HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Hieroglyphic Luwian (''luwili'') is a variant of the
Luwian language Luwian (), sometimes known as Luvian or Luish, is an ancient language, or group of languages, within the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. The ethnonym Luwian comes from ''Luwiya'' (also spelled ''Luwia'' or ''Luvia'') � ...
, recorded in official and royal
seals Seals may refer to: * Pinniped, a diverse group of semi-aquatic marine mammals, many of which are commonly called seals, particularly: ** Earless seal, or "true seal" ** Fur seal * Seal (emblem), a device to impress an emblem, used as a means of a ...
and a small number of monumental inscriptions. It is written in a hieroglyphic script known as
Anatolian hieroglyphs Anatolian hieroglyphs are an indigenous logographic script native to central Anatolia, consisting of some 500 signs. They were once commonly known as Hittite hieroglyphs, but the language they encode proved to be Luwian, not Hittite, and the te ...
. A decipherment was presented by Emmanuel Laroche in 1960, building on partial decipherments proposed since the 1930s. Corrections to the readings of certain signs as well as other clarifications were given by David Hawkins,
Anna Morpurgo Davies Anna Elbina Morpurgo Davies, (21 June 1937 – 27 September 2014) was an Italian philologist who specialised in comparative Indo-European linguistics. She spent her career at Oxford University, where she was the Professor of Comparative Philol ...
and Günther Neumann in 1973, generally referred to as "the new readings".


Overview

According to Hittitologist
Alwin Kloekhorst Alwin Kloekhorst (born in Smilde, 1978) is a Dutch linguist, Indo-Europeanist and Hittitologist. Biography Kloekhorst received his Ph.D. in 2007 at Leiden University for his thesis on Hittite. In over 1200 pages, his dissertation describes t ...
, Hieroglyphic Luwian may also be known as Empire Luwian or Iron Age Luwian, and is "closely related" to its sister language,
Cuneiform Luwian Luwian (), sometimes known as Luvian or Luish, is an ancient language, or group of languages, within the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. The ethnonym Luwian comes from ''Luwiya'' (also spelled ''Luwia'' or ''Luvia'') � ...
. Similarly, Alice Mouton and Ilya Yakubovich separate Luwian into two distinct varieties: cuneiform and hieroglyphic - the latter of a more prestigious and elite use.


Inscriptions

The earliest hieroglyphs appear on official and royal seals, dating from the early 2nd millennium BC, but only from the 14th century BC is the unequivocal evidence for a full-fledged writing system. Whilst Dutch Hittitologist Willemijn Waal has persuasively argued that Luwian Hieroglyphic was already used for writing on wooden writing boards from the early second millennium BC onwards, the first monumental inscriptions confirmed as Luwian date to the
Late Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second prin ...
, c. 14th to 13th centuries BC. After some two centuries of sparse material, the hieroglyphs resume in the Early
Iron Age The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three-age division of the prehistory and protohistory of humanity. It was preceded by the Stone Age ( Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic) and the Bronze Age ( Chalcolithic). The concept has been mostly ...
, c. 10th to 8th centuries BC. In the early 7th century BC, the Luwian hieroglyphic script, by then aged more than 700 years, falls into oblivion.


Script

A more elaborate monumental style is distinguished from more abstract linear or cursive forms of the script. In general, relief inscriptions prefer monumental forms, and incised ones prefer the linear form, but the styles are in principle interchangeable. Texts of several lines are usually written in
boustrophedon Boustrophedon is a style of writing in which alternate lines of writing are reversed, with letters also written in reverse, mirror-style. This is in contrast to modern European languages, where lines always begin on the same side, usually the le ...
style. Within a line, signs are usually written in vertical columns, but as in
Egyptian hieroglyphs Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1, ...
, aesthetic considerations take precedence over correct reading order. The script consists of the order of 500 unique signs,Laroche (1960) lists 524, but several signs separated by Laroche are now considered identical (e.g. *63 and *64 with *69, itself possibly a variant of *59 MANUS; *94 with *91 PES.SCALA.ROTAE (the "rollerskate" glyph); *136 with *43 CAPERE, etc.) some with multiple values; a given sign may function as a logogram, a determinative or a
syllabogram Syllabograms are signs used to write the syllables (or morae) of words. This term is most often used in the context of a writing system otherwise organized on different principles—an alphabet where most symbols represent phonemes, or a logograph ...
, or a combination thereof. The signs are numbered according to Laroche's sign list, with a prefix of 'L.' or '*'. Logograms are transcribed in Latin in capital letters. For example, *90, an image of a foot, is transcribed as PES when used logographically, and with its phonemic value ''ti'' when used as a syllabogram. In the rare cases where the logogram cannot be transliterated into Latin, it is rendered through its approximate Hittite equivalent, recorded in Italic capitals, e.g. *216 ''ARHA''. The most up-to-date sign list is that of Marazzi (1998). Hawkins, Morpurgo-Davies and Neumann corrected some previous errors about sign values, in particular emending the reading of symbols *376 and *377 from ''i, ī'' to ''zi, za''. Roster of CV syllabograms: Some signs are used as reading aid, marking the beginning of a word, the end of a word, or identifying a sign as a logogram. These are not mandatory and are used inconsistently.


