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25 8 ARMENIA AND THE NEAR EAST
indications which seem to show that the peoples who migrated
from there between the end of the third and the beginning
of the second millennium b.c., both to Asia Minor (where
the long-skulled Trojans were dispossessed by a short-skulled
and probably Indo-European people about 1900 b.c.), and to
Greece, were short-skulled (cf. p. 233).
As regards Armenia we know now that the short-skulled
Armenoid race immigrated into the country after a long
skulled race who inhabited the country in the Stone and Bronze
Ages. At the museum in Erivan I saw some of the crania
from that early period, and they were all typical long-skuUs.
Not till iron begins to appear in the graves do we find short
skulls. Mr. E. Lalajan, director of the State Museum in
Erivan, has excavated more than five hundred graves in the
Novo-Bejazet district near Lake Gokcha, the bulk of these
dating from the Bronze Age. They contained typical long
skulls (index, 65-3-73-9). In Georgia, too, and in the Cauca
sian regions, extending from the Kuban country to the eastern
parts of Asia Minor and farther south, a similar long-skulled
race seems to have been widely distributed and in sole occupa
tion before the incursion of the later short-skulled peoples.
According to Armenian students of the subject, the sole
supremacy of the long-skulls in Armenia began to decline in
the first half of the second millennium b.c, and by the middle
of the millennium the country was peopled by short-skulls. 1
It is not at all improbable that this change was connected with
the developments in producing iron and making iron weapons
in Asia Minor at approximately the same time, or possibly
in the fourteenth century. These new weapons obviously
gave the short-skulled Armenoid people of Asia Minor a
great advantage over the long-skulled and smaller bronze
men in the west, whom they easily conquered. And in this
connection it should be remembered that the later Khaldians
in Armenia (as well as the Khalybes) were particularly elever
smiths and workers in iron and steel.
We may probably assume that the early long-skulled
peoples in Armenia and the countries of the Caucasus belonged
1 According to information receivcd in a letter from Dr. S. Ter-Hakobian »
librarian of the Scientific Institute at Echmiadzin.
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