Abstract:

The modern history of the famous sanctuary of the goddess Leto near Xanthos in Lycia begins on April the 17th, 1840, when Charles Fellows was passing by. Its ancient history probably goes back beyond the early dynast Kuprlli, who is mentioned in a dedication by Erbbina, his great-grand­son. The spring named Melite, where the goddess wanted to bathe her children, has a Greek name, but derived from a word for honey that is attested in Anatolian languages too. And it is prob­ably also attested in Lycian by Mlidanase, the name of a woman in a Greek inscription, and by mlttaimi in a Lycian inscription honouring a woman, probably ‚honeyed‘ like malirimiš, glorifying a king in a hieroglyphic Luwian inscription of the late 9th century BC. Therefore, the spring may have had a Lycian name similar to Melite. With the myth of Leto is connected, according to Anto­ni­nus Liberalis, the name Lycia: bestowed by the goddess herself after wolves (Gr. lykoi), who were kinder to her than the Lycian herdsmen. This explanation of the Greek name by a Greek word is lin­guis­tically impeccable, albeit semantically not probable: The wolves are still there, but they did not play any role in Lycian culture. The modern, popular explanation of Lycia as a ‚land of light‘, or similar, was invented by a German historian of the 19th century, deriving it from a Greek root too. But this explanation is evidently nonsensical. The current explanation by the land of Lukka in Hittite sources is somewhat older and nothing more than an equation between similar-sounding names. There is still no proper evidence for a geographic match. But both names, Lycia and Lukka, could together with other names, e.g., Lycaonia or the toponym Lykai, just on the eastern side of the Lycian peninsula, derive from the Indo-European root *luk- (as in light, in fact), like many topo­nyms outside Anatolia, e.g., Lucca in Italy or Water-loo in Belgium. In Lycian inscriptions Leto is called “mother of the qla ebi”, which is certainly not a ‘local’ qla, but only her sanctuary near Xanthos, virtually founded by the goddess herself. And it is possible that she is called not by this title, but by the name in a poetic inscription (TL 55): Xba, which may go back to Hebat, an origi­nally Syrian goddess venerated by the Hittites too. Qla corresponds, according to the etymo­logy offered by Kloekhorst, to Greek aule, whence Latin aula and Turkish avlu. A village near Kaş, or Andifli, the Greek Antiphellos, was called Aule in the 19th century, and by European travellers Awe­lan, probably a Turkish transformation of the Greek name, or Awully, evidently the Turkish name today written as Ağullu. The Lycian name of the Letoon’s location was Pñtr-, which has noth­ing to do with the hero Pandaros, but probably corresponds to Pantar- in the toponym Pan­tar­wanta, attested in Hattusa. And the MONS Pa-tara/i, where the Hittite great-king Tuthaliya IV. erected a monument, could have been the “rocky hill” (Fellows) at the Letoon, but it is more likely to be connected with Pttara, Greek Patara, and this town’s coastal hill.

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