Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/182

descended from the Amazons of the Thermodon had never learnt perfectly the language of their husbands. Here I take it the word Scythian is used in a wider and looser sense than in that generally employed by Herodotus, for he gained the information through hearsay, and may therefore be taken to include a Caucasian language. If there is a grain of truth in the statement, it is that the men and women did not always speak the same dialect: that the Sauromatai were, in fact, like the Cherkes, exogamous. Hippocrates, who wrote a little later than Herodotus, though he places the Sauromatai west of the Don, is very positive in his assertion that they were different from other nations, and therefore from the Scyths. Strabo, writing shortly before the beginning of the Christian era, says of seventy nations, all speaking different languages, that used to assemble at the Colchidian mart of Dioscurias, that they were chiefly Sarmatians, but all of them Caucasian tribes. Talking of the Iberians, the modern Imeretians and Georgians, he mentions that those of them inhabiting the mountains lived like the Sarmatians and Scythians, on whose country they bordered and with whom they were connected by affinity of race. The Scythians here referred to are no doubt the Gēlai and Lēgai tribes, belonging to the Caucasus. He places the Albanians in the lower valley of the Kur, east of the Alazan, and makes the Caucasus their northern boundary, apparently confining them to the plain. But as they were reported to speak twenty-six languages, and could bring a larger force into the field than the Iberians, it is evident that many hill tribes must be included in their number, and this people is now doubtless represented by the Lesgians. Of the nationalities occupying the northern slopes of the main Chain, the Lesgians, therefore, and perhaps the Chechents, if the Gelai are represented by the Galgai, are to be excluded from the Sarmatai, and then we are left with the Cherkes and the Abkhas. A few centuries ago, the Adighé occupied a great part of the area previously inhabited