554 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
Hindi, Hindustani, and Gujerati, and trying in vain to come to an 
understanding with a large troop of African hajjis returning from 
Mecca, some of whom were Hausa, others from Zanzibar and the 
Swahili coast, others from Wadai and Baghirmi. One may also meet 
on this bridge Mohammedans from China and from Indonesia, and, 
to complete this Babylonian confusion of languages, some day or other 
even a Papuan from Doreh or some other place in Dutch New 
Guinea may appear there on his hajj to Mecca. 
Not less numerous than the languages are the types one meets in 
Constantinople or in any other of the larger towns in western Asia, 
and even within a linguistic group there is generally a most striking 
diversity of somatic qualities. There are Turks with fair and Turks 
with dark skin; Greeks with short and Greeks with long heads; 
Arabs with broad and low noses; and other Arabs with narrow and 
high noses; Kurds with blue and Kurds with black eyes; and the more 
one studies the ethnography of the Ottoman Empire the more one 
sees that ‘‘Turks” in reality means nothing else than Mohammedan 
subjects of the Padishah, that ‘‘Greeks’’ means people belonging to 
the Orthodox church, and that ‘‘ Arabs” are people speaking Arabic— 
the somatic difference between a Bedouin from Arabia or Mesopo- 
tamia and an ‘‘ Arab” farmer from near Beyrout is striking, and they 
have nothing in common except their language. 
Also the study of the modern religions in western Asia is of no help 
to us in this labyrinth of types. There are Greeks who look like 
Mohammedans, and many Ansariyeh or other (‘‘Moslem’’) sectaries 
are not to be distinguished from Armenians. Religion, too, is here 
much more closely connected with late historical events than with 
races or nations, and is only too often of a merely accidental character. 
Even the old historians do not help us. Their anthropological 
interests were generally trifling, and important statements like the 
note that the Armenians ‘‘zoddd dovytfovew tH Purif,’ or that a tribe 
from the Solymian Mountains spoke Pheenician, are extremely rare 
in the old writers, who give us names like Lycians, Carians, 
Cilicians, Paphlagonians, Cappadocians, Lydians, and so on, but, 
generally, do not give us the slightest details as to their place in an 
anthropological system. 
So we can well understand how, 50 years ago, G. Rosen, then 
perhaps the best authority on the nations of Asia Minor and Syria, 
could say that the anthropology of western Asia would ‘always 
remain a mystery.” 
Since then minute anthropometric researches and vast excavations 
have both thrown light on most of the problems connected with this 
‘‘mystery,’’ so that it may now be considered as practically solved. 
My own way of proceeding was to eliminate one by one every 
national or racial element that could be traced as having come 
