566 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
to accept only one nature in Jesus Christ. But this theological dispute 
gave the name to the Maronites, for they chose a monk, John Maro, 
to be their bishop after they separated from Rome, but their physical 
qualities are much older than their religious’schism. Indeed, partly 
through their isolation in the mountains, partly through their not 
intermarrying with their Mohammedan or Druse neighbors, the 
Maronites of to-day have preserved an old type in an almost marvel- 
ous purity. In no other Oriental group is there a greater number of 
men with extreme height of the skull and excessive flattening of the 
occipital region than among the Maronites. They are the best 
specimens of what C. Toldt‘ calls ‘‘planoccipital”’ formation, and 
very often their occiput is so steep that one is again and again 
inclined to think of artificial deformation. Indeed I took great care 
to make sure of this point and examined nearly a hundred babies in 
their cradles, to ascertain whether or not a particular way of laying 
the child’s head on a cushion might perhaps influence the form of the 
occiput. No such possibility was found, and we are constrained to 
regard the extreme ‘‘planoccipital’”’ formation of the Maronites (and 
their relations) as a natural character. Cf. the two types here (pl. 3.) 
I have measured 20 adult males, mostly from Baalbek and from 
Tarabolus. Their cephalic index ranged from 79 to 91 with an 
arithmetic mean of 86. The average facial index was 89, the irregu- 
lar indices running from 75 to 94, with four cases of 87. All were dark. 
Having thus treated of a series of smaller groups, we can now pro- 
ceed to the five great groups of western Asia—Persians, Arabs, Turks, 
Greeks, and Armenians. 
° R. PERSIANS. 
Notwithstanding some recent researches, our knowledge of the 
anthropology of Persia is rather scanty. In a land inhabited by 
about 10,000,000, not more than 20 or 30 men have been regularly 
measured, and not one skull has been studied. 
Apart from Kurds, Arabs, and Armenians, each numbering from 
200,000 to 300,000 souls, and smaller groups of Nestorians, Lurs, 
Gypsies, etc., there are two large ethnical groups in Persia, the Shiite 
and settled Tajik and the Sunnite and essentially nomadic Ihlat. 
The latter are Turkomans and so is the actual Dynasty of the Kajar; 
the Ihlat, being the energetic and vigorous element, are the real 
masters of the land and of the Tajik, the descendants of the old Per- 
sians and Medes. But long-continued intermarriage has produced 
a great many mixed types. Thus the Kajars have sometimes the 
high aquiline noses quite foreign to real Turkomans. 
The old type seems to be preserved in the Parsi, the descendants of 
Persians who emigrated to India after the battle of Nahauband 
1“ Untersuchungen tiber die Brachycephalie der Alpenlindischen Bevélkerung,’’ in Mitteilungen der 
Wiener anthropol. Gesell., vol. 40, 1910, p. 69 ss. and p. 197 ss. 
