durnford peoples and maps - full

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Illustrative draft

Luwian Identities: Culture, Language and Religion Between Anatolia and the Aegean University of Reading, 10-11 June 2011 page 1 of 23

Peoples and maps – nomenclature and definitionsStephen Durnford

Abstract

Southern and western Anatolia attest some ten Bronze and Iron Age scripts, of which twowere used for what we have chosen to label “Luwian” and one for the two Lycianlanguages. At least three poorly understood scripts are suspected as having been used forother members of the Luwic family. The languages of a further couple of isolated texts,though readable, remain a mystery. Such diversity poses a great challenge when we seekto delineate Luwian identity across time and space. Language is one primary indicator ofcultural identity and continuity, and I use modern linguistic parallels to explore the nature ofthe challenge, ending with a quick dip into the so-called Luwian hypothesis.

Introduction

Having a common language is one of the ways that groups proclaim a shared cultural bond.I am looking at the challenge of language and the concept of identity in relation to thepeople whom we have chosen to call Luwian. Given the sparsity of evidence, I use modernparallels to illustrate precepts that are equally applicable in the ancient context. I findmyself asking more questions than I can answer.

The designations conferred on a people by other peoples rarely coincide exactly with thelabels applied by that people to themselves. By “other peoples” I mean not only ancientcontemporaries, but also later cultures, perhaps centuries later, culminating in thepronouncements of present-day academics, amongst whom we count ourselves. We do

not stand outside this topic. We are part of it.

This paper is not burdened with citations, nor does it set one school of opinion againstanother. For a recent summary of details relevant to Luwian people and language I referthe reader to Ilya Yakubovich’s “Sociolinguistics of the Luvian Language”, where thesources of many unattributed assertions made in this paper may be traced.

Setting the scene

We do not know what names were used for themselves by those people whom we callLuwians, nor whether they acknowledged a shared semi-mystical cultural identity in the way

that Hellenes did. We might decide to label both group A and group B as Luwian, but wouldeither group have recognised a kinship with the other? Surmise is unavoidable.

The curtain lifts in the 20th. century BC at Kültepe, ancient Kaneš, about 20 kilometresnorthwest of Kayseri. Shorn of their Old Assyrian trappings, the majority of the Anatoliannames there belong linguistically to what would become Hittite a few centuries later, while aminority of the names are instead closely related to the Luwian of later centuries.

These two speech communities appear already to have been interlinked economically andsocially and at a date when the precursors of the Hittites were merely a local ethnic group.This was several generations before the move to Hattusa and the founding of the Hittite Old

Kingdom, much earlier than references to Luwians in the laws.



Peoples and maps - nomenclature and definitions Stephen Durnford


Linguistically speaking, the curtain falls in late Roman times, as far as we may judge.Unrecorded pockets of speech belonging to the branch of Anatolian Indo-European thatincludes Luwian probably faded away around that era. Bronze and Iron Age evidenceshows communities using languages of that branch as having once been spread widelyacross southern and western Anatolia, from Syria, through Cilicia, Lycia and Caria and

round up to the Troad.

Luwian is a specific Bronze Age language written in cuneiform, whose name has beenextended by modern scholarship to cover the nearly identical Hieroglyphic language aswell. There is nowadays in academia a move away from extending the designation furtherto include close relatives of Luwian, such as Lycian.

The preferred term for the whole branch is “Luwic”, while a language of uncertain parentagewith Luwic-like attributes is “Luwoid”. As outlined above, this wider group stretched acrossa larger area than the Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic attestations and existed from centuriesearlier to centuries later. This paper explores some of the risks and cautions attached to

tracing Luwian threads through this Luwic tapestry.

A modern parallel

Faced with tracking a notional Luwian linguistic identity through some two and a quartermillennia, let us begin by asking what insights may be gained from a roughly parallel casewith a comparable timespan down to the present day. Instead of asking who the Luwianswere, let is now ask who the British are and what language they speak. The reply variesaccording to who you ask and when you ask it. If you were to visit the white cliffs ofsouthern Britain every five hundred years and put those questions, the answer would differeach time.

The British enter history in Greek sources of the fourth century BC as the Celtic peoples ofsouthern Britain, to be conquered half a millennium later by the Romans. Would a Romanborn in Britain, even after several generations of occupation, declare himself a Briton? Itseems hardly likely. The Britons are to him the natives, the others, the aboriginals who donot speak Latin.

Yet, when the Saxons, Angles and Jutes invade and conquer after a further half millennium,all the previous inhabitants, Roman or Celt, are classed as Britons. Would a Saxon born inBritain, even after several generations of occupation, declare himself a Briton? It seems

hardly likely. The Britons are to him the natives, the others, who have a different statusunder the law and do not speak Anglo-Saxon.

After a further five hundred years the Normans take over in 1066 AD, and a similar cycleoccurs again. This time, however, the term “Briton” is largely absent and not applied to theconquered Saxon population. There are no further invasions, so we jump forward yetanother five hundred years to the 16th. century AD, and a unified sense of anglophoneBritishness is evident, at least in England.

A further and final half millennium brings us up to the present. These days I am a Briton, anendonym that predates all three conquests, but speaking a language whose name predates

only the most recent conquest and is derived from only one of the conquerors, the Angles.Yet it is a language shot through with the French vocabulary of the latest conquerors.





The language of Hatti changed in a manner roughly equivalent to that of Britain. If onewere to ask the neighbours of Hatti at the start of the Kaneš era what the language of Hattiwas, the reply would point to what we call Hattic. The same question asked in the sameplace half a millennium later would probably point instead to what we call Hittite, though the

Hittites themselves called it “the language of Nesa”, the place where they had migratedfrom. Moving on again to the fall of Hattusa, the official answer might still be Nesite, but aNesite heavily shot through with the Luwian already long used for monumental inscriptions.

