Luwian language
Encyclopedia
Luwian is an extinct language
of the Anatolian branch
of the Indo-European
language family
. Luwian is closely related to Hittite
, and was among the languages spoken during the second and first millennia BC by population groups in central and western Anatolia and northern Syria
. In the Old Hittite version of the Hittite Code
, all or some Luwian-speaking areas were called Luwiya. One scholar has argued that the Mycenaean Greek term ru-wa-ni-jo, attested in Linear B
syllabic script refers to the same area. The general consensus amongst scholars is that Luwian was spoken—to a greater or lesser degree—across a large area of western Anatolia, including (possibly) Wilusa
(= Troy
), the Seha River Land (to be identified with the Hermos
and/or Kaikos valley), and the kingdom of Mira-Kuwaliya with its core territory of the Maeander valley. This is suggested by, among other things, an admittedly corrupt late copy of the Hittite laws
in which the geographical term Luwiya is replaced with Arzawa
, a western Anatolian kingdom corresponding roughly with Mira and the Seha River Land (although one scholar has argued that a chain of scribal error and revision led to this substitution, and that Luwiya was not coterminous with Arzawa but was further east in the area of the Konya plain). In the post-Hittite era, the region of Arzawa came to be known as Lydia
(Assyrian Luddu, Greek Λυδία), where the Lydian language
was in use. The name Lydia has been convincingly derived from the name Luwiya (Lydian *lūda- < *luw(i)da- < luwiya- with the regular Lydian sound change of y > d), which further argues in favour of the location of Luwiya in the west.
Luwian is closely related to, though not the direct ancestor of Lycian
. Luwian has also been adduced as one of the likely candidates for the language spoken by the Trojans
, alongside a possible Tyrrhenian language (related to Lemnian
), Thracian
, and Greek
.
Beginning in the fourteenth century BC, Luwian native speakers came to constitute the majority of the population of the Hittite capital Hattusa
. It appears that by the time of the collapse of the Hittite Empire ca. 1180 BC, the Hittite king and the members of the royal family were fully bilingual in Luwian. Long after the extinction of the Hittite language
, Luwian continued to be spoken in the Neo-Hittite
states of Syria
, such as Milid
and Carchemish
, as well as in the central Anatolian kingdom of Tabal
that flourished in the 8th century BC.
Luwian has been preserved in two writing systems, namely the Anatolian adaptation of Mesopotamia
n cuneiform and Anatolian hieroglyphs.
Luwian is a term that refers to the corpus of Luwian texts attested in the tablet archives of Hattusa
; it is essentially the same cuneiform writing system
used in Hittite
. In Laroche's Catalog of Hittite Texts, the corpus of Hittite cuneiform texts with Luwian insertions runs from CTH 757-773, mostly comprising rituals. Cuneiform Luwian texts are written in several dialects, of which the most easily identifiable are Kizzuwatna
Luwian, Istanuwa Luwian, and Empire Luwian. The last dialect represents the vernacular
of Hattusa
n scribes of the 14th-13th centuries BC and is mainly attested through Glossenkeil words in Hittite texts.
. Once thought to be a variety of the Hittite language
, "Hieroglyphic Hittite" was formerly used to refer to the language of the same inscriptions, but this term is now obsolete. The dialect of Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions appears to be either Empire Luwian or its descendant Iron Age Luwian. The first report of a monumental inscription dates to 1850, when an inhabitant of Nevşehir
reported the relief at Fraktin. In 1870, antiquarian travelers in Aleppo
found another inscription built into the south wall of the el-Qiqan mosque. In 1884 Polish scholar Maryan Sokolowski discovered an inscription near Köylütolu, in western Turkey
. The largest known inscription was excavated in 1970 in Yalburt, northwest of Konya
. Luwian hieroglyphic texts contain a limited number of lexical borrowings from Hittite
, Akkadian
, and Northwest Semitic; the lexical borrowings from Greek are limited to proper nouns, although common nouns borrowed in the opposite direction do exist.
linguists and to students of the Bronze Age Aegean.
