BABYLON AND PERSIA

I9§ MEDIA, BABYLON, AND PERSIA.practicable to reconstruct, in very broad outlines, theperiods of formation through which Asia Minor musthave passed before it stands out in the full light ofhistory, with its division into numerous more or lessindependent states, its mixed population, its compli¬cated combination of religions and cultures as differ¬ent as the races which originated them.The oldesttraditions, repeated by the writers of classical an¬tiquity, represent all Western Asiaof which AsiaMinor is undoubtedly a partas having been occu¬pied, in immemorial time, during a number of centu¬ries, by Turanians ;a report which modern sciencesees little reason to dispute.* The immense chasmbetween fhis remote, misty past and the dawn ofrecorded historical times, though still greatly mixedwith myth, we can partly bridge over, owing to Pro¬fessor Sayce's Hittite discoveries.He has shown, bya comparative study of the peculiar rock-sculptiiresat Boghaz-Keui in Cappadocia, at Ibriz in Cilicia, atXarabel, near Smyrna, and in many more places ofAsia Minor, with their inscriptions incharactersidentical with those found at Hamath,f that thispowerful and gifted Harhitic race, the Hittites, atone time covered and ruled the whole of the regionbetween the Black aild Mediterranean seas, as fareast as the Halys, and ^probably somewhat beyond,leaving their traces not only in those sculptures, butin several sanctuaries of their religion, devoted tothe worship of the nature-goddess common to themand their Canaanitic and Semitic brethren, and whose*See ' Story of Chaldea," Chapter II., 'especially pp. 136-139.f See " Story of Assyria," ill. 5, p. 36,