Before proceeding further I must state that these peoples, like those of the Balkan Peninsula, must already have acquired their present physical stamp in the early Middle Ages, at any rate, before the Seljuk-Turkish conquest, for the modified, ethnically but slightly distinguished type of the western Anatolian peasant population is not characteristic of these Greeks. Rather do the Cappadocian Greeks show unmistakable Armenian influence, especially in the broad and extraordinarily high skull, and the large fleshy nose, as well as in their compact and sturdy build, while those of the mountainous coast region of Pontus have retained the more finely cut features of the Greeks and their more graceful form. Some claim to find a third type in the Greeks of south-eastern Asia Minor, a type which shows strikingly Semitic features, and which is probably to be traced back to the numerous Syrian immigrations into Asia Minor during the supremacy of the Isaurian Dynasty of Byzantium, 717-867. In the same way the Armenian type of the inland Greeks is to be traced back to the extensive intermingling of Byzantine Greeks and Armenians during the 9th and 10th centuries, when the Byzantine Empire received a strong quickening of Armenian blood. A dynasty of Armenian origin at that time gave the Byzantine imperial throne a new hold and lent renewed strength to the new kingdom and a great Byzantine province of Asia Minor was called “the Armenian Province.” In any case, we must be on our guard against deriving our present ethnographical picture of Asia Minor directly from the old racial divisions into Hittites, Phrygians and Lydians. The fact that Asia Minor served as a bridge between Asia and Europe prevented such a preservation of the old ethnical relations, as had been the case in the Balkan Peninsula, that great reservoir of people in migration; here as there, in judging of ethnological characteristics, we should, far more than has up to now been the case, start out from Byzantine times, which completely transformed the ancient ethnological nature of both peninsulas.[20] That we have to do, however, in the case of the Cappadocian and Pontic Greeks with autochthonous remains of pre-Turkish times, and not with later immigrants, is shown not only by their racial type but by their dialect. This belongs to the very oldest forms of the Modern Greek language, if one leaves out of account the still more ancient Tzakonian, and enables us to conclude that it broke away from other Greek at a very early period, and followed a separate development of its own. This is particularly true of the Pontic dialect of Samsun (Amisos), Œnoe (Unieh) and Ophis; there is in the phonetics of the dialect, as well as in the vocabulary, so much that is peculiar that it is almost unintelligible to those conversant with the ordinary Modern Greek. But this holds true also of the dialect of some twenty Cappadocian towns—for with only twenty are we here concerned—a