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Who were the Lelegians? Interrogating affiliations, boundaries and difference in ancient Caria

Who were the Lelegians? Interrogating affiliations, boundaries and difference in ancient Caria Abstract Who were the Lelegians? Ancient Greek and Latin texts refer to the Lelegians as an indigenous people, locating them in southwestern Anatolia in a region known in historical times as Caria. Yet attempts to find evidence for the Lelegians ‘on the ground’ have met with questionable success. This paper has two aims. First, it provides an up-to-date picture of the archaeology of ancient Caria and shows that there is little indication of distinctly ‘Lelegian’ forms of material culture during the first millennium BCE. Second, it juxtaposes archaeological evidence with the development of the Lelegian ethnonym and suggests that the idea of a distinct Lelegian identity was retrospectively constructed by the Carians to fulfil the role of an imaginary ‘barbarian other’. This happened in the late Classical and early Hellenistic periods, a time of intensified Carian ethnogenesis, and was a process that responded to and made creative use of earlier Greek knowledge traditions. Finally, this paper argues that a later horizon of Lelegian imagining occurred in modern scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries. Who, then, were the Lelegians? This article proposes that they were an imaginary people, invented and reinvented over the centuries. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Anatolian Studies Cambridge University Press

Who were the Lelegians? Interrogating affiliations, boundaries and difference in ancient Caria

Mokrišová, Jana
Anatolian Studies , Volume 73: 29 – Jan 1, 2023
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Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British Institute at Ankara
ISSN
2048-0849
eISSN
0066-1546
DOI
10.1017/S0066154623000042
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Abstract Who were the Lelegians? Ancient Greek and Latin texts refer to the Lelegians as an indigenous people, locating them in southwestern Anatolia in a region known in historical times as Caria. Yet attempts to find evidence for the Lelegians ‘on the ground’ have met with questionable success. This paper has two aims. First, it provides an up-to-date picture of the archaeology of ancient Caria and shows that there is little indication of distinctly ‘Lelegian’ forms of material culture during the first millennium BCE. Second, it juxtaposes archaeological evidence with the development of the Lelegian ethnonym and suggests that the idea of a distinct Lelegian identity was retrospectively constructed by the Carians to fulfil the role of an imaginary ‘barbarian other’. This happened in the late Classical and early Hellenistic periods, a time of intensified Carian ethnogenesis, and was a process that responded to and made creative use of earlier Greek knowledge traditions. Finally, this paper argues that a later horizon of Lelegian imagining occurred in modern scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries. Who, then, were the Lelegians? This article proposes that they were an imaginary people, invented and reinvented over the centuries.

Journal

Anatolian Studies – Cambridge University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2023

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