Syennesis, reigned at Tarsus, having little in common with other
Anatolian princes. But we may reasonably infer from the circumstances of
the pacific intervention just mentioned that Cilician power had been
growing for a long time previous; and also from the frequency with which
Shalmaneser raided the land, that already in the ninth century it was
rich and civilized. We know it to have been a great centre of Sandan
worship, and may guess that its kings were kin of the Mushki race and,
if not the chief survivors of the original stock which invaded Assyria
in Tiglath Pileser's time, ranked at least among the chief inheritors of
the old Hatti civilization. Some even date its civilization earlier
still, believing the Keftiu, who brought rich gifts to the Pharaohs of
the eighteenth and succeeding dynasties, to have been Cilicians.

Unfortunately, no scientific excavation of early sites in Cilicia has
yet been undertaken; but for many years past buyers of antiquities have
been receiving, from Tarsus and its port, engraved stones and seals of
singularly fine workmanship, which belong to Hittite art but seem of
later date than most of its products. They display in their decoration
certain peculiar designs, which have been remarked also in Cyprus, and
present some peculiarities of form, which occur also in the earliest
Ionian art. Till other evidence comes to hand these little objects must
be our witnesses to the existence of a highly developed sub-Hittite
culture in Cilicia which, as early as the ninth century, had already
been refined by the influence of the Greek settlements on the Anatolian
coasts and perhaps, even earlier, by the Cretan art of the Aegean area.
Cilician civilization offers a link between east and west which is worth
more consideration and study than have been given to it by historians.


SECTION 7. ASIA MINOR