that it belonged to the Sigynnæ, a nomadic people who were drawn over their plains by small horses in cars or wagons, and extended their journeys as far as the country of the Heneti, at the bottom of the Adriatic gulf. The ethnography of the region to the southward of the Danube is tolerably well known from the time of Herodotus. That writer has given us a general survey of the inhabitants, which has been illustrated by notices scattered through the works of other historians, and filled up with tolerable accuracy by Strabo, whose account of the tribes of Greeks and Thracians, and Epirots and Illyrians, is one of the most carefully written parts of his great work. From these sources we collect that four distinct races or groupes of nations, between whom it does not appear to have been supposed by the ancients that any affinity however remote existed, divided between them all the countries in Europe lately belonging to the Ottoman empire. Of these the Thracians were the most numerous and extensive. They occupied all the eastern parts of the European region above described, as well as the central plains to the southward of the Danube, and in Asia Minor a still more extensive tract. To the westward of the Thracians, and reaching from thence to the Adriatic, were Illyrian tribes, a nation of barbarous mountaineers. To the southward of the Illyrians were the Epirotic tribes, who possessed a tract of hill-country reaching from the Ionian Sea to Macedonia, and cutting off the western parts of Greece from the Illyrian territory. The fourth nation are the Greeks, who were hemmed in towards the north by the Epirots on the western, and by the Thracians on the eastern side. Of these four nations the Greeks alone can be said to have left undoubted posterity, preserving still the language and perpetuating the stock of their forefathers. There are, however, other races in the same countries who in all probability have succeeded in like manner to the Thracians and Illyrians, though the evidence of their descent is not so unequivocal, since they are not without some research distinguishable from the various colonies who have passed the Danube and settled themselves to the southward of that river in later times, after partially dispossessing the earlier inhabitants. The earliest of these invading nations came from the westward. They were the Celtic Scordisci, who, as we have seen, occupied an extensive country to the southward of the Danube. They are placed by Strabo between the Margus or the Morawa, and the Noarus,* supposed to be the Save, namely, in the modern Servia and Bosnia. They are said to have destroyed the Triballi, who had been one of the most powerful Thracian tribes in the time of Herodotus, and they maintained their independence till they were conquered by the Romans. In the accounts given of the wars of the Roman armies the Scordisci are reckoned among the principal nations of Thrace. From this time no important accession was made to the population of the countries beyond the Danube till the age of Valens, when Masia was given by the emperor to the Goths, who passed the river in a body, which Gibbon computes to have amounted to a million of people. But the Goths abandoned Mosia, which became afterwards the seat of the Bulgarian kingdom, while many extensive districts in the northern part of the Byzantine empire were colonised, as we have seen, by various Slavonian hordes. The Bulgarians were, in the ninth century, the dominant people in these countries. They were, as we shall hereafter observe, a Turkish race, and took their name from the Wolga, termed by them Bolga, on which was situated their ancient kingdom of Bolgari; but they appear to have been outnumbered by the Slavic hordes under their sway, and to have adopted the language of that people, with whom they were intermixed.¶ Nations of the Slavic language were the last people who obtained settlements for numerous hordes beyond the Danube, until the invasion of the Byzantine empire by the Turks; and those tribes in the Ottoman provinces who speak neither the Slavonian nor the Turkish language, may be considered as most * Strabo, lib. vii. p. 318. Gibbon, ch. xxvi. + T. Liv. Epit. lib. lxv. || Von Engel, cited by Adelung. See also Müller's Ugrische Volkstamm, Theil ii. ¶ Boscovich, who was a native of Ragusa in Dalmatia found himself able to understand the Bulgarians, during his travels through their country, without great difficulty. See Boscovich's Travels, Lausanne, 1772, p. 59. The speech of the Bulgarians is intelligible to the Russians, and their church books are in the Servian or Russian language. See Adelung, Mithridates, ii. 642. probably descended from the aboriginal inhabitants. They are the Greeks, the Albanians, and the Wallachs. I shall now proceed to trace the history of the four nations before enumerated. SECTION II. Of the Thracian Race. Herodotus declares that the Thracians were the most numerous race of people in the world next to the Indians.* In this passage he used the name in its widest sense, as comprehending all the nations allied to the Thracians in language and descent. It has also a more restricted meaning, in which it includes certain tribes more properly termed Thracians, and chiefly, as it appears, those clans who were subject to the Thracian kingdom of the Odrysæ, or their immediate neighbours.