Phonology

The script represents three vowels ''a, i, u'' and twelve consonants, ''h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, w, y, z''. Syllabograms have the structure V or CV, and more rarely CVCV. *383 ''ra/i'', *439 ''wa/i'' and *445 ''la/i/u'' show multiple vocalization. Some syllabograms are homophonic, disambiguated with numbers in transliteration (as in
cuneiform transliteration Cuneiform is a logo- syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge-s ...
), notably, there are many (more than six) syllabograms each for phonemic /''sa''/ and /''ta''/. There is a tendency of
rhotacism Rhotacism () or rhotacization is a sound change that converts one consonant (usually a voiced alveolar consonant: , , , or ) to a rhotic consonant in a certain environment. The most common may be of to . When a dialect or member of a language ...
, replacing intervocalic ''d'' with ''r''. Word-final stops and in some cases word-initial ''a-'' are elided. Suffixes ''-iya-'' and ''-uwa-'' may be syncopated to ''-i-'', ''-u-''.


Notes


Bibliography

;Corpus of inscriptions: * Cambel, Halet. ''Corpus of hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions''. Volume 2: Karatepe-Aslantas - The Inscriptions: Facsimile Edition. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2011 999 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110879759 * Hawkins, John David. ''Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions''. Volume 1: Inscriptions of the Iron Age - Part 1: Text, Introduction, Karatepe, Karkamis, Tell Ahmar, Maras, Malatya, Commagene. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2012 000 pp. 1-360. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110804201 * ______. ''Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions''. Volume 1: Inscriptions of the Iron Age - Part 2: Text, Amuq, Aleppo, Hama, Tabal, Assur Letters, Miscellaneous, Seals, Indices. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2012 000 pp. 361-641. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110804201 * ______. ''Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions''. Volume 1: Inscriptions of the Iron Age - Part 3: Plates. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2012 000 pp. 642-1007. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110804201 * Payne, Annick. ''Iron Age Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions''. Writings from the Ancient World 29. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012. * Peker, Hasan. ''Texts from Karkemish I: Luwian Hieroglyphic Inscriptions from the 2011–2015 Excavations''. OrientLab Series Maior, Vol. 1. Bologna: Ante Quem, 2016. . ;Studies: * *Laroche, Emil. 1960. ''Les hiéroglyphes hittites, Première partie, L'écriture''. Paris. *Marazzi, M. 1998. ''Il Geroglifico Anatolico, Sviluppi della ricerca a venti anni dalla "ridecifrazione"''. Naples. *Melchert, H. Craig. 1996. "Anatolian Hieroglyphs", in ''The World's Writing Systems'', ed. Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. . * . * Melchert, H. Craig. 2004. "Luvian". In: ''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages''. Ed.: Roger D. Woodard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. *Payne, A. 2004. ''Hieroglyphic Luwian'', Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. *Plöchl, R. 2003. ''Einführung ins Hieroglyphen-Luwische''. Dresden. * Woudhuizen, F. C. 2004. ''Luwian Hieroglyphic Monumental Rock and Stone Inscriptions from the Hittite Empire Period''. Innsbruck. . *Woudhuizen, F. C. 2004. ''Selected Hieroglyphic Texts''. Innsbruck. . *Yakubovich, Ilya. 2010. ''Sociolinguistics of the Luvian Language''. Leiden


Further reading

* . * . * .


External links

* {{cite web , title=Digital etymological-philological Dictionary of the Ancient Anatolian Corpus Languages (eDiAna) , url=http://www.ediana.gwi.uni-muenchen.de , publisher=
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; german: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It is Germany's sixth-oldest university in continuous operatio ...
, access-date=2017-03-14 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170225141334/https://www.ediana.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/ , archive-date=2017-02-25 , url-status=dead Luwian language Bronze Age writing systems Anatolian hieroglyphs