Towards the east, the south coast of Asia Minor was inhabited by the Cilicians and the Solymi. To the former belonged the slopes of Taurus and the coast to the right bank of the Kalykadnus. Towards the west came the Solymi, in a wild and broken mountain country. They took their name from the Solyma mountains (sallum = steps), which they inhabited, and according to Chœrilus of Samos, they spoke the language of the Phenicians.[740] "The pass," so Xenophon tells us, "which leads to Cilicia (from the interior of Asia Minor) is very steep, and only broad enough for a single waggon. On descending from it you come into a well-watered plain by the sea, which is inclosed from one end to the other by lofty and precipitous mountains. But the plain itself is large and beautiful, and filled with trees of every kind, and with vines. It produces much sesame, wheat, millet, and barley."[741] In addition to these advantages the slopes of Taurus offered splendid pastures for horses, and on the coast were excellent harbours. The inhabitants of this favoured land, known in Assyrian inscriptions as Chillakai, and on the coins of the district from the Persian times as Chelech,[742] belonged, like their neighbours on the Orontes and on the Upper Euphrates, to the Semitic stock. This is proved by the names of their districts and places of their gods, and by the inscriptions on their coins. The Semitic stamp of names of places like Amanus (amana, firm), Adana (eden, delight), Mallus (maa'la, height), Tarsus (tars, dry) is beyond a doubt.[743] Herodotus tells us that the Cilicians wore woollen clothes, and peculiar helmets of ox-leather, and carried swords and spears like the Egyptians, and he maintained that they were descended from Cilix, the son of Agenor, a Phenician. Their princes were always styled Syennesis.[744] This standing name was, without doubt, the title given by the princes of Cilicia to themselves: it must have been schu'a nasi, i.e. "noble prince."[745] Hellanicus tells us that of the two kings of the name of Sardanapalus, who ruled over Assyria, one had built the two cities of Tarsus and Anchiale in Cilicia in one day.[746] On the other hand Berosus informs us that Sennacherib (705–681 B.C.) had heard in Assyria that an army of Greeks had landed in Cilicia; against this he marched and defeated it, but with heavy loss. As a memorial of this victory he caused his image to be set up there, and afterwards the city of Tarsus was built in such a way that the Cydnus flowed through the middle of it. The temple at Anchiale (west of Tarsus, on the sea) was also founded by Sennacherib.[747] When Alexander of Macedonia reached Cilicia his attendants found that the circuit and towers of the walls of Anchiale proved that the city was planned on a large scale. Near the walls they saw the statue of an Assyrian king. His right hand was raised, and the inscription in Assyrian letters is said to have called him Sardanapalus, the son of Anakyndaraxes.[748]
No king of the name of Anakyndaraxes or Sardanapalus ever ruled over Assyria, unless perhaps by the latter is meant Assurbanipal (Assurbanhabal), the son of Esarhaddon. On the other hand, the inscriptions of Shalmanesar II. of Asshur (859–828 B.C.) mention the fact that he had overcome "Pikhirim the chief of the land of Chilakku (Cilicia)," and Sargon, king of Assyria (722–705 B.C.), tells us that the Cilicians had not been subject to his father, and that he had transferred the dominion over Cilicia to Ambris, king of Tubal. Hence Cilicia must have become subject to Sargon in the earliest years of his reign. In consequence of the revolt, which Ambris undertook with Urza of Ararat, and Mita, the king of Moschi, as we saw above (p. 520), Ambris was taken captive and dethroned in the year 714 B.C. Sennacherib, the successor of Sargon (705–681 B.C.), informs us that in the very first years of his reign he had caused rebellious Cilicians to be removed: the inscriptions of the later years of his reign remark that the cities of the Cilicians were destroyed and burnt, and the Cilicians in the forests were reduced. After this the inscriptions of Esarhaddon (681–668 B.C.) assure us that he reduced the Cilicians; and Assurbanipal recounts that Sandasarmi of Cilicia, who had not submitted to the kings his fathers, and fulfilled their commands, sent his daughter with many presents to Nineveh for the harem of Assurbanipal, and kissed his feet.[749]
The fall of the Assyrian kingdom restored their freedom to the Cilicians, and they appear to have maintained it till the times of Cyrus. After that time the princes of Cilicia were merely the viceroys of the kings of Persia. To these sovereigns Cilicia paid each year 500 Babylonian talents of silver and 360 selected horses. The harbours, which carried on a lively trade, were able, at the beginning of the fifth century B.C., to equip and man a hundred ships of war (triremes).[750]
The coins which have come down to us from the supremacy of the Persians allow us to form some conclusions about the religious rites of the Cilician cities. They represent Baal, the sun-god of the Syrians, on the throne, with grapes and ears of corn in his right hand, and sometimes an eagle at his side. Others exhibit Heracles attacking a lion with his club. The inscriptions name the god thus represented Bal Tars, i.e. Baal of Tarsus. A coin of Mallus also exhibits Heracles strangling the lion, i.e. the beneficent sun-god who overcomes the terrible sun-god in the sign of the lion, the consuming glow of the sun. On other coins we can trace the war-goddess, on others the birth-goddess of the Syrians, or her cow; some coins of Celenderis exhibit the goat of this goddess.[751]
The land of the Cilicians must at one time have stretched northwards over the Taurus range to the inner table-land as far as the sources of the Sarus, to the watershed between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, or even further. Sargon could not have transferred the sovereignty over Cilicia to the king of Tubal if his territory was not contiguous to Cilicia. And if we assume that the land of Tubal reached at that time as far as the Taurus, we are met by the objection that even Herodotus represents the Halys as passing through the land of the Cilicians on its way from Armenia.[752] Hence the land afterwards called Cataonia, between Taurus and Antitaurus and the northern spur of the latter range, must, even in the time of Herodotus, have belonged to Cilicia.
On the north-western slope of the Armenian mountains toward the Black Sea we have already found the Moschi and Tibarenes, whom the Hebrews counted among the sons of Japhet. The western neighbours of the Tibarenes on the coasts of the Black Sea were the Chalybians. It is the land of the Chalybians of which the Homeric poems speak, when they mention the city of Alybe—"where is the birth of silver."[753] But it is not only the obtaining of silver that is ascribed by the Greeks to the Chalybians; they are also the discoverers of the working of iron; and steel, which the Greeks obtained from this coast, was named after the Chalybians. Æschylus calls the Chalybians "barbarous workers in brass, men averse to foreigners."[754] In the scriptures of the Hebrews Tubal-cain, a name of which the first part seems to denote the Tibarenes, is the father of the smiths in brass and iron. Hence it is clear that the mines of ore and iron in the land of the Tibarenes and Chalybians must have been opened at a very early period. As a fact the ore lies at a very slight depth in the mountains. Even now large masses of copper are discovered along the coast to the west of Trebizond; beside copper, the mines of Gümüsh Khane, two days' journey in the interior from Trebizond, even now yield lead containing silver, which is also found in the mines of Baibut and Tokat, further to the south.[755]