrung from these documents. 



One of these tablets reports a toar of Atreus, King of Achaia 

 against the king of Caria at about the middle of the thirteenth cen- 

 tury, that is about 1250 B. C. There can be no doubt that in this 

 tablet we have a contemporary reference to the cycle of Trojan 

 Avars — a reference which must be regarded as an irreproachable 

 historical source, as old as the events which it records. Thus out of 

 the lost oriental background of Greek history in Asia Minor comes 

 a written document confirming a Greek tradition, born in an age 

 when the Greeks themselves still lacked writing. Because writing 

 reaches further back in the orient by nearly three thousand years 

 than it does in Greece, we are therefore able to confirm Greek tra- 

 dition out of contemporary written sources. 



It has long been recognized that in the early development of 

 Greek civilization the cities of Asia Minor took the lead. Thales, 

 who lived in one of these cities, was an example of this early stage 

 of Greek culture in Asia Minor. It is 'also evident that the inland 

 background of oriental culture contributed much to this early de- 

 velopment of Greek civilization on the western fringes of Asia. It 

 is out of this newly recovered oriental background that we are 

 slowly regaining the earlier forerunners of Greek civilization. 



This contemporary reference to the Trojan war is an epoch-mak- 

 ing revelation, which must react powerfully upon our treatment of 

 early human traditions. It at once demonstrates that such tradi- 

 tions must not be thrown to the scrap heap, but rather carefully di- 

 vested of gods and goddesses, prodigies and wonders, and then ex- 

 amined for the nucleus of sober fact upon which the legendary tale 

 has been built up. 



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