DISCOVERY 



209 



may be called lake or marsh according to the time of 

 year. 



Now let us consider the details of religious signi- 

 ficance which we have detected in the story. First 

 let us take the sacred trees. On this constant feature 

 of the .\natolian landscape much might be written ; 

 I will content myself with a quotation from a book ' 

 by a modern traveller which is full of acute observation 

 of the social custom of Asia Minor. M3' friend Mr. 

 W. J. Childs, describing a tree in the Cilician Gates Pass 

 which was covered over with pious rags and surrounded 

 by a rampart of small stones placed there one by one 

 by Moslem travellers, writes : " These sacred trees . . . 

 are found wherever trees and bushes grow, are decorated 

 always with rags, and surrounded by an accumulation 

 of stones." " The best explanation I got was that 

 these bushes mark the haunt of some dead holy man 

 ... at which, as at a shrine, offerings might product- 

 lesser miracles, or at least be accounted as good works." 

 Ovid's trees were covered with fillets and surrounded 

 by a low wall. The fundamental things in the old 

 Anatolian religion live on still, and the sacred bushes 

 which every traveller sees in modern Anatolia are 

 good evidence of the Anatolian character of the details 

 recorded bj' Ovid. 



Next let us take the story of the flood. We have 

 noted that the flood in the Philemon and Baucis legend 

 was caused by subterranean water, and that this 

 feature distinguishes it from the Semitic version, in 

 which the principal source of the flood was rain from 

 heaven. The Anatolian versions of the flood legend 

 regularly imply a deluge caused by water issuing out 

 of the earth, as is natural in a volcanic land, where 

 similar phenomena on a smaller scale are of common 

 occurrence. In his story Ovid follows this Anatolian 

 version, and follows it strictly ; and this is a point 

 of some importance, for Ovid was first and foremost 

 a story-teller, with an eye for good copy, and he has 

 a habit of accumulating picturesque detail without 

 much regard to its consistency. This tendency may 

 be observed in another flood story told in the Meta- 

 morphoses, the Greek version, with Deucalion and 

 Pyrrha playing the part of Noah and his wife. In 

 that story Ovid is manifestly drawing partly on literary 

 sources and partly on his imagination, and here he 

 actually derives his deluge both from heaven and from 

 under the earth. Jupiter first sets the storm-clouds in 

 motion, producing torrents of rain, and then calls on 

 Poseidon to shake the earth and flood the rivers with 

 subterranean waters. The contrast is significant. 

 In the Deucalion story, drawn from literary sources, 

 the Semitic and Phrygian methods are combined to 

 produce a deluge worthy of the occasion. In the 

 Philemon and Baucis story, derived from the truthful 



^Across Asia Minor on Foot (Blackwood &Sons, 1918), p. 321, 



old men who lived near the lake, only the Phrygian 

 method is used. 



The Phrygian or Anatolian story of the flood is 

 known chiefly from the legends which two Phrygian 

 cities, Apamea and Iconium, told regarding their origin 

 and early history. Both these cities lie on that some- 

 what unstable portion of the earth's crust which lines 

 the northern slope of the Taurus range. Here extinct 

 volcanoes, numerous hot springs, and frequent earth- 

 quakes reminded the ancient population that they lived 

 in a land where Zeus or Poseidon, if strong to save, 

 was also strong to smite. Of the rivers of Apamea, 

 bursting full-grown from the earth, many strange old 

 tales were told ; it was here that the Sibylline Books 

 located Mount Ararat, identifying it with the mountain 

 overhanging the Marsyas, a river famous in story 



Here an abyss opened in the earth, to close again only 

 when the king's son plunged into it, in panoply, on 

 his steed. And here, in later days, we find a legend 

 on the coins of the city which is unexampled in the 

 whole Roman world. Coins struck in the earlier part 

 of the third century of our era represent an ark with a 

 man and a woman in it, and with the name of Noah 

 written on it. Now it is well known that there was a 

 large body of Jews among the citizens of Apamea ; 

 but the same was true of many cities in Asia Minor ; 

 yet it was only at Apamea that the legend of Noah was 

 represented on the coins. The problem was thoroughly 

 investigated by a young Jewish scholar, one of the first 

 French officers to fall in the war, in a book published in 

 1913,- and he was able to supply convincing proof 

 that the legend of the flood had been located at Apamea 

 from remote antiquity, and that the Jewish version 

 was simply superimposed on the old Anatolian story. 

 The flood-story lasted on in this district till Byzantine 

 times, when, according to the local tradition, a deluge 

 threatened to overwhelm Colossae. The city which had 

 2 Noe Sangariou, by Adolphe Reinach, Paris, 1913. 



