Note 48 — Chapter IV · VAN

That this revolution was not accomplished until at least as late as the fifth century before Christ may be gathered from the pages of Herodotus. The Armenians are known to this father of historians as inhabiting the mountainous country about the sources of the Halys and those of the Tigris, extending round towards the Mediterranean in the neighbourhood of Cilicia, their boundary on this side being the Euphrates.48 On the other hand the Khaldians or Urardhians have not already disappeared, although they have obviously declined to a subordinate position. They are mentioned under the name of Alarodians,49 and they are joined with the Matienians and Saspeires or Sapeires in the eighteenth satrapy of the Persian empire.50 Herodotus leaves us in the dark as to the exact localities in which they lived, although he indicates that the seats of the Saspeires lay to the south of the Kolchians, who inhabited the southern shore of the Black Sea in the neighbourhood of the Phasis.51 He informs us that Alarodians and Saspeires were both armed like the Kolchians, and the fact that the satrapies were organised with a view to ethnic affinities suggests the possibility that the two names first mentioned had come to be applied to one and the same race. Other considerations seem to point in the same direction. Down to a comparatively recent period we find a people called Chaldians (as written in the Greek character) or Chaldæans occupying the mountains between Trebizond and Batum. There can be little doubt that they represented the remnants of the Vannic people, and they were almost certainly the same as the Alarodians of Herodotus and probably the same as the Saspeires, who have perhaps left their name to the present town of Ispir.52 When the Armenians had expelled the ancient inhabitants from the settled country we know from a most interesting chapter in the Cyropædeia of Xenophon that the latter took refuge in the mountains. They fortified inaccessible peaks and lived by plunder, raiding down upon the plains.53 Our knowledge of the geography may at this point assist our historical investigations; and we may be reasonably sure that we shall find the relics of the dispossessed Khaldians inhabiting the fastnesses of the peripheral ranges which border Armenia upon the north and south.