Britons are first recorded almost twenty four centuries ago. Elements of the close-knitlanguage group that includes Luwian are recognisable first in the Kültepe tablets and mostrecently in the onomastics of late Roman Asia Minor. That too is a time-span of close totwenty four centuries. British history has its gaps, its “dark age” and its question marks,though many fewer than Anatolia has during those centuries.

A theoretical kinship exists amongst the peoples of the world for whom English is a mother

tongue, despite their diversity. Alongside this mutual sympathy runs a sense of continuitywith the Anglo-Saxon spoken a thousand years ago, although that language isincomprehensible today without special study. The cousinship of other Germaniclanguages, however, remains literally academic to the ordinary mortal. Even the existenceof a place called Saxony fails to touch most anglophone hearts.

Yet some people, paradoxically, view the even more ancient King Arthur as the archetypalEnglish gentleman, a legendary Romano-Celtic war leader who opposed the very Saxonswhose speech underlies what we still use. How much of this supposed English collectiveidentity will show up in the archaeological record in the distant future? Yet we, fourthousand years after the earliest Kültepe evidence, are now seeking to lay bare the markersof a shadowy and unproven Luwian identity.

Some convenient terms

The sparser the evidence, the greater the scope for widely differing hypotheses. I aim todefine some terminology suitable for summarising the evidence. Definitions and criteria areof course perpetually provisional and always under review. I make frequent reference inparticular to “periaegean”, “ethnonymy” and “apophenia”.

Firstly, the term “periaegean” is familiar to botanists and geologists, but I have not come

across it in relation to human culture. The term is well suited to the study of language,religion and archaeology. I see the periaegean region as including not only Crete andeastern Greece but Thrace too, which is literally marginal on our usual maps.

Secondly, ethnonymy is about what peoples call themselves and each other. However,before looking at that topic, we take a look at the third of those terms, apophenia, which is atendency to see a pattern where none in fact exists. Adventurous hypotheses often sufferfrom apophenia. Nevertheless, progress depends a lot on bold proposals boldly offeredand prepared to accept rigorous criticism and a high rejection rate.

Living with apophenia

Apophenia is a universal risk for researchers in all disciplines. A century ago astronomers





were convinced that the planet Mars had artificial canals all over it. Who can tell which oftoday’s treasured beliefs about ancient Anatolia will someday turn out to be mere illusion?

It is useful to imagine our current efforts played out in the distant future, when only sparsefragments of today’s culture might remain. It is both fun and educational to take some

snippet of today’s actuality and compare it with how the same evidence could be interpreteddifferently in such a future scenario. Let us now indulge in a little constructive satire.

Figure 1: A fictitious illustration of scholastic apophenia

The coincidental similarity in name between Arsène and Arsenal is the seed that stimulatedthe nonsense in fig. 1. I confess to not having seen the footballing video myself, so theassessment reported is complete fiction. The small codicil on male institutions also hingesupon lexical misanalysis, as the names of both islands mentioned are Celtic (Vectis andMona, respectively). They have no connection with the English words wight and man.

Does the foregoing researchers’ report from the future remind you of anything that you have

read about ancient Anatolia? Perhaps, even, of something you may have written yourself,though written a very long time ago, of course? In my own case I must answer ‘yes’ onboth counts.

One may fear apophenia as an ever-present demon on the researcher’s shoulder, butGreek demons were the messengers of the gods and not inherently malevolent. Granted,apophenia is able to destroy reputations, but it can also stimulate constructive debate andlead to real progress. While remaining alert to its possible presence, we should not treat itas wholly negative. We shall see more of it soon.

The elusive land of Luwia

Among the oldest references to an inhabitant of Luwia is the accusative LÚ URULu-i-in in





KBo 6.2 i 39 and the restored nominative LÚ URULu-i-iš in KBo 6.2 i 36. These are in theOld Script and show that the inhabitant is simply a Luwi , from which the country and thelanguage are separately named, using the standard Luwian adjectival derivation suffixes-iya and -(i)li , respectively.

On the second of these suffixes, incidentally, I would maintain that the existence of agenitival suffix -l in Hattic is coincidental and has no bearing on the widespread use of -(i)li in Anatolian IE. This adjectival formation was inherited from IE and is particularlyproductive in Latin (qualis, humilis, etc.). The Hittite terms in -ili that refer to utterances inone or other language show the regular use of the nominative/accusative singular neuter ofthe adjective as an adverb.

It may be significant that Luwi is given the determinative URU, which does not have to referto a city as such, but at the least to a settled community. In the laws the Luwi are distinctfrom the Hittites but in frequent interaction with them. The bearers of the Luwian-likenames from Kültepe a couple of centuries previously seem to relate to their Nesite

neighbours in a comparable way.

Some of the Kaska toponyms to the north of the Hittites are similarly given URU, though theKaska appear to have had no towns as such and could quickly resettle a place after theHittites had burnt it (Glatz and Matthews 2005:56). This use of URU again suggests that itcan refer to a significant settlement, rather than only to a more substantial township.

In contrast to the Kaska, the many references to the Lūlaḫi people in both Hittite andLuwian never have URU, thereby conveying the undesirable nature of the Lūlaḫi in a similarsemantic manner to that performed etymologically by our use of “uncivilised”. The Lūlaḫi are commonly paired with the H ābiri people in Luwian, but in Hittite with the SA.GAZ,“desert dwellers”, instead, again all without URU. The H ābiri are familiar as wanderers overa wide area, and so it would be a surprise to find their name preceded by URU.

