BC 1400 – AD 700
Xanthos
Arñna · Awarna
The capital and largest city of Lycia. Twice in its history — first against Harpagos, then against Brutus — it chose collective death over surrender. The Harpy Monument, the Nereid Monument and the trilingual inscription of the Xanthian Obelisk all come from here.
- Lycian League votes
- 3
- Location
- 36.3570° N, 29.3192° E
- Today
- Kınık · Kaş, Antalya
Monuments and buildings
The Harpy Tomb
Reliefs of the bearers of the soul · c. 480–470 BC
A pillar seven and a half metres high, carved from a single block, with a marble burial chamber on top. On the reliefs wrapping the four faces of the chamber, creatures with the bodies of birds and the heads of women carry small human figures in their arms — the monument takes its name from them. Whether these beings are Harpies, Sirens, or soul-bearers particular to Lycia whose name has not reached us, is still argued. Their function is certain: they carry the dead across.
The Nereid Monument
A tomb in the shape of a temple · c. 390–380 BC
The most magnificent tomb in Lycia: a building in the form of an Ionic temple on a high podium. The statues of women set between the columns stand in wet drapery as though running in the wind — the daughters of the sea god Nereus. Two frieze bands on the podium tell of sieges, hunts and banquets. Its owner was most likely Arbinas of the Xanthian dynasty. It is regarded as the forerunner of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.
The inscribed pillar
The longest text in Lycian · c. 400 BC
This four-sided pillar at the edge of the agora carries the longest surviving text in the Lycian language: more than 250 lines of Lycian and twelve lines of Greek verse. It recounts the achievements of a member of the dynasty — most probably Kherei. It is one of the key documents in the decipherment of Lycian, though the language still cannot be read in full. This too was originally a pillar tomb; the chamber on top has collapsed.
The Lycian acropolis
The oldest core of the city · 8th c. BC – AD 7th c.
This rocky spur dropping sheer to the river Xanthos is where the city was first founded. The polygonal walls around its edge — not dressed blocks but irregular interlocking stones — are the earliest monumental architecture in Lycia. On top stands a large building around a courtyard, which the excavators call the “Lycian palace”. When Harpagos laid siege in 546 BC, the Xanthians gathered their women, children and treasure here and set them alight.
The theatre
A cavea at the foot of the acropolis, facing the agora · AD 2nd century (on Hellenistic foundations)
A Roman theatre set into the northern foot of the Lycian acropolis. The cavea faces north, towards the agora and the middle of the city; part of the seating is cut directly into the rock. The stage building is largely ruined, but the jambs of its three doors are still in place. The Harpy Tomb and the pillar sarcophagus right beside it formed the backdrop for the audience.
The Roman agora
The square of the city · Roman period
A rectangular square north of the theatre, with porticoes on three sides and a row of shops along the south edge. Most of the Xanthos inscriptions came from here — city decrees, honorific texts, records of benefaction. The inscribed pillar rises at the eastern end of the square: agora and tomb share the same ground, which in Lycia is not strange.
The Hellenistic gate and the Arch of Vespasian
The southern entrance to the city · 2nd c. BC and AD 69–79
Two structures stand side by side, passed by anyone entering the city from the south, from the direction of Letoon. First the Hellenistic gate between two towers: the inscription above it has the Seleucid king Antiochus III dedicate the city to Leto, Apollo and Artemis. Immediately behind it stands a single-arched gateway of AD 69–79, raised in the name of the emperor Vespasian. Two gates built two hundred and fifty years apart, on the same road.
The Byzantine basilica
A church with a mosaic floor · AD 5th–6th century
An early Byzantine church of three aisles with a semicircular apse at the east end. Its real value lies in the floor: broad mosaic panels of geometric patterns, animal figures and foliate borders. Xanthos was a bishopric under Byzantium; the city’s last brilliant age came with these churches. The mosaics are under protective cover today.
The Great Church
The main basilica of the city · AD 6th century
The largest Byzantine building in the eastern half of the city: a broad basilica with a colonnaded court to the west and a round baptistery beside it. There is mosaic in its floor as well. It is proof that Xanthos was still a populous city in the Christian age — as the Lycian coast emptied, this place held on a while longer.
The eastern necropolis
The Dancers’ Sarcophagus and the pillar tombs · 4th c. BC – AD 2nd c.
The slope east of the walls is covered in tombs. The most famous is the Dancers’ Sarcophagus: a large Lycian sarcophagus on a high base, with a frieze of dancing figures holding hands around its chest. Around it are pillar tombs, house- and temple-type façades cut into the rock, and toppled sarcophagi. In ancient cities the necropolis is always beside the road — so that passers-by may read the name.
