Anatolian hieroglyph
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"Hieroglyphic Luwian" is a variant of the Luwian language, recorded in a small number of monumental hieroglyphic inscriptions.
Indigenous western Anatolian hieroglyphs first appear on royal seals, from ca. 2000 BC. Some scholars believe that these are Luwian and further include the Phaistos Disc, but so far the corpus is not widely-attested enough for other scholars to agree with them.
The first monumental inscriptions confirmed as Luwian date to the Late Bronze Age, ca. 14th to 13th centuries BC. And after some two centuries of sparse material the hieroglyphs resume in the Early Iron Age, ca. 10th to 8th centuries. In the early 7th century, the Luwian hieroglyphic script, by then aged some 1,300 years, falls into oblivion.
Unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs, the lines of Luwian hieroglyphs are written alternately left-to-right and right-to-left. This practice was called by the Greeks boustrophedon, meaning "as the ox turns" (as when plowing a field).
The script was partially deciphered by Emmanuel Laroche in 1960, and its language was recognized as Luwian in 1973 by David Hawkins, Anna Morpurgo-Davies and Günther Neumann, correcting some previous errors about sign values, in particular emending the reading of symbols *376 and *377 from i, ī to zi, za.
According to the [Indo-European Database]: "At all there were about 500 symbols, each of them meaning not just sounds, but more often words, terms, even expressions. A great lot of hieroglyphs cannot yet be explained except as the determinatives, auxiliary symbols to show the meaning of the sentence. But still many signs denoted a sound or a combination of them.
"The system has a lot of homophonous signs, that is, different looking signs with the same phonetic value. The diacritical marks on the vowels, like in transcribing Sumerian, do not denote any phonetic value, but simply act as a tag saying that this is the n-th sign discovered to have a certain pronunciation (the acute accent being the second and the grave the third). Therefore, wa, wá, wà, wa4, wa5 and wa6 represent the same sound."
Literature
- J. D. Hawkins, Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian (2000)
- F. C. Woudhuizen, Luwian Hieroglyphic Monumental Rock and Stone Inscriptions from the Hittite Empire Period, Innsbruck (2004), ISBN 3-85124-209-2.
- F. C. Woudhuizen, Selected Hieroglyphic Texts, Innsbruck (2004), ISBN 3-85124-213-0.
External links
- http://www.ancientscripts.com/luwian.html
- [Luwian Hieroglyphics] from the Indo-European Database
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