The Old Kingdom Hittites thus appear to have viewed the Luwi as a settled people, but,when luwili speech is prescribed, this word is never preceded by URU, perhaps indicatingthat the Luwi had no urban centre. In contrast, whenever speaking in Akkadian isrequested, it is always URU pabili , perhaps indicating knowledge that Babylon was a physicalcity.

The clauses in which LÚ URULuwi- appears also contain KUR Luwiya- without URU.

Consequently I prefer to translate LÚ

URU

Luwi- as “a man from the Luwi community” andKUR Luwiya- as “the territory of the Luwi ”. Luwili , also lacking URU, thus means simply “inthe language of the Luwi ”.

In other parts of the laws LÚ URULuwi- is replaced by LÚ URULuwiya-. This is presumably theresult of editorial activity in an era when an ethnicity-based tribal identity had largely beenreplaced by the sensibilities of a nation state, now enlarged and with a central chancery andwith borders to be fixed and maintained. Modern editors have also preferred to restore LÚURULuwiya- in damaged contexts, and Luwi- seems in consequence to have dropped fromview in much modern discussion.

One implication of the foregoing observations is that the laws were canonised from aninherited oral system, such as a tribal society might have had and which perhaps already





existed in similar form in the Kaneš era. Another implication is that the pre-Hittites of Kanešcould already have been using Luwi- to designate that minority in the Kültepe texts whosenames seem to anticipate the Luwian of later centuries. Both these implications remainentirely unproven and could indeed be criticised as apophenic.

Much has been made of the replacement of Luwiya by Arzawa in §19 in the late copy of thelaws. This change has been taken as evidence that the land of Luwia, which is notmentioned outside the earlier version of the laws, is to be roughly equated geographicallywith the land of Arzawa, which was a well-documented rival to later Hittite power. I think itmore likely that the change of name between the older and newer copies of the laws wasstimulated by significant social and political developments during the intervening centuries.

The evaporation of Luwia

My interpretation of the Luwiya to Arzawa change is that the original tribal territory of theLuwi had by then been long incorporated into the Hittite kingdom. The Luwi people there

had all become subjects on a par with ethnic Hittites (and Hattians) in an integratedpopulation, much as we no longer categorise people as Saxon or Norman in Britain today.The Luwian language, being widespread beyond the Hittites’ borders, happened also at thattime to be characteristic of Arzawa, or at least of those elements in Arzawa with whom theHittites had dealings.

The laws, having being brought forward from an earlier inter-ethnic situation, needed toname an up-to-date political entity in place of the outmoded territory of the Luwi . We cannottell how the clauses relating to Luwians were actually viewed and acted on by the laterHittites, but the entity chosen to replace Luwia had to be one that contrasted with Hatti, and Arzawa, the Luwian-speaking rival to the west, presented itself effortlessly for the role.

There is also some tenuous evidence from the Egypt of around 1350 BC that Luwiya and Arzawa were not equivalent. Among the wives of Amenhotep III was a daughter ofTarhundaradu of Arzawa. Arzawa is one of a set of toponyms listed by Amenhotep asremote foreign places with which Egypt had dealings (Cline and Stannish 2011:11).

Among the other places listed by Amenhotep is r-ỉ -w ȝ -n ȝ (Cline and Stannish 2011:13),which, it has been suggested, could be Luwia (Sourouzian et al. 2006:413 and plate VIII b-c), though the shape of the Egyptian form seems an ill fit to me. If this suggestion is indeedcorrect, however, then Luwia is distinctly separate from Arzawa. If incorrect, on the other

hand, then the situation remains unresolved. However, the Egyptian finds are fragmentary,and excavation continues. One may hope that further evidence relating to the periaegeanzone will emerge.

Although all known Cuneiform Luwian texts come only from the Hittite capital, theindependent Arzawans of the 14th. century BC wanted to correspond with the pharaoh inthe language of their Hittite enemies. This appears to indicate both that Arzawa had nointernationally usable language of its own and also that the Arzawans felt unable tocorrespond in Akkadian. Further, this accords with the idea that the Anatolian Hieroglyphicscript was devised by Luwian speakers for their own use, perhaps deliberately facing awayfrom Mesopotamia and possibly inspired by Cretan and Egyptian models.

Opinions vary about where in the Luwian-speaking world the script was born and





developed, but its standing in Arzawa is indicated by its use for 13th. century BC royalmonuments. Suratkaya, Akpinar and Karabel are known so far. Disproving the equation of Arzawa with Luwia does not remove the certainty that Luwian was written, and presumablyalso spoken, in Arzawa. Opinions again vary over the extent of Luwian speech in Arzawaduring the various phases of the Bronze Age.

How linguistically diverse might Arzawa have been? Could it, for instance, have includedthe precursor to the non-Luwic Lydian language? Given the number of separate kingdomsin the Assuwan confederation, linguistic diversity is the default assumption that we mustmake.

Setting aside the non-Luwic Hittite and Palaic, it is also reasonable to suppose that Arzawasat at or near one end of a swathe of IE Anatolian languages running from the Troadsouthward and then east and into Syria. We know that Luwian is in there, as well as itscousins, the two languages of Lycia. Other Luwic or Luwoid languages are scatteredthrough there too, in a variety of scripts and all poorly understood.

Further, we cannot rule out pockets of language from other families entirely. How thenmight we go about making greater sense of this patchwork? Once again, patterns from thepresent day show what we might expect to find.

Finding the right names

Starting with a virtually blank sheet, scholars have been steadily resurrecting the languagesand history of pre-Classical Anatolia for almost two hundred years now. This leads topeoples and places emerging from the darkness, each requiring a distinctive new name.

Names get assigned for a variety of reasons and ultimately as the personal choice of anindividual scholar. Some are extracted from ancient texts, while others are created from asupposition of identity or from the place of discovery or some other circumstance.

