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H. ignores the upper course of the Halys, where it flows from north-east to south-west; it was its lower course which formed the boundary of the Lydian Empire; cf. c. 72 for a fuller account of it.

By ‘Syrians’ H. means the North Cappadocians (i. 72. 1), called by Strabo (542, 737) also ‘the White Syrians’, in contrast to the darker Syrians of the Levant. Some have distinguished Σύριοι (= ‘Cappadocians’) from Σύροι (= ‘the inhabitants of Palestine’), but the variety of spelling seems due merely to copyists. The name is probably a corruption of ‘Assyrian’; H. (vii. 63) actually uses it of the Assyrians, and says ‘Syrian’ is the Greek, ‘Assyrian’ the barbarous form. When the Greeks came in contact with the empire of Assyria in the eighth century, e. g. from Sinope, they began to use the term of all its subjects; the name first occurs in Pindar, fr. 173 (in Strabo, 544), the Amazons Σύριον εὐρυαίχμαν δίεπον στρατόν, which Strabo says refers to the settlement at Themiscyra near Amisus.


πρῶτος. H. shows real insight in seeing that, though the complete conquest of the Asiatic Greeks by Lydia was brief, it was an event of first-rate importance, as the ‘beginning’ of the subjection of Greeks to barbarians.


For the Cimmerians cf. 15 nn.

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