Lycia, a country on the south coast of Asia Minor, bounded on the W. by Caria, on the N. by Phrygia and Pisidia, and on the E. by Pamphylia. It is a mountainous region, formed by lofty spurs of the Taurus, which reach 10,000 feet in height; the valleys are very fertile. The most ancient inhabitants are said to have been two races called Solymi and Termilæ. The Lycians are prominent in the Homeric legend of the Trojan war. Lycia maintained its independence against Croesus, king of Lydia, but was afterwards made subject to the Persians and Syrians, and then to Rome. During the time of its independence it consisted of twenty-three confederate cities, of which the principal were Xanthus (the capital), Patara, Pinara, Olympus, Myra, and Tlos; and at the head of the whole confederation was a president or governor called the Lyciarch. Many monuments and ruined buildings (temples, tombs, theatres, &c.) and other antiquities testify to the attainments of the Lycians in civilisation and the arts, which they seem to have derived in large measure from Greek sources. Sir Charles Fellows, about 1840, was the first to discover and point out the interesting character of these Lycian remains. A beautiful collection is preserved in the British Museum. There exist also inscriptions in which a peculiar alphabet is used, closely modelled upon the Greek, the language of which appears to be inflected like the Indo-Germanic languages, and was probably akin to Zend.
See Fellows, Discoveries in Lycia (1841); Spratt and Forbes, Travels in Lycia (1847); M. Schmidt, The Lycian Inscriptions (1869); Sayce, Principles of Comparative Philology (3d ed. 1885); and Treuber, Geschichte der Lykier (1887).