Their origin lies outside the scope of this paper. The same is true of the Gypsies and their kin, but it must be stated that perhaps one of the nomadic tribes in Asia Minor, the Yuruks, is in some way or other related with them. Of far greater importance are the Kurds. From the great frequency of fair individuals among them, it is evident that their home must be in the north, and it is probable from their Aryan language that they are in some way connected with the Mitanni, who had Aryan divinities about 1280 B. C. I am well aware that at present there is no real proof or decisive evidence for this statement, but, by way of a working hypothesis, I might be allowed to suggest that the Kurds, the Amorites of the Bible, the Mitanni of the Boghaz-köi tablets and the Tamehu of the old Egyptian texts are, if not identical, at least somehow related to one another.1 About 1500 B. C., or earlier, there seems to have begun a migration of northern men to Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, Egypt, and India. Indeed, we can now connect even Further India with the Mitanni of Central Asia Minor. On the tablets of Boghaz-kõi the king of Mitanni not only calls himself and his people "harri,” but he speaks of his noblemen as "mari," and Hugo Winckler and F. C. Andreas 2 remind us of the word "marya" for "young man or "hero" in the Vedic texts. So we find the same Aryan nobles in Mitanni about 1280 B. C., and very much later also in India. If really, as it seems, the old texts state that the Amorites and the Tamehu were fair, we should thus get a historic explanation of the great number of xanthochroic people we find down to our time everywhere in Asia Minor and in Syria, and among the modern Jews. Resuming now the thread of this paper, we have a great number of different "Moslem" Sectaries spread over a vast part of western Asia under different names, as Taḥtadji, Allevi, Ali-Ullahîya, Ansarîyeh, Fellah, Kyzylbash, Yezidi, and Bektash, speaking the different languages of their orthodox neighbors, Turkish, Arabic, and Kurdish, but still absolutely homogeneous as to their somatic characteristics. And to this selfsame group belong also the Druses and the Maronites. They also have the enormously high and short "planoccipital" heads and the narrow and high noses we find with the Sectaries. Now this same hypsicephalic element with the high aquiline noses, which forms the entire stock of all these Sectaries, we find again in Persia, and in a high percentage among the Turks and the Greeks, and in a still higher among the Armenians-everywhere under circum 1 The latest migration of a European tribe to western Asia is that of the Galatians. Passing through Roumania, where the town of Galatz (Galati in Roumanian) has conserved their name, they crossed the. Hellespont about 280 B. C. Angora and Gordion were their principal towns, and it is not impossible that the latter name, and then also that of the Gordyaeans and of the Kurds, is linguistically connected with that of the Galatians, who might have had earlier precursors. Orientalistische Literaturzeitung, 1910, p. 289 ss. Cf. also Ed. Meyer, "Das erste Auftreten der Arier in der Geschichte," in Sitzungsberichte Berliner Akad. der Wissenschaften, 1908, i. |