For example, the Sigynnae of the Middle Danube ‘say that they are a colony of Medes. How they have come to be a colony of Medes, I for my part cannot say for certain: yet anything might happen if you give it long enough’.[101] Herodotus is prepared, that is, to allow infinite time to accomplish an almost impossible migration, rather than give up what he accepts as a people’s own account of their origin. But obviously this principle of ethnography was likely to lead to great difficulties. The Sigynnae, it is true, wore ‘Median dress’, presumably trousers of some kind, and perhaps a shaped cap with ear-guards, no less suitable to a Danubian than to a Median winter. But what of their physique? In this instance Herodotus gives no details; but clearly if conflict were to occur between the evidence for descent and for physique--if, that is, a people claimed descent from another people of a different physical type--it might be the difference of physique which would stand in need of explanation. There was another reason, besides, why traditions of common descent should seem to deserve tender treatment, even when geographical probability was against them. The whole Eastern Mediterranean was still but imperfectly recovering itself after one of those periods of prolonged and intense ethnic stress to which it is exposed by the permeability of its northern frontier. From Thrace to Crete there were fragmentary patches of Pelasgians; Phrygians from Macedon to Peloponnese, far up the Adriatic, and in Western Sicily; Thracians in Naxos and Attica; and Lydians at Askalon. The Ionian merchant, like the Venetian of a later time, found everywhere before him the tracks of the crusading Achaean. The Dorian Spartan in Cyprus, at Soli and Kerynia, found Kurion already the colony of an earlier Argos; at Tarentum he merely filled a vacant niche in an Achaean, almost a Homeric Italy. If things like these could happen within four or five hundred years, γένοιτο δ’ ἂν πᾶν ἐν τῷ μακρῷ χρόνῷ. Outside the Greek world it was the same. Where Sesostris had been, the Scythian and Kimmerian had followed, leaving their trail at Sinope and Askalon, as he in Colchis. Nebuchadnezzar had set the Jews by the waters of Babylon. Darius was but following the rule when he moved Paeonians to Asia Minor, and transplanted Eretrians to Ardericca.