Craig Melchert
used Luwian to support the controversial idea that the Proto-Indo-European language
had three distinct sets of velar consonant
s:
For Melchert, PIE > Luwian z (probably [ts]); > k; and > ku (probably [kʷ]).
Luwian has also been enlisted for its verb kalut(t)i(ya)-, which means "make the rounds of" and is probably derived from *kalutta/i- "circle". It has been argued that this derives from a proto-Anatolian word for "wheel
", which in turn would have derived from the common word for "wheel" found in all other Indo-European families. The wheel was invented in the 5th millennium BCE and, if kaluti does derive from it, then the Anatolian branch left PIE after its invention (so validating the Kurgan hypothesis
as applicable to Anatolian). However kaluti need not imply a concrete wheel, and so need not have derived from a PIE word with that meaning. The IE words for a wheel may well have arisen in those other IE languages after the Anatolian split.
Given the prevalence of -assa place-names and words scattered around all sides of the Aegean Sea
, this possessive suffix was sometimes considered evidence of a shared non-Indo-European language or an Aegean Sprachbund
preceding the arrivals of Luwians and Greeks
. It is, however, possible to account for the Luwian possessive construction as a result of case attraction in the Indo-European noun phrase. The possessive adjectives are pervasive in Kizzuwatna Luwian cuneiform texts, but in Iron Age texts in hieroglyphic transmission they compete with the inherited genitives. The special form of possessive adjectives with plural possessor is restricted to Kizzuwatna Luwian and probably represents a result of its structural interference with Hurrian
.
Extinct language
An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers., or that is no longer in current use. Extinct languages are sometimes contrasted with dead languages, which are still known and used in special contexts in written form, but not as ordinary spoken languages for everyday communication...
of the Anatolian branch
Anatolian languages
The Anatolian languages comprise a group of extinct Indo-European languages that were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language.-Origins:...
of the Indo-European
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
language family
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...
. Luwian is closely related to Hittite
Hittite language
Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
, and was among the languages spoken during the second and first millennia BC by population groups in central and western Anatolia and northern Syria
Syro-Hittite states
The states that are called Neo-Hittite, or more recently Syro-Hittite, were Luwian, Aramaic and Phoenician-speaking political entities of the Iron Age northern Syria and southern Anatolia that arose following the collapse of the Hittite Empire around 1180 BC and lasted until roughly 700 BC...
. In the Old Hittite version of the Hittite Code
Hittite laws
The Hittite laws have been preserved on a number of Hittite cuneiform tablets found at Hattusa . Copies have been found written in Old Hittite as well as in Middle and Late Hittite, indicating that they had validity throughout the duration of the Hittite Empire The Hittite laws have been preserved...
, all or some Luwian-speaking areas were called Luwiya. One scholar has argued that the Mycenaean Greek term ru-wa-ni-jo, attested in Linear B
Linear B
Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Greek. It pre-dated the Greek alphabet by several centuries and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean civilization...
syllabic script refers to the same area. The general consensus amongst scholars is that Luwian was spoken—to a greater or lesser degree—across a large area of western Anatolia, including (possibly) Wilusa
Wilusa
Wilusa was a city of the late Bronze Age Assuwa confederation of western Anatolia.It is known from six references in 13th century BC Hittite sources, including...
(= Troy
Troy
Troy was a city, both factual and legendary, located in northwest Anatolia in what is now Turkey, southeast of the Dardanelles and beside Mount Ida...
