During the earlier part of the second period of Phoenician influence, Phoenicia and the Phoenician colonies were not the only channel by which the elements of Assyrian culture found their way into the West. The monuments and religious beliefs of Asia Minor enable us to trace their progress from the banks of the Euphrates and the ranges of the Taurus, through Cappadocia and Phrygia, to the coasts and islands of the AEgean. The near affinity of Greek and Phrygian is recognized even by Plato;[39] the legends of Midas and Gordius formed part of Greek mythology, and the royal house of Mykenae was made to come with all its wealth from the golden sands of the Paktolus; while on the other hand the cult of Ma, of Attys, or of the Ephesian Artemis points back to an Assyrian origin. The sculptures found by Perrot[40] and Texier constitute a link between the prehistoric art of Greece and that of Asia Minor; the spiral ornaments that mark the antiquities of Mykenae are repeated on the royal tombs of Asia Minor; and the ruins of Sardis, where once ruled a dynasty derived by Greek writers from Ninus or Nineveh, "the son of Bell," the grandson of the Assyrian Herakles,[41] may yet pour a flood of light on the earlier history of Greece. But it was rather in the first period, which I have termed Phrygian, than in the second, that the influence of Asia Minor was strongest. The figure of the goddess riding on a leopard, with mural crown and peaked shoes, on the rock-tablets of Pterium,[42] is borrowed rather from the cylinders of early Babylonia than from the sculptures of Assyria; and the Hissarlik collection connects itself more with the primitive antiquities of Santorin than with the later art of Mykenae and Cyprus. We have already seen, however, the close relationship that exists between some of the objects excavated at Mykenae and what we may call the pre-Phoenician art of Ialysos,--that is to say, the objects in which the influence of the East is indirect, and not direct. The discovery of metallurgy is associated with Dodona, where the oracle long continued to be heard in the ring of a copper chaldron, and where M. Karapanos has found bronze plates with the geometrical and circular patterns which distinguish the earliest art of Greece; now Dodona is the seat of primaeval Greek civilization, the land of the Selloi or Helloi, of the Graioi themselves, and of Pelasgian Zeus, while it is to the north that the legends of Orpheus, of Musaeus, and of other early civilizers looked back. But even at Dodona we may detect traces of Asiatic influence in the part played there by the doves, as well as in the story of Deucalion's deluge, and it may, perhaps, be not too rash to conjecture that even before the days of Phoenician enterprise and barter, an echo of Babylonian civilization had reached Greece through the medium of Asia Minor, whence it was carried, partly across the bridge formed by the islands of the