Repository logo
 

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

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Mokrišová, J 

Abstract

jats:titleAbstract</jats:title>jats:pWho 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.</jats:p>

Description

Keywords

4301 Archaeology, 4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology

Journal Title

Anatolian Studies

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0066-1546
2048-0849

Volume Title

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Sponsorship
University of Michigan; The American School of Classical Studies at Athens; Koç University’s Center for Anatolian Civilizations; ‘Migration and the Making of the Ancient Greek World’ Project (European Research Council Consolidator project, Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme grant agreement No. 865644)