), the Seha River Land (to be identified with the Hermos
Gediz River
-Name:The ancient name of the river was Hermos or Hermus.The name of the river Gediz may be related to the Lydian proper name Cadys; Gediz is also the name of a town near the river's sources. The name "Gediz" may also be encountered as a male name in Turkey.-Ancient geography:The Hermos separated...
and/or Kaikos valley), and the kingdom of Mira-Kuwaliya with its core territory of the Maeander valley. This is suggested by, among other things, an admittedly corrupt late copy of the Hittite laws
Hittite laws
The Hittite laws have been preserved on a number of Hittite cuneiform tablets found at Hattusa . Copies have been found written in Old Hittite as well as in Middle and Late Hittite, indicating that they had validity throughout the duration of the Hittite Empire The Hittite laws have been preserved...
in which the geographical term Luwiya is replaced with Arzawa
Arzawa
Arzawa in the second half of the second millennium BC was the name of a region and a political entity in Western Anatolia, the core area of which was centered on the Hermos and Maeander river valleys, corresponding with the Late Bronze Age kingdoms of the...
, a western Anatolian kingdom corresponding roughly with Mira and the Seha River Land (although one scholar has argued that a chain of scribal error and revision led to this substitution, and that Luwiya was not coterminous with Arzawa but was further east in the area of the Konya plain). In the post-Hittite era, the region of Arzawa came to be known as Lydia
Lydia
Lydia was an Iron Age kingdom of western Asia Minor located generally east of ancient Ionia in the modern Turkish provinces of Manisa and inland İzmir. Its population spoke an Anatolian language known as Lydian....
(Assyrian Luddu, Greek Λυδία), where the Lydian language
Lydian language
Lydian was an Indo-European language spoken in the region of Lydia in western Anatolia . It belongs to the Anatolian group of the Indo-European language family....
was in use. The name Lydia has been convincingly derived from the name Luwiya (Lydian *lūda- < *luw(i)da- < luwiya- with the regular Lydian sound change of y > d), which further argues in favour of the location of Luwiya in the west.
Luwian is closely related to, though not the direct ancestor of Lycian
Lycian language
Lycian language refers to the inscriptional language of ancient Lycia, populated by Lycians, as well as its presumed spoken counterpart.-The speakers:...
. Luwian has also been adduced as one of the likely candidates for the language spoken by the Trojans
Troy
Troy was a city, both factual and legendary, located in northwest Anatolia in what is now Turkey, southeast of the Dardanelles and beside Mount Ida...
, alongside a possible Tyrrhenian language (related to Lemnian
Lemnian language
The Lemnian language is a language of the 6th century BC spoken on the island of Lemnos. It is mainly attested by an inscription found on a funerary stele, termed the Lemnos stele, discovered in 1885 near Kaminia. However, fragments of inscriptions on local pottery show that it was spoken there by...
), Thracian
Thracian language
The Thracian language was the Indo-European language spoken in ancient times in Southeastern Europe by the Thracians, the northern neighbors of the Ancient Greeks. The Thracian language exhibits satemization: it either belonged to the Satem group of Indo-European languages or it was strongly...
, and Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
.
Beginning in the fourteenth century BC, Luwian native speakers came to constitute the majority of the population of the Hittite capital Hattusa
Hattusa
Hattusa was the capital of the Hittite Empire in the late Bronze Age. It was located near modern Boğazkale, Turkey, within the great loop of the Kızıl River ....
. It appears that by the time of the collapse of the Hittite Empire ca. 1180 BC, the Hittite king and the members of the royal family were fully bilingual in Luwian. Long after the extinction of the Hittite language
Hittite language
Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
, Luwian continued to be spoken in the Neo-Hittite
Neo-Hittite
The states that are called Neo-Hittite, or more recently Syro-Hittite, were Luwian, Aramaic and Phoenician-speaking political entities of the Iron Age northern Syria and southern Anatolia that arose following the collapse of the Hittite Empire around 1180 BC and lasted until roughly 700 BC...
states of Syria
Syria
Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....
, such as Milid
Milid
Melid was an ancient city on the Tohma River, a tributary of the upper Euphrates rising in the Taurus Mountains...
and Carchemish
Carchemish
Carchemish or Kargamış was an important ancient city of the Mitanni, Hittite and Neo Assyrian Empires, now on the frontier between Turkey and Syria. It was the location of an important battle between the Babylonians and Egyptians, mentioned in the Bible...
