#luwian

[enkidusbi]

About the Anatolian hieroglyph L9/L444 embraced how did you discover it? I want to learn more about it. I would love to get it tattooed but I want to know more before I do.

well, i took a class in hieroglyphic luwian and we learnt it there haha

the sign list is in Laroche 1960: Les hiéroglyphes hittites. and for the language and grammar, we read Payne 2014: Hieroglyphic Luwian. An Introduction with Original Texts. i feel like that's a good place to start!

if you are interested in where these texts were discovered, Hittite Monuments is a super cool site! and for the text corpus, you can find it all transliterated and translated at eDiAna!

[bronzegods]

Telipinu, storm god of Hatti 🌩️

Telipinu was well known for his ferocious temper. Frequently mortals had to engage in a mugawar to draw him back after he’d departed in a rage. Frankly, Telipinu just wanted to take a sullen nap; wouldn’t anyone be angry if awoken with a bee sting?

Commissioned from Kiwibon

[dilutedh2so4]

A biconvex bronze seal found in 1995 carries the first assured pre-classical inscription from Troia. It is written in the Anatolian hieroglyphic script, generally used by the Hittites on their seals and on their monumental inscriptions - the latter usually in the Luwian language. Side 1 gives the incomplete name of a scribe, side 2 gives the incomplete name of a woman, presumably his wife. Its archaeological context was the western end of Blegen's House 761, dating to Troia VIIb.

Hawkins and Easton, "A Hieroglyphic Seal from Troia" in Studia Troica 6 (1996).

[ningirida]

ANATOLIA & LEVANT RESOURCES

The Anthropological Masterlist is HERE.

Anatolia, or Asia Minor, is a historical West Asian peninsula that constitutes the major part of modern-day Turkey. 

HITTITE ─ “The Hittites, or the Empire of Hattusa, were an Anatolian people that lived during the Bronze Age, from 1650 B.C.E. to 1190 B.C.E. At their height, the empire encompassed the majority of modern-day Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria.” ─ Hittite Cuneiform Script ─ Hittite Grammar ─ The Chicago Hittite Dictionary Project

HURRIAN ─ “The Hurrians, or Khurrites, were a Near East people that lived from 3000 B.C.E. to 1300 B.C.E. They lived in Anatolia and Mesopotamia.” ─ The Mitanni Empire ─ Hurrian Culture ─ Hurrian Mythology

LUWIAN ─ “The Luwians are a group of Anatolian people that lived from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. They lived in modern-day Turkey.” ─ Luwian Studies ─ Luwian Dictionary

PHRYGIA ─ “The Phrygian people were an Anatolian people that lived from 1200 B.C.E. to 700 B.C.E. They lived in central Anatolia.” ─ Phrygian Language ─ Phrygian Inscriptions

THRACIA ─ “The Thracians were an Indo-European people that lived from the 8th century B.C.E. to 1st century C.E. They lived in the Balkans and Anatolia.” ─ Thracian Information ─ Thracian Culture ─ Thracian Language

UGARIT ─ “Ugarit was an Anatolian civilization that lived from 6000 B.C.E. to 1185 B.C.E. They lived in modern-day northern Syria.” ─ Ugaritic Information ─ Ugarit in the Bible ─ El in Ugaritic Texts

The Levant is a historical West Asian region in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Asia. It spans from the western part of the Arabian Peninsula to northeast Africa.

CARTHAGE ─ “Ancient Carthage, or the Carthaginian Empire, was a Mediterranean civilization that lived from 814 B.C.E. to 146 B.C.E. They lived in modern-day Tunisia.” ─ Carthage Information ─ Carthaginian Religion ─ Carthaginian Archaeology

EGYPT ─ “The Ancient Egyptians were a northeastern African people. They lived in the Nile Valley in Egypt.” ─ Egyptian Information ─ Ancient Egyptian Art ─ Women in Ancient Egypt

PHOENICIA ─ “The Phoenician people were a Mediterranean people that lived from 2500 B.C.E. to 64 B.C.E. They lived in modern-day Lebanon.” ─ Phoenician History ─ Phoenician Alphabet ─ Phoenician and Punic Languages

SYRIA ─ “The Syrians are an Eastern Mediterranean people that share the Syrian culture. They are native to Syria.” ─ Syria Information ─ Syria from 1700 C.E to 1920 C.E. ─ Syrian Cultural Zones

[indo-europeans]

from perkunos to indra & zeus

Anatolian languages:

tarhuan, tarhunna, tarhunnaradu - hittite (linked w bull in anatolia)

tarhu, tarhunz, tarhunta, tarhuwant - luwian

tarhuwanta - palaic

trqqas - lycian

taru - hattian

teshub - hurrian

turvant - sanskrit cognate for indra?