The pace of discovery and interpretation is relentless, and opinions have to be revisedperiodically, and the definitions of names reviewed. Thus the hieroglyphic script is nolonger “Hittite”, but “Luwian” or simply “Anatolian”, and the discovery of Hattic (or Hattian)as the original language of Hatti necessitated the invention of a new name alongside thelong established “Hittite”.

A library user today seeking to learn about the language and writing of Hatti-land may thusfind confusing and contradictory information, depending on the publication date of eachsource consulted. It is helpful to have succinct and consistent terminology to describe notonly each ancient situation, but also the way such descriptions vary in modern treatments.The language of ethnonymy is one relevant area where some further terms may usefully bedefined.

An ethnonym is one of two main types. If it is a name by which a people knows itself, it isan endonym (or autonym). Otherwise it is an exonym, i.e., a name applied by one people,which I call the host, to another, the target. Exonyms occur only in the host language andfall into four significant sub-types. Thus there are in total five types of ethnonym, best

defined by illustration using modern languages, as in fig. 2.





Figure 2: The names used by six modern languages for each other

Let us consider the English, German, Dutch, French, Italian and Russian languages. Theirrespective endonyms are English, Deutsch, nederlands or hollands, français, italiano andruskij , while German, Dutch, French, Italian and Russian are exonyms in the lexicon ofEnglish.

I class French, Italian and Russian as weak exonyms, because the English form is

etymologically equivalent to the respective endonym. The remainder, German and Dutch,are strong exonyms, because the English words are quite different from the respectiveendonyms, Deutsch and nederlands (or, less often, hollands).

There are three categories of strong exonym. I class German and Dutch as plain strongexonyms, because they have no meaning or etymological implication in English. The othertwo categories of strong exonym I call locational and lexical.

A locational strong exonym is derived from a place name that is not used by the targetlanguage for naming itself. An example in English is Japanese from Japan, whereas theJapanese for Japanese is Nihongo and the country Nihon (or, more formally, Nippon). Fig.2 has no examples, but we shall meet some from Anatolia in fig. 3.

A lexical strong exonym is one with an etymology in the host language. These tend to bedisparaging. Thus the Russian for German is nemjetskij , which is derived from theadjective nemoj , “mute”, referring, like Greek barbaros, to incomprehensibility of speech.

In “Cautionary thoughts” I have quoted a few instances of seemingly mismatched exonyms,some of which could mislead a researcher in the distant future. They arise when anethnonym gets left behind like a stranded fossil after the politics and the peoples havemoved on. An ethnonym’s status can also mutate over time.

For instance, the Alemanni, “the all men”, and their neighbours the Franci, “the free people”,





were Germanic tribes who regrouped to fight the walh, “the foreigner”, meaning the Romansand their allies. Instead of Old High German endonyms for those pre-literate tribes Englishuses the weak exonyms recorded in Latin by their foes.

The French still call German Allemand , which has lost its meaningful etymology and so is

now a plain strong exonym. Using the descendant of walh, some Germanic languages stillcall some of their now long Romanised neighbours Wels(c)h, which too is no longeretymologically transparent and, like Allemand , has moved from lexical status to plain.

Apophenia lurks just below the surface

Samoyed , a plain strong exonym in English for that Uralic language, appears to be aRussian lexical strong exonym meaning “cannibal”, literally “self -eater”, but its origin isdisputed. It could instead be a folk-etymologised version of Saamid , an endonym more athome in Lappish, Samoyed’s cousin. Other origins have also been proposed. Whenetymologies compete, a scholar who espouses one of them too vigorously may risk an

accusation of apophenia.

Like any cultural borrowing, an ethnonym from another language is always prone totransformation due to folk-etymology, a phenomenon for which a less colloquial synonymmight be ‘lexical assimilation’. Such assimilation is normally twinned with some sort ofrationale, a story which justifies the transformed name by explaining its supposedetymology and which may, in some cases, indeed become ‘officially’ accepted as true.

If one is drawn to the explanation of Samoyed as altered from Saamid , what does one thenmake of Mordvin, another member of the Uralic family? Mordvin has an Iranian etymology,also as “man-eater”, and refers to a people often equated for that reason with Herodotus’s Anthropophagi, “cannibals” (Histories, Book 4.18).

There are instances the world over of one people designating another as incomprehensiblebabblers or cannibals. Should an anthropologist, considering the three foregoingindependently coined terms applied to Uralic target languages, discern triangulatedevidence of anything more significant than ignorance and malice on the part of the hostlanguages?

Ethnonyms from ancient Anatolia

Thus armed with some terminology and definitions, let us turn back to the arena in whichLuwians make their appearance. The ethnonyms in fig. 3 must be regarded as provisional,as I have had to adopt a particular interpretation of the syllabic forms.

In fig. 3 we find a full set in Hittite and a couple in Akkadian, one of which is a weak exonymthat echoes the older form of the Hittite term. We also have some in Hurrian. We do notreally expect to finds names to replace many of the question marks, given the smallness ofthe corpora, although there could perhaps have been a time during the Old Kingdom whenall six might have known of each other.

We can see three strong exonyms, or four, if we include the English word Hittite. Inspired

by Yariri of Carchemish, I have cited the language of Assyria as the Luwian word for Akkadian. My excuse is that it is perhaps in the Old Assyrian of Kaneš that the earliest





Luwian words are found. I have also cheated a little in that Yariri wrote this in Hieroglyphic,not Cuneiform.

Figure 3: Some Anatolian ethnonyms

The Hittites’ language words are generally derived from a place-name, using the sameadjectival derivative as we find nominalised in the name Ḫatt usilis from Ḫatt usas. Itscognate in Lydian supplies the regular patronymic and possessive adjective. The Hittiteforms -umnili are built from the ethnicon and refer not to the language of the place directly,but to the language of its inhabitants.

