Note 35.1 — Chapter II · Statement of the Problem and the Evidence.

Now the most recent researches into Mesopotamian history establish with certainty the conclusion that there was no direct political contact possible between the powers in the valley of the Euphrates and the western shores of the Aegean, in the second millennium B.C. It is true that the first Tiglath-Pileser, near the end of the twelfth century, extended the Assyrian arms to the shores of South-Eastern Asia, to Cilicia and Phoenicia35.1; but there does not seem to have been any permanent Assyrian or Babylonian settlement on this littoral. The city of Sinope in the north, which, as the legend attests and the name that must be derived from the Assyrian god Sin indicates, was originally an Assyrian colony, was probably of later foundation, and geographically too remote to count for the present inquiry. In fact, between the nascent Hellas and the great world of Mesopotamia, there were powerful and possibly independent strata of cultures interposing. We have to reckon first with the great Hittite Kingdom, which included Cappadocia and Northern Syria, and was in close touch with Phrygia and many of the communities of the shore-line of Asia Minor; and which at the period of the Tel-el-Amarna correspondence was in diplomatic relations and on terms of equality with the Assyrian and Egyptian powers. And the tendency of modern students, such as Messerschmidt in his Die Hettiter, is to extend this ethnic name so as to include practically all the Anatolian peoples who were other than the Aryan and Semitic stocks. As far as I can discern, at the present stage of our knowledge this is unscientific; and it is at present safer to regard the pre-Aryan inhabitants of the Troad, Phrygia, Lycia, Caria, and Lydia, possibly Cilicia, as varieties of an ancient Mediterranean stock to which the people of the Minoan-Aegean culture themselves belonged. At any rate, for the purposes of our religious comparison, they are to be counted as a third stratum, through which as through the Hittite the stream of influence from Mesopotamia would be obliged to percolate before it could discharge itself upon the Hellenic world. And these interjacent peoples are races of great mental gifts and force; they were not likely to transmit the Mesopotamian influence pure and unmingled with currents of their own religious life.