aleppo - 

hadad - mesopotamia?

iskur - sumeria?

zeus - greek

indra - vedic

trokondas - rome

jupiter dolichenus  - armenian/roman

- associated with sky, weather, lightning, thunder, battlefield, commander, mountains, helpful, slaying enemies with an axe, vanquishing, decided whether would be drought and famine or fertile fields and good harvests, thunderbolt becomes axe

religious treatment

- "Weather god of the thunderbolt, glow on me like the moonlight, shine over me like the son god of heaven!" - KUB 6.45 iii 68-70, Hittite king Muwatalli II’s personal god who he referred to as “my lord, king of heaven” (associated with Anatolia’s bulls instead of horses)

- Hittite king Warpalawas II made rock relief and animals were sacrificed to him 

- Luwian magic rituals intended to bring rain or heal the sick

- chief god of the luwians, whose chariot was pulled by horses. later depicted standing on a bull.

- cows + sheep were sacrificed to him for grain + wine to grow 

- in curses, he was called upon to “smash enemies with his axe” and gave the king royal power, courage and marched him in battle - in late Luwian texts

- Pegasus, Greek winged horse which carries Zeus’ thunderbolt name comes from one of his epithets piḫaššašši meaning “of the thunderblot”

cult sites

- Aleppo, Syria, major city of the weather god - conquered by Hittite king Suppiluluima I who installed his son Telipinu as priest-king. Temple for weather god was modified to conform to Hittite cult

snake/dragon slayer myth near Mount Kasios in Syria & Corycus in Turkey

- Illuyanka in Hittite

- Hedammu in Hurrian

- Typhon in Greek (taken from Cilicia)

- Naga in Sanskrit

[archaeologicalnews]

Ancient inscription reveals lost civilization in Turkey that may have defeated King Midas

Last winter, a local farmer in southern Turkey stumbled upon a large stone half-submerged in an irrigation canal with mysterious inscriptions. The stone revealed the story of an ancient, lost civilization that may have defeated King Midas' kingdom of Phrygia in the late eighth century B.C., according to new findings.

Some months after discovering the stone, the farmer tipped off local archaeologists to the stone's existence, according to a statement.

"Right away it was clear it was ancient, and we recognized the script it was written in: Luwian, the language used in the Bronze and Iron ages in the area," James Osborne, an archaeologist and assistant professor of Anatolian Archaeology at the University of Chicago, said in the statement. With a tractor, the farmer helped the archaeologists pull the heavy stone block, or stele, out from the canal. Read more.

[allthingslinguistic]

Why do scripts and writing practices die out?

The death of scripts is something Pippa and I have been thinking about a fair bit recently. We gave a talk about it at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas back in the autumn, and presented a poster at …

An interesting blog post about writing systems and archaeology in linguistics, from the blog of Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS). Excerpt: 

Why do people stop writing in a particular script? It’s a simple question but one that’s received surprisingly little academic attention, perhaps because almost by definition, evidence for why something stops happening will be scarce. This is true with any tradition or cultural practice, and relates to a broader discussion of how we conceptualise and reconstruct ancient social change. But since writing is one of our key sources of evidence as well as the practice we’re investigating, the problem of evidence is particularly acute there.

The first thing we need to be sure of is that a script really has died out, rather than people merely changing what they use it for or the materials on which they write it. The ancient East Mediterranean offers a good example of this with the case of hieroglyphic Luwian. In the Late Bronze Age, this seemed like a script (and associated language) on the rise. It was widely spoken in Anatolia and seemed to be gaining ground, perhaps even among the Hittite royal elite by the end of the thirteenth century BC. The Hittites used Luwian writing alongside their usual cuneiform script, and it’s best preserved now in monumental rock-cut inscriptions, such as those from the capital, Hattuša. As CREWS Visiting Fellow Willemijn Waal has argued, it may also have been written on wooden tablets.

But with the collapse of the Hittite Empire at the beginning of the twelfth century, Luwian inscriptions entirely vanish from the archaeological record. There are no attestations anywhere in the region. And yet, we know that people were still using the script because it reappears around two centuries later in the Iron Age Syrian successor states that arose out of the old empire. For the script to be preserved, it must have continued to be used during the intervening time on perishable materials. What we see at the end of the Late Bronze Age is not the death of Luwian hieroglyphs, but a change in how they were used that renders them invisible to us for around two hundred years.

Read the whole thing. 

[linguisticalities]

Ancient inscription reveals lost civilization in Turkey that may have defeated King Midas

The lost kingdom was one of the largest settlements to exist in ancient Turkey at the time.