Lycia

The Greek name of the region, Lykía, the southwestern Anatolian land whose heroes Sarpedon and Glaucus fight for Troy in the Iliad. Herodotus reports the Lycians’ own tradition that they came from Crete, that they had been called Termílai, and that they took the name Lýkioi from Lykos, a son of the Athenian king Pandion who had fled to their country; he adds, strikingly, that they reckoned descent through the mother, not the father.

Lykía is the exonym that conquered the record. The Greek tradition even preserves a memory of the native name it displaced, Termílai for Trm̃mili, while supplying a Greek hero to explain its own form, the same pattern by which Greek myth domesticated foreign names. Modern philology connects Lykía instead with the Bronze-Age Lukka lands of the Hittite and Egyptian records. Either way the Greek name has no link to Trm̃mili; the people are known to history under a name their conquerors and neighbors gave them, not the one they gave themselves.

The Lycians’ own name for themselves, Trm̃mili, and for their land, Trm̃mis, attested in their own alphabet in the inscriptions of Lycia, among them the Letoon trilingual, where the Lycian text stands beside Greek and Aramaic versions. The form contains the special nasalized m̃ that the Lycian alphabet writes with its own letter, and it answers, across the languages of antiquity, to nothing the outside world called these people.

This endonym is the whole point of Lycia’s place in the atlas. In their own writing the people are Trm̃mili; the Greek Lykía by which everyone else knew them bears no relation to it. Herodotus even records the gap, reporting that the people “were formerly called Termílai” and took the name Lycians from a Greek hero, Lykos. The native name and the Greek name sit side by side on the Letoon stone itself, one people labeled twice in two unrelated words, the self-name surviving only because the Lycians, unusually, wrote their own language down.

The Latin name of the region, Lycia, taken from the Greek; the Lycians kept their famous league and a measure of autonomy until Claudius annexed them in 43 CE, joining their country to Pamphylia as a Roman province. The rock-cut tombs and the pillar-monuments of the Lycians remained, but their language was already giving way to Greek.

The Latin fixes the Greek exonym permanently as the region’s name. By the Roman period the native Trm̃mili had passed out of use along with the Lycian language itself, surviving only in the inscriptions on the tombs; Lycia alone went forward. The people who had labeled themselves Trm̃mili on their own monuments for centuries ended as the Lycii of a Roman province, remembered everywhere by the name that was never theirs and nowhere by the name that was.