1/14/2024 0 Comments Iliad meander riverHerodotus calls her Athena and tells that her priestess got a beard when a disaster was appending. One of the Carian goddesses was Hecate, who was responsible for road crossings and became notorious in Greece as the source of witchcraft. Unlike his Greek colleague, this Zeus was an army god. One of their ritual centers was Mylasa, where they venerated a male supreme god, called 'the Carian Zeus' by Herodotus. What united the Carians, however, was their religion. Because of their disparate country, the Carians were divided when they learned to read and write, every village used its own version of the Phoenician alphabet. Hilltops were fortified and there were several villages in the valleys, but there were hardly any cities. The Carian coast, north of BodrumĬaria is, like Greece, a country of mountains and valleys, poor in agricultural and other resources - in comparison with Egypt and Babylonia a backward country. Because of his descent and birth place, Herodotus is one of our most important sources. note Herodotus himself is also a good example of the close ties between the Carians and Greeks: his father is called Lyxes, which is the Greek rendering of a good Carian name, Lukhsu. note According to the Greek researcher Herodotus of Halicarnassus (fifth century BCE), the inhabitants of Miletus spoke Greek with a Carian accent. It seems that the Greeks settled on the coast in the dark ages between c.1200 and c.800, where they and the Carians mixed. Had the Carians arrived in their country from the west, their language would have been closer to Greek. It is related to Luwian, Lycian and Lydian, the languages spoken to the southeast and north of Caria. It is also confirmed by modern linguistics: the Carian language belongs to the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European languages. Sherd with an incomprehensible Carian inscription In the fifth century, the Greeks thought that the Carians had arrived in Caria from the islands of the Ionian Sea, whereas the Carians claimed to be indigenous. note This is a remarkable piece of information, because in Homer's days, Miletus was considered a Greek town the fact that it is called Carian indicates that the catalogue of ships contains some very old information. In the Trojan War, they had, according to the poet, sided with the Trojans. In the Catalogue of ships, he tells that they lived in Miletus, on the Mycale peninsula, and along the river Meander. The people are absent from the Egyptian texts of this age.Īfter a gap of some four centuries in which they are mentioned only once, the first to mention the Carians is the legendary Greek poet Homer. Caria and the Carians are mentioned for the first time in the cuneiform texts of the Old Assyrian and Hittite Empires, i.e., between c.1800 and c.1200.
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