Among the plethora of Iron Age corpora, only Lycian A, as far as I know, attests anendonym, namely tr ili . It is an adjective with the same -(i)li stem as in Hittite and, quiteplausibly, perhaps means “mountain people”. The question mark is here because theLycian A texts do not, as far as I know, refer specifically to their language, but only to thepeople. The same word is found in Lycian B as well, but the uncertainty attached to it is

greater. The second question mark is because we cannot tell whether tr ili was theendonym in Lycian B too or whether it was an exonym there referring to the Lycian Aspeech community only.

We have had to create our own names for most of the languages of the Anatolian Bronzeand Iron Ages. Already we find, in Hittite versus Hattic , that our modern coinings have beenovertaken by events in a way reminiscent of fig. 2’s Rus and Russia or Dutch and Deutsch.When classical authors refer, for instance, to “Lydians” or “Phrygians”, which people do theyreally mean in modern terms?

The troublesome neighbours again

As mentioned above and shown now in fig. 4, Lūlaḫi and Ḫābiri recur as a coordinated pair





a relatively large number of times in our limited Cuneiform Luwian corpus in varioussyntactic contexts. The Lūlaḫi are mentioned many times in Hittite also, occasionallyspelled Lūlaḫḫi and sometimes paired with desert dwellers as a source of contamination tobe exorcised.

Figure 4: The Lūlaḫi and Ḫābiri paired in any syntactic contexts

Ḫābiri has a clear Hurrian etymology, and is presumably synonymous with the desertdwellers, a term which is written only sumerographically in Hittite. An etymology forLūlaḫ(ḫ)i is not known, however, and its translation as “mountain dweller” is simply aplausible suggestion to contrast it with the desert dwellers.

So what kind of ethnonym is Lūlaḫi ? In which language did the name originally have ameaningful etymology? Were they also the Leleges of Greek tradition? Hittite texts speakof various ritual dealings with the Lūlaḫi and their gods, giving the distinct impression thatthe Lūlaḫi were no mere figures of xenophobic dismay, but were real, physical neighbours

of both Hittites and Luwians.

Was the Hittite and Luwian name Lūlaḫi a weak exonym, a rendering of the Lūlaḫi’sendonym by their eastern neighbours? If so, then a parallel weak exonym could haveentered early Greek, but to the west instead. However, what if Lūlaḫi were an exonymoriginating in central Anatolia, where the cuneiform attestations place it? By what routemight it have reached the Greeks, and would it then have been assigned to very samepeople as understood so far away in Hattusa?

We know that the inhabitants of the New World were erroneously labelled “Indians” byEuropeans, so mistakes do happen. The case for the Lūlaḫi and the Leleges being thesame people remains unproven for me, and my inclination is to regard it as another





instance of apophenia.

Returning now to the Hittite Old Kingdom and pulling the threads together, the Luwi seem tohave been close neighbours of Hatti, settled but not urbanised, and perhaps continuing asimilar association previously established with Nesa before the conquest of Ḫattuš. The

territory of the Luwi presumably lay to the south of those towns, towards the area whereLuwian Hieroglyphic texts cluster in later centuries.

Looking back from the twilight centuries

Figure 5: Localised Iron Age text groups known or suspected to be Luwic(Hieroglyphic locations taken from Tayfun Bilgin 2009)

Having looked at a possible origin of the Hittite view of Luwians, I next jump forward in timeto several groups of alphabetically written texts of the Iron Age. Fig. 5 shows the locationsof languages which are, or could be, related to Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic Luwian.

Phrygian, coming from another branch of IE altogether, is omitted from fig. 5. It has twocorpora, separated by several centuries, as shown in fig. 6. The later one uses Greekscript, the earlier one a related but distinct Phrygian alphabet. The isolated Mysian text isapparently a form of Phrygian written with the Lydian alphabet.

None of the Iron Age Hieroglyphic Luwian texts shown in the first column of fig.6 are found

to the west of Cilicia. Only in the Lydian area is there any degree of geographic overlapwith Hieroglyphic monuments, but after an interval of half a millennium or more. Lydian is





not a Luwic language. Are we to attach any significance to these facts? I return to thisbriefly later.

Figure 6: Approximate dates of the localised Iron Age text groupsP = Persian conquest; G = Greek conquest under Alexander(Symbols from fig. 5 mark the timespans, not individual texts)

The Pisidian group seems to consist of personal names written in Greek script. While thesereveal their Anatolian kinship, they tell us almost nothing about the underlying language.

Pamphylian is the only Greek dialect included. It arrived during the era of the legendarynostoi very early in the Iron Age. It displays some phonological developments similar tothose found in adjoining Anatolian languages, but a substratum effect remains disputed.

The two languages of Lycia, which I persist in calling only by the neutral labels A and B, arewhat we know most about. They are closely related to Luwian, but appear not to descenddirectly from the written dialects we find elsewhere.

Carian is a current frontier of research and is considered to be Luwic. The possible pluralform in fig. 4 is to show that there may be more than one language or dialect hiding underthat geographical label.

“Others” in fig. 5 are sometimes called “Paralydian”, “Paracarian” or “Caroide”, according tofindspot and scholastic preference. They are defined negatively, being both undecipheredand not a member of any other group. Some may date from very much later, perhaps evenearly Turkish, and may not be evidence for us at all.

M301a is a coin which I propose to have been minted for the Xanthians and so presumablyin Xanthos itself, but the question mark shows that this is not certain. My reading of this

coin is covered below.





