The Turks pressed forward in the direction of Europe, even as the Sarmatians did towards India, earlier than they have the credit of doing. The Skoloti have been already considered. But what do we find in the early history of Asia Minor? A mountain throughout the Turk area is Tagh or Dagh. The mountain from which the 10,000 Greeks saw the sea was Thekh-es. This, perhaps, is accidental. But who dwelt around it? The Skythini, the Anatolian equivalents to the Russian Skythæ. But this proves too much, since Skythæ was no native name, but one of Sarmatian origin, and, as such, indicative of Sarmatians in the parts about. Otherwise, how could it be used? These Sarmatians cannot be demonstrated. Nevertheless, the name in the Anabasis of the king of the Paphlagonian neighbours of the Scythini, near the mountain Thekhes, is Korylas, and Kral is the Lithuanic for king. But king is a common, not a proper name. So is Zupan (=chief, lord, or superior) in the present Slavonic. Yet Gibbon speaks of Zupanus, as a king so-called, by certain Slavonians of the Middle Danube. All this may be accidental. Such accidents, however, are stranger than the facts which explain them away.
Ottomans, Greeks, Romans, Goths, and Slavonians have all modified the original blood of Thrace; yet the present blood of Ottoman Rumelia is, probably, more Thracian than aught else, Thracian on the mothers’ side.
The old Thracian affinities are difficult; but not beyond investigation. A series of statements on the part of good classical authors tell us, that the Daci were what the Getæ were, and the Thracians what the Getæ; also, that the Phrygians spoke the same language as the Thracians, and the Armenians as the Phrygians. If so, either the ancient language of Hungary must have been spoken as far as the Caspian, or the ancient Armenian as far as the Theiss. Many facts are against this: indeed the evidence must be dealt with by attributing two languages to Phrygia, one approaching the nearest tongue on the East, which would be the Armenian, and another standing in the same relation to the Thracian, on the west. This distinction being drawn, the rest is probable.
The evidence as to there having been members of the Thracian stock on both sides the Hellespont, is not limited to the Phrygians of Mysia. The Bithyni and others are in the same category. Which way was the migration? It is generally believed to have been from Asia to Europe; but the deduction of the Greeks from Italy, and that of the Sanskrit language from Europe, modifies this view. In truth, the present writer reads the whole history of Thrace backwards; seeing in the majority of the populations akin to the Thracians on the eastern side of the Hellespont signs of European intrusion. Signs, too, of European intrusion he sees in the world-wide tale of Troy; the historical basis of the great Homeric poems being not the struggle between the Greek and the Asiatic, but that between the Greek and Thracian, each fighting for a footing in Asia Minor. Perhaps the beginning of the Greek colonization was the end of the Sarmatian; for the ancient Thracians I believe to have belonged to this stock. Like the Lithuanians of the Cimmerian Bosphorus, they have effected their share of achievements in India; their conquests having been Bacchic, Thracian, and Slavonic, just as the Cimmerian inroads were Lithuanic. So that there was a double origin to the so-called Indo-Europeans of Hindostan and Persia; a trace of which may possibly,—I do not say probably—exists at the present moment in the name Jat.[23]
Between the original Thracian basis and the present dominant population of Osmanlis, there have been the following elements of intermixture: Pelasgic (whatever that was), Semitic, Hellenic, Roman, Gothic, Slavonic, and Bulgarian.
So far as the Macedonians were other than Hellenic, they were either Skipetar or Slavonian, i.e., in the category of the ancient Albanians, or in the category of the ancient Thracians; or they may have been mixed in some unascertained manner. Even if we suppose them to have pressed southwards and eastwards from the head-waters of the Axius, and from the southern boundary of Servia, a place for them in the same great class with the Thracians is admissible; and, in all probability, southern Servia was their original locality. That they, too, pressed forwards in Asia is likely. That words so radically alike as Mygdon-es and Macedon-es, are wholly unconnected, and that they resemble each other by accident, is what I am slow to believe; but that the line of demarcation between the Thracians and Macedonians is broad and trenchant for members of the same stock, is likely, since each was an encroaching population, and, as such, a population which obliterated transitional and intermediate varieties.
It is well known that of the three localities of the Pelasgian stock, known under that name within the period of authentic history, two are in Macedonia: one of these we get from Herodotus, the other from Thucydides.
1. Herodotus mentions the Pelasgi of Khreston—above the Tyrsênians.
2. Thucydides, those of Cleonæ, Dium, and Olophyxus on the peninsula of Mount Athos.
The Pelasgi of the third locality, the Asiatic Pelasgi, or the Herodotean Pelasgi of the parts about Plakia and Skylake, near Cyzicus, may reasonably be considered as settlers of comparatively recent origin, both from the general phenomena of ethnological distribution, and the most scientific interpretation of the few data we possess for the ancient ethnology of Asia Minor.