On the Prehistory of Lesbos’ Relations with Lydia: When and Where Did the Greeks First Encounter the Lydians?

This paper presents evidence bearing on the question of how far back reach the contacts between the Greeks and the Lydian-speaking population of western Anatolia, concentrating first of all upon the problem of the earliest history of the Maeonians/Lydians, their original homeland and the date of their arrival into Lydia. I discuss the well-known evidence of the Greek texts and the respective linguistic data and present a new interpretation of the geographical setting of the text known as the Indictment of Madduwatta, which sheds new light on the issue, allowing the date of the first Greek-Lydian encounters to be pushed significantly back.