Although it lies within the probable geographical area of Arzawa, Lydian is in a separatebranch of Anatolian. If it is a linguistic intruder, does legend entitle us to look inland for itsearlier domicile? The legendary origin of the Tursenoi is as an overpopulated inland peopledriven down to the coast to migrate. The Lydians were the folk who stayed behind.

Assessing Late Bronze Age Beycesultan, Naoise Mac Sweeney says “people .. did notdefine themselves primarily in relation to either the Hittites or the Arzawan confederacy, buthad their own dynamic and shifting world view” (Mac Sweeney 2010: 7). Might we seeforerunners of the Lydians in non-aligned Beycesultan, I wonder?

The Lydian coast is also associated in legend with Mopsus, a name particularly connectedwith settlements along the southern coast, including Aspendus. Does the isolated andpoorly understood Sidetic derive from the pre-Greek speech that Pamphylian replacedeverywhere else in that neighbourhood? Incidentally, the name pamphyloi , “the all tribes”reminds us of those Alemanni from another migration age, and in both cases the originalidentities of the participants have been obscured.

The native name of Aspendus, Estwedi-, echoes that of Azatiwadaya, alias Karatepe,named after its builder Azatiwada, whose overlord was of the house of Mopsus. Mopsusreportedly led settlers into Pamphylia but is also commemorated in Mopsouhestia andMopsoucrene and died in Mallus, all far to the east. Was the Hiyawa of the Çineköybilingual a single large Cilician kingdom which, like Tarhuntassa in an earlier age, had itswestern boundary at Parha/Perge in Pamphylia?

In contrast to the swathe of Hieroglyphic Luwian across much of Anatolia, the Iron Agealphabetic texts are concentrated in the south west, where Hieroglyphic is unattested.Whereas Hieroglyphic is also relatively uniform, the Iron Age texts are very diverse in bothscript and language, and each is tightly limited to its own area. Did they therefore arise in afree-spirited ‘wild west’, conquered occasionally, but rarely dominated for very long? Suchan independence of spirit is certainly attributed to the peoples of that area by the historicalnarratives that have come down to us in Hittite, Greek and Latin.

For each Iron Age language which could be Luwic there is a two-part question: Is it indeedLuwic? Did its speakers then exhibit any sense of cultural continuity with the people whomwe call Luwian? The first part can be answered to varying extents for some of theselanguages. The second must, on present evidence, remain almost entirely unanswered.

The variety seen in the Iron Age attestations probably indicates a comparable diversity oflocal preliterate speech in earlier eras too. It is all too easy for us to see the consistency ofwritten Bronze Age Luwian as indicating a corresponding minimum of variation in spokenlanguage across the whole area. This notion of a late Bronze Age vernacular Luwic koine is as illusory as taking the written Latin used across mediaeval Europe to be direct evidenceof consistency in the daily speech of that area and era.

How might we read the evidence from Lycia?

In favour of the notional koine one could cite the evident kinship of the Lycian languageswith the Luwian of centuries earlier. However, this supposes that Lycia constitutes a

representative sample of the whole south west area as it had been. Yet all the Iron AgeLuwoid languages attested outside Lycia are highly divergent and may well have been so





since much earlier in the Bronze Age than a putative Luwic koine.

I am surely not the first to venture the following explanation for the apparently atypicalconservatism of the Lycian languages. Consider the evolution of Scandinavian Germanicover the last thousand years. All but Icelandic have greatly simplified the inflectional

complexity of their Old Norse ancestor in a manner similar to that shown by modernEnglish, to a greater extent, in its descent from Anglo-Saxon. Modern Icelandic, in contrast,is scarcely altered from the language of the Old Norse sagas.

The flora, fauna and language of islands evolve at their own pace and with minimalinteraction with the rest of the world. When the status quo is not pressured there may be noreason to change. A case along these lines can be made for the relative isolation of thelanguages of Lycia.

Lycia is confined, broadly speaking, between a rocky coast and a mountain range and isblessed with fiercely defensive inhabitants. Its consequent isolation from neighbouring

areas gave it an island-like ability to remain culturally conservative. This conservatism wasnot only linguistic, but social and religious too.

Given the strong post-Empire survival of Hieroglyphic to the north and east of Cilicia, whynot something comparable in Lycia too, in the mountainous west? Alongside the twoLuwian-like languages might not legendary history have also flourished there in the Iron Age? We would be surprised if this were not the case in that sort of heroic society, but canwe discern something of it in the surviving literature?

In a context where Heracles is mentioned twice Lycian B also alludes to muxssa (TL44d:39) and zrppedu (TL44d: 6), who could be Mopsus and Sarpedon respectively. If notillusory, these references alone take us back to the age of migrations at the close of theBronze Age. Moreover, there is a similar kind of evidence from place names too.

A number of local toponyms are found in both A and B. Lycian A is concerned with mattersof the moment, such as epitaphs, edicts and the recent deeds of dynasts. Its historicalpatches refer to Persians, Spartans, Athenians and others. When we are able tounderstand more of it, it will furnish a valuable new source.

Lycian B has a much smaller corpus and mostly touches on a different set of matters to the A texts. Of particular interest are some words, listed below, which look like the names of

four places lying well outside Classical Lycia and taking us more firmly back to the Bronze Age. The first three of these possible toponyms occur both in base form and as ethnica,while the fourth appears to be the ethnicon alone.

1) tralije wijedri (TL44d: 42) and trelewñne (TL44d: 40);

2) mire (TL44d: 3, 40, 67) and irẽñne (TL44d: 66);

3) trqqñtasa (TL44c: 62; d: 4) and trqqñtasazi (TL55: 8);

4) tunewñni (TL44c: 63; d: 22, 62; TL55: 9).

