CAVE DWELLINGS — FEWKES. 629 



cause — the small size of the excavated rooms. Thus, although many 

 people believe that the former inhabitants of the cliff dwellings of 

 Arizona were pygmies, as every tyro knows, skeletons that occur in 

 them do not support this theory. 



On entering one of these cone dwellings of Cappadocia we find 

 ourselves in a spacious chamber with shelves or niches excavated in 

 the solid stone of the walls. The stairways resemble round tunnels 

 through which one ascends to an upper story through holes like those 

 lateral openings by which one enters the room. The floors separating 

 the upper from the lower stories were usually thick enough to hold 

 the weight that might rest on them, but occasionally these floors have 

 given way and fallen to the floor below, thus enlarging both rooms 

 and forming a lofty chamber. In one instance nine stories were 

 counted, but generally there are one, two, or four stories, their posi- 

 tion appearing on the outside as small windows or peepholes. 



Many of the cave dwellers of Cappadocia have in front of the 

 excavated rooms a portico later in construction than the room, as 

 indicated by Greek or Roman arches and columns. In the interior 

 occur also evidences of later occupation showing Christian origin 

 or Byzantine culture. The customs of the natives living near the 

 caves of this region differ slightly from those of an ordinary Berber 

 village.^ 



I ask your permission to depart a little from the trend of my 

 address and to consider the antiquity of these Cappadocian cave 

 dwellings, many of which are no doubt comparatively modern monas- 

 tic dwellings, though others reach back to a remote antiquity. Sayce 

 regards Cappadocia as the original home of the Hittites, considering 

 that in the hieroglyphy of this ancient people " cones are used as 

 ideographs for king and country." If this be true the cone dwellings 

 of Cappadocia were known and perhaps inhabited at the epoch of 

 Hittite supremacy, or about 1900 B. C. Although these caves were 

 probably inhabited before this reipote time, no one has assigned 

 them an older date. 



Diodorus, Strabo, and other early historians or geographers of 

 antiquity have embodied in their writings an account of the trog- 

 lodytes living on the coast of the Red Sea written by Agatharcides 

 about 250 B. C. This account is instructive as perhaps the oldest 

 known historic record of the culture of cave dwellers. These troglo- 

 dytes are described as a pastoral people, governed by chiefs who 

 fought valiantly for their farms. " They made use of stone imple- 

 ments, spears, and arrows. Women always finally parted the coni- 



1 For this material I am partly indebted to an instructive article by Prof. J. R. S. 

 Sterrett in the Centm-y Magazine for May, 1900, from which the statements here made 

 are quoted. There is considerable general literature on the cave dwellings of Cappadocia, 

 one of the most accessible accounts being that in Records of the Past. 



