Antalya province, south-west Turkey
Capital of Lycia from the earliest days of the Lycian Federation to the Roman conquest.
Lycia is an alpine land on the south-west coast of Turkey. In antiquity it was inhabited by a people of Hittite (specifically Luvian) stock who had been there since the Bronze Age. In the fifth century BC, they were still using their own language and writing their inscriptions in an alphabet of their own invention, but during the Hellenistic period they were gradually absorbed into the Greek world.
The Lycians had a strong sense of unity. Some sort of federal organization, with Xanthos as its centre, existed as early as the sixth century BC, for in describing the Persian invasion of 540 Herodotus refers to Xanthos as ‘the city of the Lycians’. And Xanthos was confirmed as the national capital when the Lycian League was given a formal constitution in the second century BC. Nonetheless, Xanthos was a small place: its walls enclose only twenty-seven hectares, and it is clear from the way the Lycians chose to scatter their tombs across the intramural area, that the town had lots of empty space.
Xanthos was brutally sacked on two occasions. The first was in 540 BC, when the Persian general Harpagus stormed the city and massacred its inhabitants. It was said that of the entire community only eighty families escaped and they owed their survival to the fact that they had taken refuge in the hills rather than the town. Five hundred years later disaster struck again, this time in the shape of a Roman army commanded by Marcus Brutus, Caesar’s assassin. Brutus wanted money and communicated this desire in no uncertain terms; the elders of Xanthos, knowing that Antony and Octavian were already on the march against him, refused. It was a bad miscalculation. Brutus launched a whirlwind assault, in the course of which Xanthos was reduced to ashes.
Lycia at this time was still technically independent, although of course in reality it had been a Roman client state for more than 100 years. Eventually, in AD 43, it was formally incorporated in the empire, and, either on its own or as one half of the province of Lycia and Pamphylia, took its place in the roster of Roman provinces. It remained there for the next six centuries, i.e. until the collapse of the provincial system in the seventh century AD. Early on in this period Xanthos was rebuilt, and much of what is visible today is Roman work of the first or second centuries. The Roman governors didn’t reside at Xanthos, however, preferring PATARA, which had better communications with the outside world.
Xanthos lies on a hill overlooking the river of the same name in western Lycia. The largest monuments are the Roman theatre and agora; the most interesting are the unique tower tombs, one of which bears the longest known inscription in the Lycian script. The walls are Lycian work of the fifth or fourth century BC, but settlement at the time they were built was apparently confined to the few hectares of the ‘Lycian acropolis’ in the south-west sector of the city. The Roman town spread over more of the intramural area, but by the Byzantine period the inhabited area had once again been reduced to the south-west corner. By the end of the seventh century the site was deserted.
At its peak, in AD 50–150, the population of Xanthos may have touched 2,500 but for most of its history it would have had far fewer inhabitants than this.