Figure 7: Apparent Lycian B references to distant or Bronze Age places





No.1 looks like the city of Tralles on the Maeander; while No. 2 looks uncannily like Mira,the kingdom that adjoined or overlapped the north of the Lukka Lands. Tralles, whoseBronze Age name is not yet known, lies within the territory of Mira, and their names areseparated by only two words in TL44d: 40.

No. 3 may simply show standard adjectival derivatives of the god Trqqiz (corresponding toLycian A’s Trqqas). However, Tarhuntassa was the eastern neighbour of Bronze AgeLukka. Its possible attestation here alongside Mira looks too good to be true, but it isclosely connected twice with No. 4 in a manner very like that of No.1 with No. 2. I see No. 4as descending from *Tunawani , the ethnicon from Classical Tyn(n)a, Bronze Age “Tunnanear Tarhuntassa” (Hutter 2003: 248)

What is to be made of this grouping of names, if it is not judged apophenic? Did Lycian Bperhaps have a role in epic narrative? That would not be incompatible with its position asthe third language of TL44, after the builder of that tomb had recounted more recent events

in Lycian A and Greek. There are several indications that the writer of the B text on thatmonument was more at home with the A language and was perhaps using a non-vernacularmedium.

In TL44d: 66-67, sandwiched between irẽñne and mire, we read sebẽnesi ke tedesike: xugasi: xñtawaza, which looks to me like a claim to royal status via both the maternal andthe paternal grandfathers. Of the half dozen epitaphs from Antiphellus, TL55, the only otherB text and monolingual, differs also in its sentence structure from the other local epitaphs.It closes with that mention of tunewñni and trqqñtasazi , as though use of Lycian B waswarranted by an ancient heritage.

If Lycian tradition did indeed refer back into the Late Bronze Age, which seems quite likely,given the continuity in language, then the B texts in particular seem to provide the specificevidence. However, connections being proclaimed with each of the two adjoining Bronze Age kingdoms still would not tell us more about Luwians as such.

Lycaonia

On the subject of continuity, the toponym Lukaonia looks like the Greek rendering of aBronze Age *Lukkawaniya, “the land of the Lukka-dwellers”. Lycaonia is largely anelevated, dry area with salty soil. It lies north of the Taurus range and to the north west of

the Lukka Lands. If the name recalls a mass migration, then there are a couple of historicalimplications.

Firstly, the resettlement of Lukka people was on a scale sufficient to create a new regionalname. Could it be the result of the forced removal of population by the Hittites after theirconquest of Lukka in the late 13th. century BC? If so, the settlement area is both close toHatti and unlikely to breed prosperity for the deportees.

Secondly, the designation *Lukkawaniya would be a late creation and thus absent fromearlier Bronze Age records. It appears to have also eclipsed the Hittites’ designation of thearea as the Lower Land.

As a linguistic postscript, the vocalism of Lukaonia suggests that the Luwic form may have





already become something like * lukaw’niya, having undergone the syncope in the ethniconsuffix seen in Lycian B -ewñni and routinely simplified further to -eñni in Lycian A.

Two mystery texts

There are more scripts and languages than we have yet managed to penetrate. What willthey turn out to be? Could a notional Luwian identity survive among them, althoughprobably with a different name to that which we bestow upon it?

Among “others” in fig. 4 is M301a (Mørkholm and Neumann 1978: sub M301a), a coin witha legend in an unknown alphabet. I believe the coin to refer to the Xanthians. Could it beindicating yet another speech community? Details are in fig. 8.

In publishing this reading (Durnford 1991) I called the script “Carian” by default, because itis not Lycian. Adiego (Adiego 2007: 492) and Konuk (Konuk 2009: 201, n. 29) havecorrected this designation, though without finding a secure alternative. The questions

posed in fig. 8 therefore remain open.

Figure 8: A puzzling coin legend

A further undeciphered text, in Phoenician script this time, comes from Ördek Burnu on thecoast close to the border between Turkey and Syria. Fig. 9 shows my attempt at a reading.It is contemporary with Hieroglyphic from Sam’al and is at least a couple of centuries olderthan any of the south western groups treated above. Once wrongly assumed to be in theHieroglyphic language, could it nevertheless be a distant Anatolian cousin after all? Otheralphabetic texts from that area are in Sam’alian, a local North West Semitic dialect, distinctfrom Aramaic.

One can see a few sequences which look Semitic and some that recur, such as r m l y . Isthe latter perhaps connected with armaliya, “to sicken”, since this is a funerary stele? Twice





one sees Rakib-’el, “god the rider”, known from Kilamuwa’s Hieroglyphic text, and hereapparently preceded by Semitic prepositions. R k b ’ l and š š are followed by ʔ l h,surely the Semitic word for “god”.

Figure 9: The Ördek Burnu stele (after Friedrich 1932: 38-9)

Wouldn’t it be nice if the thrice repeated š ʔ could be sa and cognate with the Lycian wordfor “and”? However, the Lycian languages come half a millennium later and five hundredkilometres to the west. This is the territory where apophenia lurks, ready to pounce on theunwary.

The wider view

There are many clear linguistic ties uniting the corpora of Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic

Luwian with the two alphabetically written Lycian languages, despite the large number ofunresolved questions. In contrast, when seeking to relate a word in a puzzling text to thevocabulary of some distant location, one can easily be seduced by chance resemblance.The history of decipherment is littered with the bones of theories based on the discreditedetymological method.

A dialect continuum is a familiar enough linguistic concept, and a prime example is shownin fig. 10. It offers a high degree of observable detail, enabling a correspondingly highcredibility in academic studies from the Grimm brothers onward. The alphabetic texts fromIron Age Anatolia, however, present no such nice pattern, being in various scripts, somesparsely attested, and scattered through many centuries and wide distances. On top of thatare the intrusions of other groups and possible mass transplantations of population, such as





mooted with Lycaonia.

