296 THE EASTERN ORIGIN OF THE CELTS. 



connects with the poet Homer. Chios, lying off the coast of Lydla^ 

 possessed a class of men called Homeridse.®^ They were singers, and 

 I cannot but think that their name is the old word Zimran or Amh- 

 ran, the song. Ilgen gives such a meaning to the name Homer itself.^"^ 

 Smyrna laid claim to be his birth-place, and undoubtedly Zimi-an's 

 descendants named that city. But the names of Zimran and his son 

 Mahalah are constantly found in the genealogies of the blind poet. 

 Thus he is called the son of the Smyrnean river god Meles. His 

 mother again is the daughter of Menapolus and a daughter of Omy- 

 retis, or of Theseus, the son of Eumeles, and a nymph Smyrna. Her 

 name Critheis is like the Scandinavian Gerda, the daughter of Gymir. 

 In another account, Mseon of Lydia, whose name may have been the 

 same as Heman, was his father. It is remarkable that Hesiod is 

 made a nephew of Meeon, bearing, as the name does, such a close re- 

 semblance to Ishod. Perses also, the brother of Hesiod, is identical 

 in form with Peresh, the cousin of Ishod. ^^ I do not by any means 

 assert that Homer was Zimran, or even that Mahalah or Heman 

 was his father, but these names must indicate that the great poet was 

 a Zimrite. It is also very probable that he never saw Asia Miaor, 

 and that the scenes and peoples he sang of were to be found somewhere 

 between Palestine and Arabia, Egypt and Babylonia, where all the 

 names he mentions may be discovered in a truer Homeric order and 

 of a more thoroughly Homeric character than in Asia Minor and 

 Greece.®^ Ishod can hardly fail to have been the old -^syetes, whose 



86 Pindar Ap. Strab. xiv. 1, 35. 



Athenseus also refers to the Homeritse. The song Nomium, wliich he connects Tvith 

 Eriphanis, the mistress of Menalcas the hunter, and the refrain of which was "the tall oaks," 

 may have arisen out of the story erf Heman, Briphyle and Mahalah, with Darda, the man of the 

 oak. Athen. xiv. 11. According to Pausanias, two persons named Melan were early colonists 

 of Chios, vii. 4. 



87 Anthon's Class. Diet., Homerus. 

 8S lb. 



^^ I do not consider that the researches of Dr. Schliemanu, although of great historic value, 

 l)y any means establish the fact that the Troade was the scene of the Trojan war. Strabo 

 (I., ii. 22) tries to meet the objections of those who affirmed that Homer knew Egypt, Syria and 

 other regions better than Greece. Again (XII., iii. 26, 27) he specifies many places intimately 

 connected with the Troade which Homer does not mention. The Egyptian priests, according 

 to Dion Chrysostom, had a version of the war of Troy different from that of Homer. We find 

 Memnon, the Ethiopian or Susian, appearing as one of its heroes. Egypt is visited by Menelaur 

 and other of the Greeks. Northern Africa is the course of the Trojan fugitives. Paris carries 

 Helen to Sidon. Mr. Gladstone shows that according to Homer the Phcenicians were a border 

 people on the north-west instead of on the south-east. Menestheus, in whose time the was 

 occurred, was the son of Petes, an Egyptian. Diodorus Siculus connects the knowledge of 

 Homer with Egypt. We have no indications that any states existed in Asia Minor so early as. 

 the period of the Trojan war, which Pliny j)laoes in the time of Rameses III., Manetho in that 



