Who were the Lelegians? Ancient Greek and Latin texts refer to the Lelegians as an indigenous people, locating them in southwestern Anatolia in a region known in historical times as Caria. Yet attempts to find evidence for the Lelegians ‘on the ground’ have met with questionable success. This paper has two aims. First, it provides an up-to-date picture of the archaeology of ancient Caria and shows that there is little indication of distinctly ‘Lelegian’ forms of material culture during the first millennium BCE. Second, it juxtaposes archaeological evidence with the development of the Lelegian ethnonym and suggests that the idea of a distinct Lelegian identity was retrospectively constructed by the Carians to fulfil the role of an imaginary ‘barbarian other’. This happened in the late Classical and early Hellenistic periods, a time of intensified Carian ethnogenesis, and was a process that responded to and made creative use of earlier Greek knowledge traditions. Finally, this paper argues that a later horizon of Lelegian imagining occurred in modern scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries. Who, then, were the Lelegians? This article proposes that they were an imaginary people, invented and reinvented over the centuries.

勒勒吉亚人是谁？古希腊和拉丁文本将勒勒吉亚人称为土著人民，将他们定位在安纳托利亚西南部的一个历史时期称为卡里亚的地区。然而，在“地面上”为勒勒吉亚人寻找证据的尝试却取得了令人质疑的成功。本文有两个目的。首先，它提供了古代卡里亚考古学的最新图片，并表明在公元前第一个千年期间几乎没有明显的“勒勒吉亚”物质文化形式。其次，它将考古证据与 Lelegian 民族名称的发展并列，并表明独特的 Lelegian 身份的想法是由 Carians 回顾性地构建的，以履行想象中的“野蛮人他者”的角色。这发生在古典晚期和希腊化早期，一个强化卡里亚民族起源的时代，是一个回应和创造性地利用早期希腊知识传统的过程。最后，本文论证了 19 世纪和 20 世纪的现代学术中出现了勒勒吉想象的后期视野。那么，勒勒吉人是谁？这篇文章提出他们是一个虚构的民族，经过几个世纪的发明和改造。