, as well as in the central Anatolian kingdom of Tabal
Tabal
Tabal was a Luwian speaking Neo-Hittite kingdom of South Central Anatolia. According to archaeologist Kurt Bittel, the kingdom of Tabal first appeared after the collapse of the Hittite Empire....
that flourished in the 8th century BC.
Luwian has been preserved in two writing systems, namely the Anatolian adaptation of Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the...
n cuneiform and Anatolian hieroglyphs.
Cuneiform Luwian
CuneiformCuneiform
Cuneiform can refer to:*Cuneiform script, an ancient writing system originating in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC*Cuneiform , three bones in the human foot*Cuneiform Records, a music record label...
Luwian is a term that refers to the corpus of Luwian texts attested in the tablet archives of Hattusa
Hattusa
Hattusa was the capital of the Hittite Empire in the late Bronze Age. It was located near modern Boğazkale, Turkey, within the great loop of the Kızıl River ....
; it is essentially the same cuneiform writing system
Cuneiform script
Cuneiform script )) is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium , cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs...
used in Hittite
Hittite language
Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
. In Laroche's Catalog of Hittite Texts, the corpus of Hittite cuneiform texts with Luwian insertions runs from CTH 757-773, mostly comprising rituals. Cuneiform Luwian texts are written in several dialects, of which the most easily identifiable are Kizzuwatna
Kizzuwatna
Kizzuwatna , is the name of an ancient Anatolian kingdom in the second millennium BC. It was situated in the highlands of southeastern Anatolia, near the Gulf of İskenderun in modern-day Turkey. It encircled the Taurus Mountains and the Ceyhan river. The center of the kingdom was the city of...
Luwian, Istanuwa Luwian, and Empire Luwian. The last dialect represents the vernacular
Vernacular
A vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca.- Etymology :The term is not a recent one...
of Hattusa
Hattusa
Hattusa was the capital of the Hittite Empire in the late Bronze Age. It was located near modern Boğazkale, Turkey, within the great loop of the Kızıl River ....
n scribes of the 14th-13th centuries BC and is mainly attested through Glossenkeil words in Hittite texts.
Hieroglyphic Luwian
Hieroglyphic Luwian is a term that refers to the corpus of Luwian texts written in a native script, known as Anatolian hieroglyphsAnatolian 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 term Luwian hieroglyphs is used in English publications...
. Once thought to be a variety of the Hittite language
Hittite language
Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
, "Hieroglyphic Hittite" was formerly used to refer to the language of the same inscriptions, but this term is now obsolete. The dialect of Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions appears to be either Empire Luwian or its descendant Iron Age Luwian. The first report of a monumental inscription dates to 1850, when an inhabitant of Nevşehir
Nevsehir
Nevşehir, formerly Muşkara, , is a city and the capital district of Nevşehir Province in the Central Anatolia Region of Turkey. According to the 2010 census, population of the district is 117,890 of which 85,634 631 live in the city of Nevşehir...
reported the relief at Fraktin. In 1870, antiquarian travelers in Aleppo
Aleppo
Aleppo is the largest city in Syria and the capital of Aleppo Governorate, the most populous Syrian governorate. With an official population of 2,301,570 , expanding to over 2.5 million in the metropolitan area, it is also one of the largest cities in the Levant...
found another inscription built into the south wall of the el-Qiqan mosque. In 1884 Polish scholar Maryan Sokolowski discovered an inscription near Köylütolu, in western Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
. The largest known inscription was excavated in 1970 in Yalburt, northwest of Konya
Konya
Konya is a city in the Central Anatolia Region of Turkey. The metropolitan area in the entire Konya Province had a population of 1,036,027 as of 2010, making the city seventh most populous in Turkey.-Etymology:...
. Luwian hieroglyphic texts contain a limited number of lexical borrowings from Hittite
Hittite language
Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
, Akkadian
Akkadian language
Akkadian is an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate...
