Lycia

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The land falls toward the sea in folds. Behind the bays of the southwest Anatolian coast — the Teke peninsula, in the modern provinces of Antalya and Muğla, near 36.36° N, 29.32° E — the Taurus mountains drop almost into the water, so that the rivers run short and steep and the towns sit on isolated terraces between gorge and shore. This is broken country, hard to cross and easy to defend, and the people who held it through the first millennium BCE made of that geography a politics. They never became one kingdom. They became, instead, a federation of cities that argued and voted and sent representatives to a common assembly, and they cut their dead into the living rock of the cliffs so deliberately that the tombs remain the most legible thing they left. The empires came — Persia, Macedon, the Hellenistic kingdoms, Rome — and each in turn absorbed the federation. The tombs absorbed nobody, and weathered all of them.

The Lukka and the Termilae

The Lycians called themselves Trmmili — the Termilae of the Greek sources. “Lycian” is the outside name, traceable to the Lukka of the Bronze Age. In the tablets of the Hittite chancellery the Lukka lands appear repeatedly across the second millennium BCE, a region nominally subject to the Hittite hegemony of central Anatolia under Suppiluliuma I in the mid-fourteenth century yet chronically in revolt, raiding by sea, slipping the imperial grip. The Lukka turn up in Egyptian records too, named among the coalition of Sea Peoples that pressed against the eastern Mediterranean kingdoms around 1200 BCE. They leave no literature of their own from this depth; they are visible only in the complaints of larger powers, which is itself a kind of portrait — a people on the edge of the great states, useful, mobile, never quite governable.

When Homer composes the catalog of Troy’s allies, the Lycians stand among the most distinguished. They come from the far rim of the Aegean world to fight for Priam under two leaders. Sarpedon, son of Zeus by a mortal mother, is the foremost; his death before the walls is one of the Iliad’s gravest scenes, the father of the gods weeping tears of blood for a son he cannot save and the body borne home to Lycia on the wings of Sleep and Death. (Greek genealogy multiplied the name: a different Sarpedon, reckoned a son of Zeus and the Phoenician princess Europa, belongs to the Cretan cycle, and the two were sometimes braided together across the generations — a tangle that says less about Lycia than about how readily the Aegean world wove this coast into its own family of heroes.) Beside him fights Glaucus, grandson of Bellerophon — the hero who came to Lycia and slew the Chimera, the fire-breathing composite of lion, goat, and serpent that the land’s own myth located in its mountains, where natural gas still burns from the rock at Olympos. Meeting Diomedes across the lines, Glaucus discovers an ancestral guest-friendship between their houses and the two warriors exchange armor rather than blows. Whether the Iliad’s Lycians are a memory of the Lukka or a poetic relocation is argued; what is not argued is that by the archaic period the Lycians themselves had taken the Homeric heroes for their own and carved Bellerophon and the Chimera onto their monuments.

The tongue and the script

The Lycian language is one of the surest threads back into Anatolian antiquity. It belongs to the Anatolian branch of Indo-European, and within that branch to the Luwic group — descended from, or closely sister to, the Luwian spoken across western Anatolia in the second and early first millennia BCE. It is therefore a near relative of the language of the Hittite world, carried down into the historical period on the southern coast while the great Bronze Age states that spoke its cousins had vanished.

The Lycians wrote it in an alphabet of their own, adapted from an archaic Greek script of the Doric type — some twenty-nine signs, twenty-three consonants and six vowels, including letters Greek did not possess, invented to render Anatolian sounds. They wrote left to right. Several hundred inscriptions survive, most of them funerary, fixing the name of the dead and cursing the violation of the tomb. Two trilinguals make the script readable. The pillar known as the Xanthian Obelisk, raised on the acropolis of the chief city around 400 BCE as the funerary monument of a dynast of the house of Xanthos, carries a long text in standard Lycian, in the divergent dialect called Milyan or Lycian B, and in Greek verse. The Letoon stele, uncovered in 1973 at the federal sanctuary below Xanthos, sets Lycian beside Greek and Aramaic — the last the chancellery language of the Persian administration — and gives a phrase-by-phrase anchor that confirmed the alphabet’s Greek derivation and unlocked much of the grammar. Greek displaced Lycian as the written language in the first century BCE; the older tongue went silent, but it had already been pinned to stone in a way few peripheral languages of the ancient world ever were.

