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

VAN & PICTISH CAVE-DWELLINGS IO

but wrongly so, ““ Early Briton settlements ’’ found in Britain. These cave-dweilings and burrows in the Venasa district are still occupied to the present day by swarms of a nomadic people commonly known to Europeans as “ The Troglodytes (or ‘ Cave-dwellers’) of Cappadocia.” These people live of choice in these old burrows, like conies. They are reported by travellers to be in appearance a race distinct from other modern races in Asia Minor, but have not yet been examined by anthropologists. From the name of their district “* Venasa’ and their cave-dwelling habits, they are presumably an isolated detachment of the primitive Van horde, which has become hemmed in and stranded by the passing tides of alien invaders which have swept over that land in later ages, from East and West. A recent visitor to these cavedwellers, Mr. Childs, gives graphic descriptions of these people and their warrens, from which the following account of one of the burrows is extracted :—

It, too, was honeycombed with passages and cells, of which some had been exposed by weathering as in the cliff. While I looked at this primitive dwelling, something moved in a hole close to the ground, and the head of a chubby brown-faced child appeared. It came out as much at home and unconscious of its surroundings as a slum-child in an alley ; but on seeing me drew back out of sight with the startled manner and instant movement of a wild anjmal.’’?

After such a picture of the subterranean lairs of the primitive Van in“ The Land of the Hittites,’ we can better understand how the highly-civilized ruling Aryan race, the HittoPhcenicians, living in fine timber-built houses above ground, should distinguish themselves from the lowly aboriginal cave-dwellers by the epithet ‘‘ Mansion-dwellers ’—Khilani or ““ Gyaolowonie.”’

The chain of Van names left by the various swarms of these Van hordes of hunters in their progress westwards from the Van Lake region of Asia Minor into Europe and up the Danube valley by Vienna and its “‘ Vanii regnum ” or “ Kingdom of the Vans,’ and Wend-land of Germany to

1 W. J. Childs Acyoss Asia Minor on [oot 1917, 217, etc. * 1b. 227.