The direct distance from Xanthus to the Ördek Burnu stele is twice that between the Dutchand German phrases in fig. 10. The overland distance is much greater. The assumption ofprevious scholars that the stele concealed the language of the hieroglyphs has been

disproved, but it is clear from what has been said above that showing a connection toanything Luwic is extremely difficult.

Figure 10: Local speech in a small part of Europe

The same kind of difficulty bedevils attempts to build a diagramme of the relationshipsamong the family of Anatolian languages. Fig. 11 shows a familiar tree with some extrabits. This theoretical approach is only an approximation, because we lack the degree ofdetail that would be available with modern languages.

I hang my tree around a central spine from Indo-European down to Lycian A, because thelatter’s alphabetic writing generally tells us much more than the syllabic scripts do. Thisspine is also etymologically rich, as a significant amount of Lycian vocabulary can be tracedfrom top to bottom.

Taking the Palaic branch to illustrate how each branch is represented, I always allow forunattested dialects, indicated by the question mark out to the side. These are all presumedto descend from a notional uniform ancestor, here Common Palaic, a language perhapsalready separated from its closest relatives. Pre-Palaic, in contrast, although it may beeffectively identical with Common Palaic, is defined as a dialect still in a mutuallycomprehensible continuum with its siblings, pre-Nesite, etc. This use of Pre- and Commonstages back-to-back is a convenient tactic for delineating isoglosses and evolutionary





changes.

The name “Luwian” applies only to the Cuneiform variety and its Hieroglyphic avatar. Thewhole family is “Luwic”, whose ancestral stages are therefore Pre- and Common Luwic. Anadvantage of this rigour is that mooted transaegean attestations, traditionally called the

Luwian hypothesis, can be stitched into the tree under the new name. I label those mootedattestations “Offshore Luwic”. It contrasts with “Mainland Luwic”, which covers both Luwianand languages known or suspected to be close relatives of it.

Figure 11: A provisional family tree of the Anatolian languages

I see three main phases of Bronze Age transaegean interaction which left traces of Anatolian language in Greek. These three phases may each have lasted for centuries. Thelatest is the semi-historic migration age and the subsequent era of Iron Age alphabetictexts. The second phase matches the Greek age of legend, i.e., the oral history of theMycenaeans as reworked by Homer, dramatists and other writers. Hittite references toLuwiya and luwili also date from then. The earliest phase is more contentious and centreson the apparently Luwic toponyms already in Crete and Greece before Mycenaean times.

In the periaegean region two well-known examples of phase 1 toponyms are Parnassus,“the place of the temple”, and Tylissus in Crete, “the place of assembly”. Both havecounterparts in Cuneiform Luwian. Phase 1 is dominated by place names, such as the two

just cited, many of which also have a mythological story attached.





Phase 2, which is not explored in this paper, has a different centre of gravity compared tophase 1. Phase 2 is dominated, not by toponyms, but by legendary personal names andsome of the places associated with them and their stories. Into this phase fall names suchas Daidalos, Iobat ēs and Sarpēdon.

However, how well does the clean impression of phase 1 that is given by Parnassos andTulissos survive scrutiny of another toponym, or, rather, of one of its inhabitants? It haslong been recognised that a Bronze Age *Gw elphoi , with initial labiovelar, is required toexplain the Classical Delphoi and its Aeolic variant, Belphoi .

One of the planks of the original Luwian hypothesis is the name of the female monster,Delphyne, who guarded the oracle of Delphi on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. Her namelooks like a derivative meaning “the Delphian”, the suffix being -una, the familiar Luwicethnicon.

Can we say anything useful about this analysis of Delphyne? Fig. 12 seeks to show how

certain sound changes characteristic of Mainland Luwic are absent from my notionalOffshore Luwic. This should mean that the original hypothesis has to be either abandonedor restructured.

My preferred way forward is to propose that those three isoglosses apply only to MainlandLuwic. Choosing this solution offers scope for more detailed investigation of the sequenceof language changes.

Figure 12: A critical look at the Luwian hypothesis

Borrowings into Greek in all eras seem generally to retain the original voicing ofconsonants, while replacing a velar fricative with a plosive. Aspiration appears to be





characteristic of earlier borrowings. For this, and its two e vowels, I see Ephesos, forinstance, as another phase 1 form.

Phase 2 borrowings, such as Pēgasos and Sarpēdon, are relatively straight-forward. In duecourse we may hope to recast the phases into a greater number of episodes. For each

episode one wonders what the peoples concerned called themselves and each other, andwhich peoples they regarded as akin to themselves.

The Celts defined themselves ethnologically by their shared language and religious beliefs.Hellenes did the same. For neither people did this sensibility prevent fierce internecinewarfare. Much the same can be said of the Lycians.

To what extent may we assume that a language kinship which we discover in modern timeswas also acknowledged in ancient times as such, perhaps marking an ethnological bondtoo? How Bronze Age Luwians perceived their shared identity we cannot easily tell, butcommonality of language and religion are a fair default hypothesis.

Forms of Luwian speech, recorded or deduced, were spread over a large range from the Aegean to Syria and over many centuries from Kaneš to Roman times. Could there havebeen a corresponding continuity of self-identity in reality? Surely not. There must havebeen many endonyms and exonyms, of which our knowledge is certainly incomplete. Andwhat about Ördek Burnu, that coin, those unassigned texts, the rest of the Luwic tree andwhat still awaits discovery? The risk of apophenia is high, but excitement is undimmed.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Ian Rutherford for inviting me to speak and to many in the audience whomay helpful observations afterwards. I am also indebted to my wife, Sandra Capildeo, forproofreading and civilising my prose.

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