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CHAPTERS IN THE HISTORY OF ARMENIA 239
to a race which was the same as the Mediterranean or Afghan
race.1 The latter was dark-haired and comparatively short
and slight in build. It was originally distributed over the
Mediterranean countries, Egypt, North Africa, Crete, many
of the Greek islands, the south of Greece, and farther to the
west. In Asia it was distributed over Arabia, and eastwards
to Persia and Afghanistan. The Arabs and several of the
original Semitic peoples belonged to this race, as did also
the Israelite immigrants into Palestine, and probably the
Phænicians. The northern Arabic-speaking tribes and the
Druses, Maronites, etc, have a strong admixture of Armenoid
blood. This applies in a particularly high degree to the
Jews ; it is the source of the so-called Semitic appearance,
with the hooked Armenoid nose, which in reality is not Semitic
at all. On the coast of Asia Minor wc meet with the long
skulled race in Troy in the third millennium b.c. ; but the
extent of its earlier distribution elsewhere in Asia Minor is
unknown. In view of its wide distribution at an early date
in the east, south, and west, wc might expect it to have extended
at that time over the interior of Asia Minor and Syria ; at
present, however, there have been no systematic investigations
of prehistoric graves in those regions, and failing these wc
can reach no definitive conclusion.
The circumstance that kings and gods on Hittite reliefs of
the second millennium b.c. are undoubtedly of the Armenoid
type is not of the evidential value that Luschan holds it to be.
These reliefs are sufficiently late for us at least to expect that
there had been an immigration by then of the short-skulled
race. Further, they unquestionably represent the type of
the ruling class, which, as wc know, was immigrated Indo-
European. According to these reliefs it would have been
markedly Armenoid.
According to Luschan’s investigations a very considerable
percentage of dark long-skulls may be found in the present-day
Turkish-speaking population of Western Asia. But it seems
more reasonable to suppose that these long-skulled people are
descended from an original people of the Mediterranean race
than that they entered the country at a later epoch, which
Cf. Halfdan Bryn, Menneskerasene og deres utvikling, pp. 125 ff., Oslo, 1925.
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