Leleges

Alcaeus (7th or 6th century BCE) calls Antandrus in the Troad "Lelegian", but later Herodotus substitutes the epithet "Pelasgian", so perhaps the two designations were broadly synonymous for the Greeks.

These remarks of Pausanias find confirmation in the form of the cult in historic times, centering on a many-breasted icon of the "Lady of Ephesus" whom Greeks called Artemis.

Often historians assume, as a general rule, that autochthonous inhabitants survive an invasion as an under-class where they do not retreat to mountain districts, so it is interesting to hear in Deipnosophistae that Philippus of Theangela (a 4th-century BC historian) referred to Leleges still surviving as serfs of the "true Carians",[10] and even later Strabo[11] attributes to the Leleges a distinctive group of deserted forts and tombs in Caria that were still known in his day as "Lelegean forts"; the Encyclopædia Britannica 1911 identified these as ruins that could still be traced ranging from the neighborhood of Theangela and Halicarnassus as far north as Miletus, the southern limit of the "true Carians" of Pherecydes.

The fourth-century BC historian Philippus of Theangela suggested that the Leleges maintained connections to Messenia, Laconia, Locris and other regions in mainland Greece, after they were overcome by the Carians in Asia Minor.

[12] A single passage in the fragmentary Hesiodic Catalogue of Women[13] places "Leleges" in Deucalion's mythicized and archaic time in Locris in central Greece, identified as the rocks turned human that repopulated the earth after the great deluge.

Meanwhile, other writers from the 4th century onwards claimed to discover them in Boeotia, west Acarnania (Leucas), and later again in Thessaly, Euboea, Megara, Lacedaemon and Messenia.

[15] These European Leleges must be interpreted in connection with the recurrence of place names like Pedasus, Physcus, Larymna and Abae, both in Caria, and in these "Lelegian" parts of Greece.

Perhaps this is the result of some early migration; perhaps it is also the cause of these Lelegian theories; perhaps there was a widespread pre-Indo-European culture that loosely linked these regions, a possibility on which much modern hypothesis has been constructed.