The northern necropolis
The Payava and Merehi monuments · 4th century BC
The burial ground north of the city held two masterpieces of Lycian sarcophagus carving. The Payava Tomb: a huge sarcophagus with a pointed lid on a high base, its reliefs showing the owner being received by a Persian satrap, its Lycian inscription giving his name. The Merehi Monument is a slightly smaller version of the same type. Both were dismantled and taken to London in 1842.
The Roman acropolis
The broad plateau to the north · 4th c. BC – AD 7th c.
The high plateau at the northern end of the city. The Lycian acropolis was a sheer rock for defence; this one is broad and habitable — under Rome the centre of gravity of the city shifted here. On it are stretches of wall, housing, cisterns and a Byzantine basilica. When Brutus laid siege in 42 BC, the Xanthians burned their own city for the second time.
Tombs inside the city
The dead between the streets · 4th c. BC – AD 2nd c.
At Xanthos the tombs were not pushed outside the city; pillar tombs, rock tombs and Roman vaulted tombs stand among the buildings. This is a Lycian habit: the ancestors counted as part of the city. Three separate traditions — the Lycian pillar tomb, the house-type façade cut into rock, and the Roman vault — can be seen here side by side.
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.
Out of the dark
~800–600 BC · 8th c. BC
When the silence lifts, settlements move back to defensible hilltops. The oldest layers on the acropolis of Xanthos reach down to the 8th century BC; the city becomes the ruling power of the valley and does not let go of that position for a thousand years.
Battle on the Xanthos plain
546–540 BC · 545 BC
Herodotus tells it this way: when Harpagos came down into the plain, the Xanthians went out to meet him heedless of being outnumbered many times over. They fought with great valour, were beaten, and were driven back inside the city. What came next is a story the ancient world never forgot.
Fire on the acropolis
546–540 BC · 545 BC
The Xanthians gathered their wives, their children, their slaves and all their goods on the acropolis and burned them. Then they swore an oath to one another, marched out, and fell fighting to the last man. The thick layer of burning from that day can still be read in the excavations.
Building on the ash
546–540 BC · c. 540 BC
Herodotus adds one detail: eighty families who happened to be away that day survived. Together with newcomers they refounded Xanthos. The city rises on top of the burnt layer — and within two centuries it will raise the most magnificent monuments in Lycia.
Lords who struck their own coin
5th–4th c. BC · c. 485–360 BC
At Xanthos, Kuprlli, and after him Kheriga and Erbbina, mint silver in their own names. On the coin stands the emblem of Lycia: the three-legged triskeles. The script is Lycian — the region answers to Persia, yet carries its own tongue on its money.
A Lycian lord in a Greek temple
5th–4th c. BC · c. 390–380 BC
The Nereid Monument rises at Xanthos: the tomb of a Lycian dynast, built in the form of an Ionic temple. Its friezes show sieges, hunting scenes, nobles in Persian dress. East and West meet here in a single block of stone; today the monument fills one of the halls of the British Museum.
Pericle of Limyra
5th–4th c. BC · c. 380–360 BC
In the east Pericle of Limyra grows strong; he besieges Telmessos, binds the west to himself as well, and joins the Satraps’ Revolt. This short-lived union is Lycia’s own experiment in self-rule. When the revolt is crushed, the region passes into the hands of the Carian satrap Mausolus.
Surrender without a battle
334–333 BC · 334/333 BC
Arrian writes that Telmessos, Pinara, Xanthos, Patara and some thirty smaller settlements opened their gates without a fight. To a region weary of Persian tribute, a Macedonian master was no different from a distant one. Lycia changes hands in the course of a single winter.
“A gift, or a friend?”
197–188 BC · 178 BC
The Lycians send envoys to Rome and ask a single question: were we handed over as a gift, or entrusted as friends? That distinction, preserved by Polybius, is one of the sharpest sentences in ancient politics. The senate answers with deliberate ambiguity.
The Koinon Lykion is founded
168 BC · after 168 BC
Freedom does not scatter the cities, it draws them together: twenty-three of them found a common assembly. Its name is the Koinon Lykion — the League of the Lycians. Each city runs its own affairs; war, coinage, foreign relations and the high court are held in common.
Three votes, two votes, one vote
168 BC · 2nd c. BC
The League’s invention is weighted representation: the six largest cities hold three votes each, the middling ones two, the small ones one. Costs and taxes are divided in the same proportion. Neither do the great crush the small, nor the small live off the backs of the great.
