* A certain number of these tribes or of their towns are to be found in the list contained in the treaty of Ramses II. with the Khâti.
We are at a loss to know the distribution of tribes in the centre and in the north-west, but the Bosphorus and the Hellespont, we may rest assured, never formed an ethnographical frontier. The continents on either side of them appear at this point to form the banks of a river, or the two slopes of a single valley, whose bottom lies buried beneath the waters. The barbarians of the Balkans had forced their way across at several points. Dardanians were to be encountered in the neighbourhood of Mount Ida, as well as on the banks of the Axios, from early times, and the Kebrenes of Macedonia had colonised a district of the Troad near Ilion, while the great nation of the Mysians had issued, like them, from the European populations of the Hebrus and the Strymon. The hero Dardanos, according to legend, had at first founded, under the auspices of the Idasan Zeus, the town of Dardania; and afterwards a portion of his progeny followed the course of the Scamander, and entrenched themselves upon a precipitous hill, from the top of which they could look far and wide over the plain and sea. The most ancient Ilion, at first a village, abandoned on more than one occasion in the course of centuries, was rebuilt and transformed, earlier than the XVth century before Christ, into an important citadel, the capital of a warlike and prosperous kingdom. The ruins on the spot prove the existence of a primitive civilization analogous to that of the islands of the Archipelago before the arrival of the Phoenician navigators. We find that among both, at the outset, flint and bone, clay, baked and unbaked, formed the only materials for their utensils and furniture; metals were afterwards introduced, and we can trace their progressive employment to the gradual exclusion of the older implements. These ancient Trojans used copper, and we encounter only rarely a kind of bronze, in which the proportion of tin was too slight to give the requisite hardness to the alloy, and we find still fewer examples of iron and lead. They were fairly adroit workers in silver, electrum, and especially in gold. The amulets, cups, necklaces, and jewellery discovered in their tombs or in the ruins of their houses, are sometimes of a not ungraceful form. Their pottery was made by hand, and was not painted or varnished, but they often gave to it a fine lustre by means of a stone-polisher. Other peoples of uncertain origin, but who had attained a civilization as advanced as that of the Trojans, were the Maeonians, the Leleges, and the Carians who had their abode to the south of Troy and of the Mysians. The Maeonians held sway in the fertile valleys of the Hermos, Cayster, and Maaander. They were divided into several branches, such as the Lydians, the Tyrseni, the Torrhebi, and the Shardana, but their most ancient traditions looked back with pride to a flourishing state to which, as they alleged, they had all belonged long ago on the slopes of Mount Sipylos, between the valley of the Hermos and the Gulf of Smyrna. The traditional capital of this kingdom was Magnesia, the most ancient of cities, the residence of Tantalus, the father of Niobe and the Pelopidae. The Leleges rise up before us from many points at the same time, but always connected with the most ancient memories of Greece and Asia. The majority of the strongholds on the Trojan coast belonged to them--such as Antandros and Gargara--and Pedasos on the Satniois boasted of having been one of their colonies, while several other towns of the same name, but very distant from each other, enable us to form some idea of the extent of their migrations.