The Phœnician origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons : discovered by Phœnician & Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, by preroman Briton coins & a mass of new history : with over one hundred illustrations and maps

ORIGINAL HOME OF PREHISTORIC VANS 99

is in keeping with this tradition. The large town of Van and its lake thus stands on the old land-bridge connecting the three continents of Europe, Africa and Asia; for Asia Minor is west of the Caucasus, and in its flora and fauna, and also geologically, is part of Europe rather than Asia proper. Situated on the great immemorial trade-route running east and west between Europe and Asia, it was traversed by Xerxes and his famous Ten Thousand, and an actual inscription by that Persian emperor on his hasty return from the Grecian campaign and Hellespont in 480 B.C. is engraved on the citadel rock there, showing the directness of the route to Europe. And significantly the founding of the town of Van is ascribed by Armenian tradition to Semiramis, that is, the great legendary Queen-matriarch of prehistoric times. And this part of Eastern Asia Minor was a centre of the Matriarchist cult of the Mother-goddess and her “Galli” priestesses down to the Greco-Roman occupation.

These matriarchist aborigines of Van, disclosed to be presumably of the primitive stock of the pre-Aryan Fein, are called “‘ Biani’’ in the cuneiform inscriptions of their Hittite rulers about the ninth century B.c. They are also called therein ‘‘ The Children of Khaldis,”+ or ‘‘ Children of the River —which title, we shall find, is apparently the source of the names ‘‘Chaldee,’ ‘“‘Galatia” and “ Kelt,” and anthropologists find that primitive men distributed themselves along the river-banks, and were literally “ Children of the River.’ These Van or Biani were clearly, I find, the “ Pani’ aborigines of the Indian Vedic hymns and epics who opposed the Early Aryans in establishing their higher solar religion before the departure of the eastern branch of the Aryans to India, They were possibly also, I think, the remote prehistoric originals of the “ Fan” barbarians, as the Chinese still term generally the barbarous tribes on the western frontiers of the Celestial Empire, as far at least as Asia Minor,

In physical appearance the primitive Vans, as the * Pani” of the Vedas and epics, are described as “dark or

1S.LV., 1882, 454, etc.