132 



MARTIN L. EOUSE^ ESQ.^ B.L._, ON 



their traces there, and from his "putting more faith," as he 

 says,* in the story he gives of their expulsion by the Scythians 

 and their arrival in Asia as invaders " than in any other 

 -account " of ' the founding of the Scythian empire. All we 

 know is that he found that Kimmerioi had settled, and perhaps 

 were still established on that peninsula ; and that peninsula is 

 in Pajphlagonia. 



But, turning our thoughts afresh to the northern shore, 

 where Kimmerioi had dwelt in numbers before they made way 

 for Scythians, it is remarkable that the name of Eiphath, head 

 of our second branch, finds a distant echo in the geography of 

 the Greeks. 



The Grecian poets from an early period, and the geographers 

 and historians after them, speak of a range of mountains called 

 Eipaian, from whose caves and hollows the cutting blasts of 

 Boreas, or the north- wind, blew, and beyond which, according 

 to some of the authors, dwelt the Hyperborei, secure from 

 these rough gales, in calm serenity ; and, while Lucan places in 

 the range the source of the Tanais, or Don, it appears from 

 the geography of Ptolemy and Marcian to be the straggling 

 chain of low hills which divides the rivers flowing to the 

 Euxine from those that flow to the Baltic.f Pliny and the 

 writers that succeeded him have, it is true, spelt the name for 

 us with initial Bh ; but the writers that went before him all 

 wrote it with unaspirated bringing it closer to Eiphath, 

 which is the more striking in that initial r goes without 

 aspiration in only two other names or words in the Grecian 

 tongue. That the Greeks should have shortened Eiphathaian 

 into Eipaian, is not stranger than that they should abbreviate 

 Skolotoi (the true name given by Herodotus)§ into Skythai (or 

 Scythians) or that the Eomans should know as Gauls a people 

 who among themselves were known first as Galatai and then as 

 Keltai. 



The Eipaian Mountains, or Hills, were thus the natural 

 northern boundary of the south Eussian Kinnnerioi, yet were 

 too insignificant in themselves to have obtained a descriptive 

 geographical name; but, just as Mount Alaunus is first heard 

 of when the Alauni, or Alans, have first entered Europe, and is 

 vaguely placed at divers points north of them by different 

 writers,! 1 thus evidently taking its name from the people whose 



* Her. IV, 11. 



t Smith, Diet. Class. Geog., " Ehipaei Montes." 



X Ihid. § IV, 6. II Smith, Diet. Class. Geog., " Alaiii." 



