LELEGES. Various traditions were current among the Greeks respecting earlier inhabitants of their country. They were inclined to assign the comprehensive name of Pelasgians to all such peoples, but among them distinguished Carians and Leleges whom they regarded as akin. The Carians existed as a people in South-western Anatolia in historical times, and the earliest extant mention of the Leleges is the record in the Iliad (x. 429, xx. 96) of their presence at Troy as allies of the Trojans. They were from Asia Minor. Herodotus records their former presence in the Greek islands, while both Strabo and Pausanias place them in various regions of the Peloponnese and Central Greece. There is evidence that they were settled also in parts of Thrace, Mace donia and Illyria.
A large class of Greek place-names, notably those in and testifies to the presence on the mainland of a people closely associated with Asia Minor. A view now widely held is that Greek-speaking peoples first came to Greece from the north about the 17th century B.C., subduing the population, who had been in contact with the Minoan civilization, and attacking the Cretans themselves. It was these people, according to this view, who set up the Mycenean civilization. Of the language of the
early inhabitants nothing is known and it would be rash to assert that they did not speak Greek. This in no way means that the Minoans did so. The Carian language is now definitely regarded as non-Indo-European. Moreover, though the conquest of Greece by northern tribes is an undoubted fact, the question of the Greek-speaking peoples' occupation of Greece is not so simple as to be solved by the mere postulation that northern conquerors brought the language. The Achaeans were a great power in the eastern Aegean in the 14th century, and the view is gaining ground that there were early Greek migrations from east to west across the Aegean. It is, however, certain that there were Asianic peoples occupying the islands and the Greek mainland in a period that the historical Greeks regarded as ancient, and that the name of one of these tribes was Leleges.