Cutting the dead into the cliff

Nothing the Lycians made declares them so plainly as their tombs. They placed the dead high, in the rock faces above their towns, and they carved the rock to look like the houses of the living. The earliest and most distinctive type is the house-tomb: a façade hewn directly from the cliff in imitation of a timber dwelling, with squared beam-ends, mortised joints, and a projecting roof reproduced in stone, as though a wooden Lycian house had been pressed into the mountain and petrified. Later came the temple-tombs, their fronts given pediments and columns in the Greek manner, the carpentry idiom yielding to the architectural one. The slopes below the cliffs and the roadsides carry a third form, the freestanding sarcophagus on a high base, its lid often a pointed Gothic-looking arch — the so-called Lycian sarcophagus that became the region’s signature.

Oldest and grandest is the fourth form: the pillar tomb, a tall freestanding shaft of masonry with the burial chamber set at its summit, raising the dead bodily above the town. The pillar tombs belong to western Lycia and to the dynasts who ruled it; the most famous, the Harpy Tomb at Xanthos, carried a marble chamber whose reliefs show winged female figures bearing small child-sized souls away in their arms — the dead carried off to the next world by flying daimones, a belief the monuments make concrete. (The Xanthos reliefs, like the temple-form Nereid Monument raised for the dynast Arbinas around 390–380 BCE, were removed to the British Museum in the nineteenth century; casts stand on the site.) At Myra the cliff above the theater is honeycombed with more than a hundred rock-cut façades, a vertical city of the dead overlooking the city of the living. The Lycians spent their wealth on permanence, and chose to spend it on the houses they would occupy after death rather than the ones they occupied before it.

Gods of the federation

The religious center of Lycia lay a short walk south of Xanthos at the Letoon, the sanctuary of Leto and her twin children Apollo and Artemis. Leto stood at the head of the Lycian pantheon — in the native inscriptions the eni mahanahi, the mother of the gods — and the myth that brought her to this coast, fleeing the wrath of Hera and finding shelter and water among Lycian herdsmen before her children were grown, fixed the region as her chosen ground. Her son Apollo had at nearby Patara one of the most renowned oracles of the ancient world, a winter seat said to balance his summer residence at Delos. Her daughter Artemis, goddess of the wild margins where the Lycians lived, was honored across the federation. The Letoon was not only a place of cult but the meeting ground of the nation: its festivals drew the cities together, and in the second century BCE it was formally constituted the federal sanctuary of all Lycia, the religious anchor of a political union. A people without a capital made a shrine its common house.

The interpretatio that names these gods in Greek covers an older Anatolian substrate; the Lycians, like their Luwian forebears, worshipped storm- and sun-divinities under their own names before the Olympian vocabulary settled over them, and the Greek messenger-god Hermes, guide of souls, found a natural home among a people so preoccupied with the journey of the dead. Herodotus records another marker of their distinctiveness: the Lycians, he wrote, named themselves after their mothers and reckoned descent through the female line — a custom he found remarkable enough to single out, and one the inscriptions partly bear out in the prominence they give maternal names.

A republic of cities

What the modern world remembers most about Lycia is the shape of its politics. The cities never fused into a kingdom; they bound themselves into a league, and the league worked by representation and by weighted vote. The geographer Strabo, writing at the turn of the first century CE, has left the clearest description. Twenty-three cities shared in the common council, graded into three classes by importance. The six greatest — Xanthos, Patara, Pinara, Tlos, Myra, and Olympos — cast three votes each; the middle cities cast two; the smallest, one. The delegates met in a general congress, in whichever city they agreed upon, and there first elected a Lyciarch, the federal magistrate who headed the union for his term, and then the other officers; judges and magistracies were apportioned among the cities in the same proportion as the votes, so that obligations followed power. Patara, on the coast, served as the practical center, and the great bouleuterion — a stone council chamber seating well over a thousand — still stands there; the archives of the league are thought to have rested under the protection of Apollo’s temple in the same city.

This was federalism with proportional representation, built and running while the rest of the Mediterranean was governed by kings and tyrants and unmixed city-democracies, and it did not go unnoticed. When Montesquieu sought, in the eighteenth century, a model of what a confederate republic might be, he named this one: were he to give a model of an excellent confederate republic, he wrote in The Spirit of the Laws, he would choose that of Lycia. The framers of the United States read him closely. Alexander Hamilton quoted that judgment in The Federalist No. 9, and the Lycian confederacy is cited across the Federalist papers — in numbers 9, 16, and 45 — as an ancient precedent for a strong federal union in which member states keep their identity while ceding real power to the center, and in which voice is scaled to weight. An assembly of mountain towns on the Anatolian coast became, two thousand years after it dissolved, an argument in the design of a continental republic.

