BC 1300 – AD 700
Oinoanda
Wiyanawanda
A city on a mountain ridge; the “Wiyanawanda” of the Hittite texts is most likely this place. The vast inscription in which Diogenes the Epicurean had his philosophy carved — the longest stone inscription known from antiquity — was found here.
- Lycian League votes
- 1
- Location
- 36.8103° N, 29.5521° E
- Today
- İncealiler · Seydikemer, Muğla
This city in history
The Yalburt inscription
~1500–1200 BC · c. 1230 BC
The Hittite king Tudhaliya IV had his Lukka campaign carved into a spring monument. The inscription names the settlements of the region one by one — and those names will still be standing a thousand years later. It is the strongest evidence we have for the continuity of the Lycian cities.
A road map in stone
AD 43 · AD 45
The monument set up at the entrance to Patara lists every road and every distance in the new province: more than sixty routes, written out mile by mile. The Stadiasmus Patarensis is the most detailed road document to survive from the Roman world.
In mythology
Offerings cut in the rock
Artemis
In the interior of Lycia there are hundreds of small votive reliefs cut into the rocks at the roadside. Most are nameless, most are roughly worked — marks left by villagers, shepherds and travellers. The great temples were for kings; these stones were for everyone.
The rider and his club
Kakasbos
In the interior of Lycia the same figure appears on hundreds of rock reliefs: a man on horseback with a thick club raised in his hand. His name is known from inscriptions — Kakasbos. He has no place in Greek mythology; this god is entirely local.
Whose god he was
Kakasbos
The reliefs of Kakasbos are not in great temples but at the roadside and near villages. Those who dedicated them were not notable people but ordinary ones: shepherds, farmers, travellers. Attempts were made to match him with Heracles, but the fit was never quite right — because he is not a hero but a protector.
The mythology nobody wrote down
Kakasbos
Kakasbos shows that mythology does not live in epics alone. His name occurs in no poem, no one wrote down his story — yet his reliefs outnumber those of any Greek god in Lycia. Who the people actually prayed to is told not by literature but by stone.