EARLY INHABITANTS OF WESTERN ASIA—LUSCHAN,. 555 
from outside, and then to study the remainder. It was my good 
fortune to begin archeological and anthropometric field work in 
Lycia as early as 1881, and since that time I have never ceased to 
collect all available data connected with the natural history of man 
in western Asia. So it is the work of 30 years of which I shall now 
try to give a short account, and this will be done best by beginning 
with the ostensible foreign elements and then describing the remain- 
ing tribes and groups. 
A. DARK AFRICANS. 
These are naturally by far the easiest to eliminate, and they have 
only in a very insignificant way contributed to the building up of the 
white communities in Asia Minor and in Syria, although they have 
been imported there from the earliest historical times down to our 
own days. Even now there are few houses of wealthy Moham- 
medans without dark servants, male or female, and without hali- 
caste children of the most various tints. Nowhere, perhaps, with the 
exception only of Brazil, could miscegenation be better studied than 
in the large towns of the Levant. Domestic slavery is still flourishing 
there, and ‘‘black ivory”’ generally comes, as in the old times, from the 
Upper Nile, but also from Bornu. In the Turkish-speaking south of 
Asia Minor a dark African is generally called ‘‘Arab,’’ in Syria, 
‘“‘Maghrebi” or ‘‘Habeshi.” As far as I know, social inferiority is 
never connected with color; half-castes frequently intermarry with 
whites, but still there is no real negro permeation of the other natives, 
probably because that section of the offspring which reverts to negro 
qualities does not stand the climate. 
B. CIRCASSIANS. 
About a million of the Mohammedan inhabitants of the Caucasus 
immigrated into Asia Minor and Syria after the fall of Shamyl. 
The lot of these muhajir (refugees) was generally a melancholy one; 
the Ottoman Government did its best to give them land, but land 
without a master is rare also in Turkey, and in many places the result 
was a fight of all against all or a state of regular brigandage, often 
resulting in the final extinction of the Circassians. Where the land 
given to them was really masterless, it lay in unhealthy swamps 
and marshes, where malaria raged and carried them off at a terrible 
rate year by year. I know a place near Islahiyeh where more than 
1,000 Circassian families were settled about 1880; now only 7 of them 
remain, and these in a wretched state of fever and disease. Only 
a very few of these Circassian colonies aré really thriving, and prob- 
ably most of these glorious sons of snowy mountains will in a few 
generations have paid with their lives for their fidelity to Islam. 
