Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/356

 34Q HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. were left alone behind the insuperable bulwarks of their mountains, so that they could retain their name, the originality of their language, and their customs. If we thus look upon the southern Lycians as the last repre- sentatives of a tribal group whose chequered existence was shared by the forefathers of the Trojans, we shall more easily understand how they came to occupy the situation, which the legendary lore collected by Homer assigns to them. It enables us, at the same time, to dismiss, as baseless, the explicit statements of Herodotus, to the effect that the Lycians had originally come from Crete, and that their name was due to the Athenian Lycon, son of Pandion. 1 In all likelihood, when Herodotus wrote his narrative, the last assertion had been recently coined, trumped up at Athens, whose policy it was to establish an historical link between Attica and Lycia, so as to induce the latter to enter the maritime federation set on foot by the Cimons and Pericles, with the object of com- pelling the cities on the coast to pay tribute. Only for the sake of the thing shall we record the attempts that have been made to put a meaning upon the word " Lycian." The derivations that have been proposed are all taken from the Greek language. The Greeks of Rhodes and of Caria, it has been urged, as they steered towards the Asiatic coast, leaving the great island in their rear, saw the sun emerge from behind Cragos ; in their ignorance they imagined that the god of light had his dwelling somewhere among those dazzling heights they had never scaled ; hence they came to call the people who inhabited them Leukoi, 2 the " Luminous " ones, i.e. Orientals. The conjecture is ingenious ; the fact, however, that if the Lycians are one with the Louka of the Theban inscriptions, they were so named long before the existence of Greeks in Caria or Rhodes, makes it unnecessary to argue the point. Nor are these the sole tokens by which we may recognize in the Lycians, a people that had constituted themselves into a compact political body, centuries before the migratory movement of the Greeks in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean took place. The Lycian language is known from numerous texts, 1 Herodotus, i. 173. 2 From the root luc, signifying light both in Greek and Latin (G. CURTIUS, Grundzuge der Griechischen Etymologic, 5th ed., 1879, p. 160). Upon the various derivations of Leukoi, see TREUBER, Geschichte, pp. 28, 29.