Who Were the Lycians?

The Lycians were an ancient people who inhabited the area of present day Turkey between the bays of Antalya and Fethiye, a compact, mountainous territory. The ancient Greeks knew and admired the Lycians, for the Lycians had solved a problem which baffled the ancient world: how to reconcile free government in the city-state with the needs of a larger political unity. The institutions of the democratic Lycian Federation (the first democratic union known) were studied and envied by most classical writers. The Lycians were an important part of the Greek and Near Eastern worlds since they lived at the point where the two cultures intermingled at an important strategic juncture. They were also one of the few non-Hellenistic nations of antiquity which could not be called ‘barbarians’. In fact, their image in antiquity was much like that of today's Swiss: a hard-working and wealthy people, neutral in world affairs but fierce in the defence of their freedom and conservative in their attachment to ancestral tradition. Lycia was the last region on the entire Mediterranean coast to be incorporated as a province in the Roman Empire and even then the Lycian Union continued to function independently. The Lycians spoke a language of their own before adopting Greek around the 3rd century BC. Their many monuments, especially their beautiful tombs which embody their ancestor cult, still dot the entire landscape of the southwest coast of Turkey between the Gulf of Fethiye and Phaselis.