Luwian Language - Geography

Geography

Luwian 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.

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.