Luwian Language - Hieroglyphic Luwian

Hieroglyphic Luwian

Hieroglyphic Luwian is a term that refers to the corpus of Luwian texts written in a native script, known as Anatolian hieroglyphs. 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.

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Famous quotes containing the word hieroglyphic:

    Undoubtedly we have not questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)