One coinage, one army
168 BC · 2nd–1st c. BC
The League strikes its own silver: the head of Apollo on one face, a lyre and the legend ΛΥΚΙΩΝ on the other — with the initials of the minting city along the edge. One currency, one army, thirty cities each with its own square: here the idea of federation takes solid form.
The age of twenty-three cities
~168–43 BC · 2nd–1st c. BC
For a century Lycia governs itself and grows rich. Twenty-three voting cities, together with the dozens of towns around them, make up a single political body. The region’s population, its buildings and its trade stand at the height of their history.
Siege in the valley
42 BC · 42 BC
Brutus demands money and soldiers from Xanthos; the city refuses. The Xanthians first tear down their own suburbs to clear the ground outside the walls, then string a net across the river and stop their own people from slipping away. The siege drags on for days.
A second time, the same choice
42 BC · 42 BC
They do again what they had done against Harpagos five hundred years before: the city is set alight. Appian says Brutus promised his soldiers a reward for every Xanthian they saved — even so, no more than a hundred and fifty are left alive. The soldiers wept, it is said.
Patara takes the lesson
42 BC · 42 BC
Brutus turns towards Patara. He frees the women taken at Xanthos without ransom and sends them to the city; they tell what they saw. The next day Patara opens its gates, hands over its treasury, and is spared. The assembly city of Lycia is left standing.
After the ashes
42 BC · 42–41 BC
When Brutus is defeated and dies at Philippi, Antony declares Lycia free once more and sends help for the rebuilding of Xanthos. The city rises again, but never regains its old weight. From now on the centre of the League is unmistakably Patara.
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.
The League lives on, on paper
AD 43 · AD 1st–2nd c.
Rome does not abolish the League; it turns it into a provincial assembly. The title of Lyciarch survives, but the man who holds it is now high priest of the imperial cult. The cities still gather, still vote — only now a governor’s signature sits above their decisions.
The earth shakes
AD 2nd–4th c. · AD 141
A great earthquake strikes Lycia from end to end. From Telmessos to Myra, theatres, colonnaded streets and baths come down. The inscriptions say the cities were levelled to the ground. The largest rebuilding effort in the region’s history begins.
The fortune of Opramoas
AD 2nd–4th c. · c. AD 125–155
After the earthquake, Opramoas of Rhodiapolis rains money on dozens of cities: theatres, baths, granaries, dowry funds. The inscription covering the walls of his mausoleum records what he gave to each city, one by one — the longest record of benefaction in the ancient world.
The gods fall silent
AD 2nd–4th c. · AD 4th c.
As Christianity spreads, the temples close. Letoon, Leto’s sanctuary of a thousand years, is abandoned, and the stone of its altars is carried off to build basilicas. Lycia’s own gods — Kakasbos, Sozon, the lions of the rock tombs — are quietly effaced.
On the Lycian Way
Five hundred and forty kilometres
Likya Yolu
A line that begins at Ovacık above Fethiye and ends at Geyikbayırı, on the doorstep of Antalya. The Lycian Way was waymarked in 1999 — so the path itself is young. The ground it treads is not: goat and mule tracks, short stretches of Roman paving, steps cut into rock, cisterns. The route passes through or below some twenty-five ancient cities. Its worth lies not in its own age but in what it strings together.
The hearth of the country
Letoon – Ksanthos – Patara
Twenty-two kilometres cross the heart of Lycia. Letoon is not a city but the sanctuary of the whole country: three temples, federal festivals, treaties cut into stone. Above it Xanthos, the capital that twice chose mass death over surrender. Then Patara: where the assembly of the League met, and the lighthouse Nero had raised in AD 64 — the oldest lighthouse known to stand.
Gifts to twenty-eight cities
Limyra – Rhodiapolis – Gagai
Rhodiapolis is a small city, but it produced the most generous man in Lycia: Opramoas. When the earthquake of AD 141 wrecked the region he sent money from his own fortune to twenty-eight cities — theatres, baths, walls, grain. The inscription on the wall of his tomb lists those gifts one by one and is the longest known inscription in Anatolia. From there the way descends to Gagai, on the sea.
The whole Lycian Way — 12 stages, 540 km
In mythology
The wolves show the way
Leto
Thirsty and worn out, Leto comes upon a pack of wolves. They do not attack; they go on ahead and lead her to the bank of the river Xanthos. Leto finds water, and in gratitude names the land after them: Lykia — the country of wolves. This origin story, told by ancient writers, ties the region’s name to the Greek lykos.
Letoon is founded
Leto
Leto is taken in where she found the water, and there she stays. In time three temples rise: Leto in the middle, Apollo and Artemis to either side. The sanctuary is the house not of a goddess but of a family — and for the Lycians the hearth not of one city but of the whole country.
