[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 6] [Extensions of Remarks] [Page 7844] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]PATARA: THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, 1800 YEARS AND 7000 MILES AWAY ______ HON. CLIFF STEARNS of florida in the house of representatives Tuesday, May 9, 2006 Mr. STEARNS. Mr. Speaker, the city of Patara in Turkey sports a fantastic beach that sprawls for more than 11 miles. It recently rated number one, on the London Sunday Times' list of the world's best beaches. But Patara is worth our attention for more than sand and surf. An archeological team led by Akdeniz University Professors Fahri Isik and Havva Iskan Isik recently unearthed an ancient parliament building in Patara--the meeting place of the first federal republic in recorded human history. The building, called the Bouletarion, housed at least twenty-three city-states of the Lycian League, which existed along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey from about 167 BC until 400 AD. The Lycian League's republican governing system, utilizing proportional representation, was unparalleled in the ancient world, and fascinated the pioneering intellectuals of the Enlightenment, particularly Montesquieu. Depending on the size of the member cities, each elected one, two or three representatives to the Lycian parliament. When cities were too small, two or three banded together to share one representative vote. The six largest cities in the League had the right to three votes. The parliament elected a president, called the ``Lycearch,'' which at various times served as the League's religious, military, and political leader. Although it is contested, there is evidence to suggest that women could be and in fact were Lycearch. In Book IX of Montesquieu's Spirit of the Law, after charting the highs and lows of the earliest republics, he stresses the utility of a confederacy. He cites the Lycian League as an example: ``It is unlikely that states that associate will be of the same size and have equal power. . . . If one had to propose a model of a fine federal republic, I would choose the republic of Lycia.'' Montesquieu's interest in the Lycian way of government would prove central to our founding. Thanks to his writings, in the debates about our own Constitution, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison cited the Lycian League as a model for our own system of government. As well, in literal linkage, the semi-circular configuration of seats in this House of Representatives is exactly the same seating arrangement as in the Bouletarion in Patara. The Bouletarion's throne- like perch, where the elected Lycearch sat, is much the same as the seat of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. On June 30, 1787, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, James Madison appealed to the delegates' understanding of the Lycian League. The Convention had just rejected the ``New Jersey Plan'', which called for a rather modest revision of our nation's first constitutional framework, the failed Articles of Confederation. The delegates resolved to come up with a new constitution, but had few notions in common of how it should proceed. A delegate from Connecticut, Oliver Ellsworth, had just finished arguing for the Articles of Confederation's principle that every state should be equal in the national arena. He specifically asked, ``Where is or was a confederation ever formed, where equality of voices was not a fundamental principle?'' James Madison replied that the Lycian League was different, according representation in reflection of actual size. His Virginia plan provided for a bicameral legislature, with both houses' representation based on states' population. He eventually had to accept a compromise, with a people's house of proportional representation, our House of Representatives, in tandem with a Senate of equal state representation. Hamilton and Madison also cited the Lycian League in defense of representative democracy. While direct rule usually resulted in either tyranny or anarchy, the two founders felt that delegation of authority to elected representatives would allow the government to function properly. In addition, the Lycian League was. used in defense of individual rights and a strong national government, two notions the original Articles of Confederation conspicuously avoided. In Federalist number 15, Hamilton called the Articles' avoidance of individual rights in favor of state rights the ``radical vice'' of our nation's first governing system. The ideas and debates of our founding fathers may seem archaic to our modem times, but we face questions of federalism every day in this Congress. A federalist system of government divides power between a central authority (the federal government) and constituent political units (the states and localities). The delineation of that power comes into question particularly often on the Energy & Commerce Committee, of which I am a Subcommittee Chairman, whether we are debating the proper authority over electricity transmission across state lines., the regulation of hazardous waste, or the transmission of information through our telecommunications infrastructure. Meanwhile, whether we are helping Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries develop representative democratic systems, or providing advice to the burgeoning democracies of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, we effectively reenact the Constitutional Convention's debates about the Lycian League and the nature of democracy around the world. We are doing what we can to help spread freedom and democracy, in our own image. Unfortunately, while it is relatively easy to conceive of the best model of government--as our founding fathers did, and Montesquieu did before them--the diversity of the real world, in geography, ethnicity, religion, and history, makes applying that best model quite difficult in practice. The British archeologist George Bean highlighted some of the unique features of the Lycian League--features not dissimilar to our own country's: ``Among the various races of Anatolia, the Lycians always. held a distinctive place. Locked away in .their mountainous country, they had a fierce love of freedom and independence, and resisted strongly all attempts at outside domination; they were the last in Asia Minor to be incorporated as a province into the Roman Empire.'' Our experience so far in guiding the nascent democracy in Iraq should certainly illustrate that representative democracy may not be perfectly replicable, at least overnight. Fifteen years ago, all a visitor to Patara would have noticed were the tops of a few old stones. Today, the excavations at Patara have unearthed the remains of an entire city. The archeological team has rescued numerous buildings and items from the sand and scrub brush, besides the Bouletarion parliament building, including: a large necropolis; a Roman bath; a sizeable semicircular theater; a sprawling main avenue leading to the market square; a Byzantine basilica (one of 22 churches once packed into Patara); one of the world's oldest lighthouses; and a fortified wall. I would encourage everyone to visit Patara, for its beauty and for its archeological significance. The excavation site is 10-15 minutes from the glorious beach, and will be opened to the public in 2007. While we wait, one of Turkey's largest museums, the Antalya Archaeological Museum, displays many of the finds from Patara and the surrounding area. We owe a great debt to Turkey's Ministry of Culture and the Akdeniz University in Antalya for their dedication of time and money to bringing the ancient ruins of Patara out of the dust and back into our lives. In closing, I would like to thank: Dr. Gul Isin, Associated Professor of Archeology at Akdeniz Antalya in Turkey, who has been diligently working with Dr. Fahri Isik and Dr. Havva Iskan Isik to uncover the mysteries of the Patara site; Professor James W. Muller of the University of Alaska, Anchorage, who dissected how the Lycian League impacted the founding fathers; and the American Friends of Turkey, the Friends of Patara, and former Representatives Stephen Solarz and Robert Livingston, who graciously introduced me to the archeological findings at Patara, and the important work of Professors Isin and Miller. ____________________