, and Northwest Semitic; the lexical borrowings from Greek are limited to proper nouns, although common nouns borrowed in the opposite direction do exist.
Relationship to preceding languages
Luwian has numerous archaisms, and so is important both to Indo-EuropeanProto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
linguists and to students of the Bronze Age Aegean.
Craig Melchert
Craig Melchert
H. Craig Melchert is a linguist known particularly for his work on the Anatolian branch of Indo-European. He received his B.A. in German from Michigan State University in 1967 and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard University in 1977. From 1968 to 1972 he served in the United States Air Force,...
used Luwian to support the controversial idea that the Proto-Indo-European language
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
had three distinct sets of velar consonant
Velar consonant
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....
s:
- Plain velars
- Palatovelars
- Labiovelars
For Melchert, PIE > Luwian z (probably [ts]); > k; and > ku (probably [kʷ]).
Luwian has also been enlisted for its verb kalut(t)i(ya)-, which means "make the rounds of" and is probably derived from *kalutta/i- "circle". It has been argued that this derives from a proto-Anatolian word for "wheel
Wheel
A wheel is a device that allows heavy objects to be moved easily through rotating on an axle through its center, facilitating movement or transportation while supporting a load, or performing labor in machines. Common examples found in transport applications. A wheel, together with an axle,...
", which in turn would have derived from the common word for "wheel" found in all other Indo-European families. The wheel was invented in the 5th millennium BCE and, if kaluti does derive from it, then the Anatolian branch left PIE after its invention (so validating the Kurgan hypothesis
Kurgan hypothesis
The Kurgan hypothesis is one of the proposals about early Indo-European origins, which postulates that the people of an archaeological "Kurgan culture" in the Pontic steppe were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language...
as applicable to Anatolian). However kaluti need not imply a concrete wheel, and so need not have derived from a PIE word with that meaning. The IE words for a wheel may well have arisen in those other IE languages after the Anatolian split.
Luwian possessive adjectives
Where Hittite allows the classically Indo-European suffix -as for the singular genitive and -an for the plural genitive, the "canonical" Luwian as used in cuneiform employed instead a possessive suffix -assa for the singular genitive and -assanz- for the plural genitive.Given the prevalence of -assa place-names and words scattered around all sides of the Aegean Sea
Aegean Sea
The Aegean Sea[p] is an elongated embayment of the Mediterranean Sea located between the southern Balkan and Anatolian peninsulas, i.e., between the mainlands of Greece and Turkey. In the north, it is connected to the Marmara Sea and Black Sea by the Dardanelles and Bosporus...
, this possessive suffix was sometimes considered evidence of a shared non-Indo-European language or an Aegean Sprachbund
Sprachbund
A Sprachbund – also known as a linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area or language crossroads – is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity and language contact. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related...
preceding the arrivals of Luwians and Greeks
Greeks
The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world....
. It is, however, possible to account for the Luwian possessive construction as a result of case attraction in the Indo-European noun phrase. The possessive adjectives are pervasive in Kizzuwatna Luwian cuneiform texts, but in Iron Age texts in hieroglyphic transmission they compete with the inherited genitives. The special form of possessive adjectives with plural possessor is restricted to Kizzuwatna Luwian and probably represents a result of its structural interference with Hurrian
Hurrian language
Hurrian is a conventional name for the language of the Hurrians , a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly vanished by 1000 BC. Hurrian was the language of the Mitanni kingdom in northern Mesopotamia, and was likely spoken at least initially in Hurrian settlements in...
.
External links
- Luwian Swadesh list of basic vocabulary words (from Wiktionary's Swadesh list appendix)
- Arzawa, to the west, throws light on Hittites
- Alekseev Manuscript
- Hieroglyphic Luwian Phonetic Signs
- Catalog of Hittite Texts: texts in other languages
- Genitive Case and Possessive Adjective in Anatolian
- Melchert homepage on Anatolian tongs