Natri
Apollo
In Lycian inscriptions Apollo’s name is Natri. This shows that the god was not imported but matched to a local one. In the same inscriptions Artemis appears as Ertemi and the storm god as Trqqas. The Lycians did not take on the Greek gods — they began to call their own gods by Greek names as well.
The sky on the coin
Trqqas
The silver of the Lycian League carries the head of Apollo — but on the earlier coins the cities struck for themselves, the emblems of the storm god turn up again and again: the thunderbolt, the bull, the eagle. If you want to know a region’s real god, do not look at the temples. Look at the money.
And a son
Trqqas
Zeus’ strongest tie to Lycia is not a place but a person: Sarpedon. Homer names him the mortal son of Zeus and king of the Lycians. The god will not be able to save his son from death at Troy — and that will be one of the most human scenes in the Iliad.
Iobates’ way out
Bellerophon
Iobates cannot kill his guest outright either. Instead he gives him a task no one comes back from: to kill the Chimaera, which is laying waste to the mountains of the country. The young man setting out from the palace of Xanthos is in fact being sent to carry out his own execution.
Pegasus
Bellerophon
The seer Polyeidos gives him counsel: you cannot beat the beast from the ground, only from the sky. With a golden bridle given by Athena — Maliya, in Lycian — Bellerophon tames the winged horse Pegasus. Now there is a rider in the Lycian sky.
Lycia’s son-in-law
Bellerophon
At last Iobates accepts the truth: this young man is under the protection of the gods. He shows him the letter, gives him his daughter Philonoe, and grants him half his kingdom. Bellerophon becomes the founding ancestor of Lycia — the lines of both Sarpedon and Glaucus run back to him. On the façade of his tomb at Tlos he is shown in flight on the back of Pegasus.
A mortal son
Sarpedon
Sarpedon is the son of Zeus and the mortal Laodameia, and king of Lycia. Homer introduces him as the noblest of all the allies who come to Troy. We hear the reasoning of his kingship from his own mouth: if the best land and the fullest cups are ours, then fighting in the front rank is our debt.
To Troy
Sarpedon
The Lycians come from farther away than any other ally of Troy. Sarpedon shares the command with his cousin Glaucus; all through the Iliad the Lycian contingents appear wherever the fighting is hardest. This is Lycia’s first and strongest entry into Greek epic.
Sleep and Death carry him
Sarpedon
Zeus does one last thing: he bids Apollo lift his son’s body from the battlefield, wash it, and wrap it in immortal robes. Then the twin brothers Hypnos and Thanatos — Sleep and Death — carry Sarpedon home to Lycia in their arms. He is buried in his own country, and there he is worshipped as a hero.
The man who recited his lineage
Glaucus
Glaucus is Bellerophon’s grandson, and he leads the Lycian army together with Sarpedon. In the Iliad he recites his descent from beginning to end, and it is thanks to this that the oldest telling of the Bellerophon legend has come down to us. It is the first family tree of Lycian history in literature.
For the body of Sarpedon
Glaucus
When Sarpedon falls, Glaucus prays to Apollo with his wounded arm, is healed, and takes over the command; it is he who leads the bitter fight for his king’s body. In the end he too dies before Troy. The graves of both Lycian commanders are in their own land.
The Harpy Tomb
The Harpies
In the middle of Xanthos, a burial chamber set on a single stone pillar seven and a half metres high. On the reliefs wrapping its four faces, creatures with the bodies of birds and the heads of women carry small human figures in their arms. The monument takes its name from them.
Harpies, or Sirens?
The Harpies
The small figures they carry are the souls of the dead; but who these beings are is disputed. Harpies, Sirens, or soul-bearers particular to Lycia whose name has not reached us? The one certain thing is their office: they take the dead from this world to the next.
Why so high?
The Harpies
Lycia’s pillar tombs are always up in the air — the monument does not stand on a base, it is the base. The dead are not put in the ground but set on high. One reason may be the belief that the soul would be taken up by birds. The rock tombs, with their façades at unreachable heights, carry the same idea on.
The Nereid Monument
The Nereids
The most splendid tomb at Xanthos is a building in the form of an Ionic temple. The figures of women set between its columns stand as though running over the sea, their wet garments streaming behind them in the wind. These are the daughters of the sea god Nereus — the Nereids.
Why sea nymphs on a tomb?
The Nereids
The Nereids are the protectors of sailors, and they were also held to be the ones who bring the dead to the far shore. The owner of the tomb was most likely Arbinas of the Xanthian dynasty. Here Lycia manages, with real mastery, to tell its own beliefs about the dead in Greek forms.