Antiphellos Lion Sarcophagus

Carved in the fourth century BC, the Lion Sarcophagus stands at the top of Uzun Çarşı Sokak, the old Roman street climbing from the harbor through the center of Kaş, ancient Antiphellos, and is one of the town's best-known landmarks, sometimes called the King's Tomb. It is a classic Lycian rock-cut tomb: a sunken lower chamber about 1.5 meters high, built to hold an earlier burial, supports a stone chest carved to imitate a timber-framed house, topped by a pointed, boat-shaped lid with a lion's head projecting from each end. What sets the monument apart is its inscription, written in Lycian B, or Milyan, an older and more literary dialect known from only one other surviving monumental text, the pillar tomb at Xanthos. Laid out in verse rather than as an ordinary epitaph, the inscription makes this sarcophagus one of the most linguistically significant funerary monuments surviving from ancient Lycia.