Caria

A region of south-western Anatolia that was governed by its own dynasty under Persian sovereignty, and produced two things everyone has heard of. The Carians were an indigenous Anatolian people with their own language, absorbed into the Persian empire after the fall of Lydia in 546 BC and administered by local rulers rather than Persian appointees. Artemisia I ruled Halicarnassus in the 480s as a Persian vassal and commanded a squadron of five ships at Salamis in 480. Herodotus, who was born in her city, reports that she was the only one of Xerxes' commanders to advise against fighting in the straits, that she was right, and that Xerxes watching from the shore said his men had become women and his women men. He also reports that she escaped by ramming a friendly ship, which the pursuing Athenians took as proof she was on their side. The Hecatomnid dynasty of the fourth century made Caria briefly powerful and thoroughly Hellenised. Mausolus moved the capital to Halicarnassus, rebuilt it on a grid with a fortified harbour, and was buried in a tomb so large that his name became the word for a monumental one. The Mausoleum was counted among the seven wonders and stood for sixteen centuries before earthquakes brought it down. Alexander took the city in 334 after his siege was assisted by Ada, the last Hecatomnid, who adopted him as her son and was restored as satrap. Caria passed to the Seleucids, then to Rhodes, then to Rome. The Carian language was written in a script derived from the Greek alphabet and was not deciphered until the 1980s, largely from graffiti left by Carian mercenaries serving in Egypt. That service is the other thing the region was known for: Carians and Ionians hired by Psamtik I in the seventh century were the first Greek-speaking soldiers in Egyptian pay, and their descendants formed a distinct community at Memphis for generations.

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