The empires that absorbed it

The federation’s freedom was always conditional on the indifference of greater powers, and it was repeatedly lost and recovered. Around 540 BCE the Persian general Harpagus, advancing for the Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus, met the Lycians on the plain north of Xanthos and drove them back into the city. Herodotus records what followed: the men of Xanthos gathered their wives, children, and possessions onto the acropolis, set the whole of it ablaze, swore oaths of death, and rushed out to fall fighting to the last. Eighty families, absent from the city, survived to rebuild — a story the Xanthians told of themselves more than once, for the city is said to have burned itself a second time rather than yield, centuries later, to Brutus in the Roman civil wars.

Under Persian rule Lycia was governed by native dynasts who struck their own coinage with the triskeles, the three running legs that became the country’s emblem, and built the pillar tombs and the Nereid Monument: Kuprlli around the middle of the fifth century, then Kheriga and Kherei of the house of Xanthos, then in the east Perikles of Limyra, who pushed toward uniting the country before the dynasts’ age closed. In 333 BCE Alexander marched down the coast and the Lycian cities largely opened their gates. After his death the country passed among the Hellenistic kingdoms — to the Ptolemies of Egypt, then to the Seleucids after Antiochus III, then, when Rome broke Antiochus at Magnesia, assigned to Rhodes by the settlement of Apamea in 188 BCE. The Lycians resented Rhodian mastery and appealed to Rome, which in 168 BCE declared them free; it was in the freedom of these last pre-Roman generations that the league reached its mature, much-described form. In 43 CE the emperor Claudius ended the experiment, annexing the country and joining it to its eastern neighbor as the province of Lycia et Pamphylia. The cities kept their assemblies and their festivals as municipal forms; the sovereignty was gone. Lycia entered the imperial system as one more self-organized community of the eastern provinces — like the caravan polity of Palmyra on the Syrian desert margin, a place that ran its own affairs within the Roman frame until Rome decided otherwise.

Even then Lycia kept giving. Its cliffside towns became prosperous Roman provincial centers — Patara a major harbor, Myra later the see of the bishop whose cult spread across Christendom as Saint Nicholas. And in 412 CE a child was born at Constantinople to a high-ranking family out of Xanthos and raised on Lycian ground; Proclus, last great systematizer of the Athenian Neoplatonists, carried the name Lycius through a life spent expounding the structure of all reality, so that the most rigorous metaphysics of late antiquity bore, as a surname, the name of this coast.

The textual and excavated record

Lycia is reconstructed from three kinds of evidence held in tension. The classical authors supply the political frame: Herodotus describes the matrilineal custom and the burning of Xanthos before Harpagus in the first book of the Histories, and Strabo preserves the only full account of the league’s twenty-three cities and their graded vote in the fourteenth book of the Geography; Livy and Appian add the wars with Rhodes and the second self-immolation. The inscriptions supply the language: the corpus of Lycian texts, gathered in the standard editions of the Tituli Lyciae and the Kleinasiatische Sprachdenkmäler, turns on the trilinguals, and H. Craig Melchert’s edition of the Letoon stele’s Lycian version anchors the modern grammar against its Greek and Aramaic parallels. The French excavations at Xanthos and the Letoon, published across the long series of the Fouilles de Xanthos, recovered the federal sanctuary, the inscribed pillar, and the architecture of the tombs; the Harpy Tomb reliefs and the Nereid Monument, carried to London in the 1840s by Charles Fellows, made the funerary art the object of European study a century before the language was read. The afterlife of the league belongs to the documentary record too: Marinus’s Life of Proclus attests the philosopher’s Lycian house, and the Federalist papers’ debt to the confederacy is traceable through Montesquieu, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the political-theory literature set out.

The dynasties that ruled here are known mostly from the legends on their coins and the curses on their graves. The league that argued in the bouleuterion at Patara was dissolved by Rome and remembered, of all places, in Philadelphia. But the house-tombs are still set into the cliffs above Myra and Xanthos and Pinara, their stone beam-ends and roof-lines carved in faithful imitation of dwellings whose timber rotted three thousand years ago — the Lycians’ image of home, raised over the towns by people who reckoned that the dead would outlast every conqueror who came for the living, and were, in this one respect, exactly right.

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