Who the Carians were
Caria occupied the rugged southwest corner of Anatolia, a region of mountains, small valleys and a deeply indented coast facing the Greek islands. The Carians spoke a language of the Anatolian branch of Indo-European, related to Lydian and Luwian. They wrote it in a script of their own, which was long a puzzle. Progress came in the late twentieth century, partly from inscriptions found in Egypt that paired Carian with Egyptian or Greek, and today many signs can be read, though the language is still imperfectly understood.
Greek writers placed the Carians in the region before the Greek settlers arrived, and Herodotus recorded the Carian claim to be ancient inhabitants. Greek colonists settled the coast, notably at Halicarnassus and in nearby cities, and the result was a mixed culture where Greek and Carian names, cults and customs lived together. Herodotus himself came from Halicarnassus, and his family names suggest a Carian connection.
A reputation as soldiers
Carians were widely known as fighters for hire. The Greek poet Archilochus, in the seventh century BCE, uses “Carian” as a word for a mercenary, which shows the reputation was established early. Herodotus says Carians were the inventors of helmet crests, shield emblems and shield handles, a claim worth treating as a Greek tradition, not a proven fact. It still tells us that Greeks associated Carians with military equipment and service abroad.
Poverty and a rugged homeland may have pushed men to seek employment, though this is a guess. What is documented is that Carian soldiers appear in the records of other states.
Carians in Egypt
The best evidence for Carian mercenaries lies in Egypt. Herodotus says Pharaoh Psamtik I, in the seventh century BCE, gained power with the help of Ionian and Carian men who had come in bronze armour. He reports that they were given land and that Carian communities, along with Greeks, were later settled near Memphis. Carian inscriptions have been found at Memphis, Saqqara and elsewhere, many on tombstones, which indicates families who made Egypt their home.
Even more famous is the graffiti carved into the colossal statues at Abu Simbel in Nubia, probably during a campaign of Psamtik II around 593 BCE. Greek, Phoenician and Carian soldiers left their names there. These marks make clear that Carians served as a recognised group alongside Greeks, and they are among the most valuable sources for the Carian script.
Egypt was not the only employer. Carians served other rulers in the Near East and are often listed with the broader class of mercenaries that powers hired. Comparing their story with the Carthaginian mercenaries recruited by another Mediterranean state shows how common paid soldiering was across the ancient world.
Carians and the Greeks
In the Iliad, the Carians fight on the Trojan side and are described as having a strange speech. This reflects the Greek tendency to treat non-Greek speakers as other. In the Persian Wars, some Carians sided with the Ionian revolt against Persia around 499 to 494 BCE, while others later served Persia. The best-known Carian of that era was Artemisia I, ruler of Halicarnassus, who fought on the Persian side at Salamis in 480 BCE. Herodotus reports that Xerxes admired her judgement, and her advice before the battle is one of the more famous episodes in his account. Her ships fought in the larger Greco-Persian conflict, at a battle whose outcome is usually credited to the Greek fleet and to Themistocles naval strategy, which lured the Persians into narrow waters.
After the wars, many Carian cities were drawn into the Athenian alliance and are recorded among the contributors of Delian League tribute.
The Hecatomnids
In the fourth century BCE, Caria came under the rule of the Hecatomnid family. Hecatomnus of Mylasa was appointed satrap by the Persian king in the 390s BCE. This kind of office was part of the satrapy system, but the Hecatomnids turned it into something close to a hereditary principality. After Hecatomnus died, around 377 BCE, power passed to his children one after another: Mausolus, Artemisia II, Idrieus, Ada and Pixodarus.
The family kept Persian approval while acting almost independently, and they cultivated Greek art and fashion. Their inscriptions in Greek and their patronage of sanctuaries, including the Zeus sanctuary at Labraunda, reveal how thoroughly they blended Carian, Persian and Greek elements.
Mausolus and Halicarnassus
Mausolus ruled from about 377 to 353 BCE. He moved the capital from inland Mylasa to the coastal city of Halicarnassus, which he rebuilt with a large harbour, walls and public buildings. Mausolus expanded Carian influence by taking over neighbouring areas and by taking part in a revolt by Greek allies against Athens, in the 350s BCE.
His name survives in the word “mausoleum”, from the huge tomb that his wife and sister Artemisia II oversaw after his death. According to later writers, the architects were Satyros and Pytheos, and well-known Greek sculptors worked on its decoration, though the attribution of particular figures is uncertain. The tomb was counted among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. It stood for many centuries before earthquakes damaged it, and in the medieval period stone from the site was reused in the castle at Bodrum. In the nineteenth century, Charles Newton recovered sculptural fragments, many now in the British Museum. Works of this sort belong to the wider history of Greek sculpture and pottery, and the Mausoleum shows how Greek craftsmen worked for non-Greek patrons.
The end of the dynasty
Ada, a Hecatomnid, was ruling a fortress at Alinda when Alexander the Great arrived in 334 BCE. She adopted him as her son and was restored to power after Halicarnassus was besieged and captured. Ada’s brother Pixodarus had earlier driven her out, and after his death a Persian official, his son-in-law Orontobates, held Halicarnassus against Alexander. As Alexander went on to confront the Persian king in the long struggle of Alexander versus Darius, Caria passed to Macedonian and then Hellenistic control. The Carian language faded over time, as Greek came to dominate, and the surviving inscriptions are the main evidence for what had been a distinct people.