Leleges

The Leleges were one of the aboriginal peoples of the Aegean littoral, distinct from the Pelasgians, the Bronze Age Greeks, the cretan Minoans, the cycladic Telkhines, and the Tyrrhenians. The classical Hellenes emerged as an amalgam of these six peoples. The distinction between the Leleges and the Carians (a nation living in south west Anatolia) is unclear. According to Homer, the Leleges were a distinct Anatolian tribe; However, Herodotus states that Leleges had been an early name for the Carians;. The fourth-century BCE historian Philippus of Theangela, suggested that the Leleges maintained connections to Messenia, Laconia, Locris and other regions in mainland Greece, after they got overcome by the Carians in Asia Minor.

It is thought that the name Leleges is not an autonym, a name these people applied to themselves, in a long-submerged tongue. Instead, during the Bronze Age the term lulahi was in use in the Luwian language of the Hittites in Anatolia: in a Hittite cuneiform inscription priests and temple servants are directed to avoid conversing with lulahi and foreign merchants. It is surmised that the reference is to strangers. According to the suggestion of Vitaly Shevoroshkin, applying the term to men of the lands that would become classical Caria and Lycia, "Leleges" would then be an attempt to transliterate lulahi into Greek.

Late traditions reported in Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheke, and by Pausanias, derive the name from an eponymous king Lelex; a comparable etymology, memorializing a legendary founder, is provided by Greek mythographers for virtually every tribe of Hellenes: "Lelex and the Leleges, whatever their historical significance, have acted as a blank sheet on which to draw Lakonia and all it means," observes Ken Dowden.