574 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
Their origin lies outside the scope of this paper. The same is true 
of the Gypsies and their kin, but it must be stated that perhaps one 
of the nomadic tribes in Ma Minor, mee Yuruks, is in some way or 
other related with them. 
Of far greater importance are the Kurds. From the great frequency 
of fair individuals among them, it is evident that their home must 
be in the north, and it is probable from their Aryan language that 
they are in some way connected with the Mitanni, who had Aryan 
divinities about 1280 B. C. 
I am well aware that at present there is no real proof or decisive 
evidence for this statement, but, by way of a working hypothesis, I 
might be allowed to suggest that the Kurds, the Amorites of the 
Bible, the Mitanni of the Boghaz-k6i tablets and the Tamehu of the 
old Egyptian texts are, if not identical, at least somehow related to 
one another.1. About 1500 B. C., or earlier, there seems to have begun 
a migration of northern men to Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, Egypt, 
and India. Indeed, we can now connect even Further India with 
the Mitanni of Central Asia Minor. On the tablets of Boghaz-k6i 
the king of Mitanni not only calls himself and his people “harri,”’ 
but he speaks of his noblemen as ‘‘mari,” and Hugo Winckler and 
¥. C. Andreas ? remind us of the word “‘marya” for “young man” or 
‘“‘hero” in the Vedic texts. So we find the same Aryan nobles in 
Mitanni about 1280 B. C., and very much later also in India. 
If really, as it seems, the old texts state that the Amorites and the 
Tamehu were fair, we should thus get a historic explanation of the 
great number of xanthochroic people we find down to our time 
everywhere in Asia Minor and in Syria, and among the modern Jews. 
Resuming now the thread of this paper, we have a great number of 
different ‘“‘Moslem” Sectaries spread over a vast part of western 
Asia under different names, as Tahtadji, Allevi, Ali-Ullahiya, Ansari- 
yeh, Fellah, Kyzylbash, Yezidi, and Bektash, speaking the different 
languages of their orthodox neighbors, Turkish, Arabic, and Kurdish, 
but still absolutely homogeneous as to their somatic characteristics. 
And to this selfsame group belong also the Druses and the Maronites. 
They also have the enormously high and short “planoccipital”’ 
heads and the narrow and high noses we find with the Sectaries. 
Now this same hypsicephalic element with the high aquiline noses, 
which forms the entire stock of all these Sectaries, we find again in 
Persia, and in a high percentage among the Turks and the Greeks, and 
in a still higher among the Armenians—everywhere under circum- 
1 The latest migration of a European tribe to western Asia is that of the Galatians. Passing through 
Roumania, where the town of Galatz (Galati in Roumanian) has conserved their name, they crossed*the 
Hellespont about 280 B.C. Angora and Gordion were their principal towns, and it is not impossible that 
the latter name, and then also that of the Gordyaeans and of the Kurds, is linguistically connected with 
that of the Galatians, who might have had earlier precursors. 
2 Orientalistische Literaturzeitung, 1910, p. 289 ss. Cf. also Ed.Meyer, ‘Das erste Auftreten der Arier 
in der Geschichte,” in Sitzungsberichte Berliner Akad. der Wissenschaften, 1908, i. 
