Lycian

One, that bore / the brave Orontes and his Lycian crew, / full in AEneas' sight a toppling wave o'erthrew. / Dashed from the tiller, down the pilot rolled. / Thrice round the billow whirled her, as she lay, / then whelmed below.

In regard to the antiquity of the monuments, and the people who spoke the language called Lycian, now first made known through these inscriptions, we are enabled to arrive at conclusions which fix their era with some degree of certainty.

From the 4th Century BCE onwards, the Lycians built rock-hewn "house" tombs – often funeral chambers carved into cliffs, with the rock face around the doorway cut to imitate the façade of a wooden Lycian house, complete with "timbers" and protruding "joists".

Formed in the 2nd Century BCE and composed of 23 city-states, the Lycian League was the world's first democratic union, a model of a strong confederacy based on popular and proportional representation.