† The Thracians in the time of Herodotus reached northward as far as the Danube. The coast of the Adriatic was occupied by the Illyrian race, distinct, as we shall find, from the Thracian; but to the eastward of the Illyrians the whole country was occupied by Thracian tribes as far as the Euxine. The heart of Thrace was the broad valley of the Hebrus lying between the chains of Rhodope and Hæmus, the latter of which is now called the Balkan. Strabo makes it reach westward to the Strymon, τὰ δὲ πέραν Στρύμονος ἤδη, μέχρι τοῦ Αἴμου, πάντα Θρακῶν OTS He says in another passage that all Greece was hemmed in towards the north by Thracian, Epirotic, and Illyrian nations. The Thracians, he adds, possess Macedonia and a part of Thessaly: above Acarnania and Ætolia are the Thesproti, the Cassopæi, the Amphilochi, the Molossi, and the Athamanes, which are Epirotic nations. We shall have occasion to advert again to these last tribes and the race to which they belong. The principal nations between Mount Hamus and the Danube were the Krobizii, near the Pontus, and the Triballi, a Thracian people, as Strabo declares,|| who inhabited the extensive Triballian plains in the central parts *Herod. lib. v. c. 3. Herod. lib. v. c. 3. et seqq. VOL. III. + Adelung, Mithridat. b. ii. s. 354. На of the inland country, of which they kept possession till they were expelled by the Celtic Scordisci, shortly before the time of Alexander the Great. Within the same boundary were several other tribes, well known to be of the Thracian stock; as the Bessi, who inhabited the greater part of Mount Hamus, where they maintained their independence even against the army of Xerxes; the Bryges, near Macedonia, who were the ancestral stock of the Phrygians, according to Herodotus and Strabo; the Satræ, in the south on the mountains of Rhodope, equally wild and independent; the Trausi, on the Travus, known to Herodotus; and the Thyni near Salmydessus, who were said to have passed with the Mysians into Asia Minor, and to have been the ancestors of the Bithynians. Besides these tribes, who are all termed Thracians in a more restricted sense, there were several nations who are known by sufficient evidence to have belonged to that race. 1. The Getæ and Dacians are declared by all the ancient writers to have been of the Thracian race. The Getæ are first mentioned by Herodotus, who terms them the most valiant and honest of the Thracians.* They were subdued by the army of Darius before he arrived at the Danube; therefore they dwelt at that time to the southward of the Danube, and it does not appear that they differed in manners or language from other Thracian tribes. In the time of Thucydides they are found in the same region, namely, between the Danube, Mount Hæmus, and the Euxine; and, as Mannert has observed, they must have been among those Thracian tribes who combined with the Scythians in resisting the arms of Philip of Macedon.+ Perhaps at this time they crossed the Danube, since they appear on the northern side when the country on the Euxine was invaded by Lysimachus. Niebuhr thinks they had disappeared from their former country in the age of Alexander, who found a city of the Geta within the Scythia of Herodotus.+ In the time of Strabo the country of the Getæ certainly was to the northward of the Danube. It was a part of Dacia, Herod. iv. c. 93. + Mannert, Geogr. der Griecher und Römer. Niebuhr, Geogr. of Scythia, translated from his "Kleinere Schriften." and Strabo declares* that the people of the eastern Dacia, near the sea and the mouth of the Danube, were called Getæ, and those of the western part Daci.+ It seems then that the Getæ, who were recognised by Herodotus and Thucydides as Thracians, were of the same race with the Dacians.‡ But 2. The Macedonians appear to have been a Thracian people. The Argive Temenidæ founded a Grecian state in Macedonia at an early period, and Philip brought the skin-clad Macedonians from their mountains, and taught them to till the soil and live in towns, and by military discipline trained them to become conquerors of the world. But the language of the Macedonians was unintelligible to the Greeks. The Greek soldiers in Alexander's army understood not, as we learn from Quintius Curtius,§ a speech addressed to the Macedonians. Niebuhr thought the Macedonians a Pelasgic people. the Pelasgic name had become extinguished in Greece long before the age of the Macedonian conquests. We may infer from a well-known passage of Herodotus, that the only relics of the Pelasgi existing in his time, as distinguished from the Greeks, were the bands of Tyrsenian Pelasgi who were settled near Placia and Crestona. Had the language of the Macedonians been that of these same Pelasgi, the fact could hardly have escaped his knowledge, and it would assuredly have been mentioned by him in the passage in which he discussed the question with what nations the Pelasgi were allied, and what idiom was their speech. If we give credit to Strabo, we must consider the Macedonians as a Thracian people. That geographer mentions several parts of the Macedonian country, and Pieria, on the borders of Thessaly, ⚫ Strabo, p. 314. ed. Casaub. + Strabo adds his testimony to the Thracian origin and language of the Getæ, and he cites in another passage a verse of Menander, in which the Getæ are mentioned as Thracians: πάντες μὲν οἱ Θράκες μάλιστα δ' οἱ Γέται ἡμεῖς ἅπαντες—οὐ σφόδρ ̓ ἐγκρατεῖς "All the Thracians, but especially the Getæ, are not very temperate." See Strabo, lib. vii. p. 295. Strabo says expressly, p. 305, that the Daci and the Getæ speak one language. § Q. Curtius, vi. 9. Mithridat. ii. p. 361. н н 2 |