Anatolian hieroglyphs are an indigenous hieroglyphic script native to western Anatolia first appears on Luwian royal seals, from ca. 2000 BC, used to record the Hieroglyphic Luwian language. A hieroglyph is one part of an ideographic writing system that is often found carved in stone. ... Asia Minor lies east of the Bosporus, between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. ... Luwian (sometimes spelled Luwiyan) is an Anatolian language known in three forms: (1) Cuneiform Luwian, (2) Hieroglyphic-Luwian and (3), the somewhat later Lycian. ... Hieroglyphic Luwian is a variant of the Luwian language, recorded in a small number of monumental hieroglyphic inscriptions. ...

The script is commonly called Luwian hieroglyphs in Englilsh publications. Older (pre-1973) publications use Hittite hieroglyphs. A number of scholars prefer the term Anatolian hieroglyphs.^{[1] [2] [3]}

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. The Bronze Age is a period in a civilizations development when the most advanced metalworking (at least in systematic and widespread use) consisted of techniques for smelting copper and tin from naturally occurring outcroppings of ore, and then alloying those metals in order to cast bronze. ... Iron Age Axe found on Gotland This article is about the archaeological period known as the Iron Age, for the mythological Iron Age see Iron Age (mythology). ...

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). It has been suggested that Hieroglyph (French Wiki article) be merged into this article or section. ... Boustrophedon is an ancient way of writing manuscripts and other inscriptions in which, rather than going from left to right as in modern English, or right to left as in Arabic, alternate lines must be read in opposite directions. ...

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. 1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1960 calendar). ... 1973 (MCMLXXIII) was a common year starting on Monday. ...

The script comprises about 500 signs in total. Each symbol is used either as a logogram, a determinative or a syllabogram, or polyvalently a combination of these. Signs used as syllabograms denote syllables of the structure V or CV, or less frequently two syllables, CVCV. Transliteration of logograms is conventionally the term represented in Latin, in capital letters (e.g. PES for the logogram for "foot"). The syllabograms are transliterated, disambiguating homophonic signs analogously to cuneiform transliteration, e.g. ta=ta₁, tá=ta₂, tà=ta₃, ta₄, ta₅ and ta₆ transliterate six distinct ways of representing phonemic /ta/.^[4]

It is obvious that the script was designed for the Luwian language (notably because of the absence of an e series), and no texts recording another language are known,^[5] although there is occasionally foreign material like glosses in Urartian^{[citation needed]} and some Hurrian theonyms. Luwian (sometimes spelled Luvian) is part of the Anatolian branch of the Indo European language family and has been preserved in three forms: (1) Cuneiform Luwian, (2) Hieroglyphic-Luwian and (3), the somewhat later Lycian. ... Urartian can refer to: The ancient kingdom of Urartu the Urartian language spoken there the family of Hurro-Urartian languages This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... The word Hurrian may refer to: An ancient people of the Near East, the Hurrians. ...

Some scholars compare the Phaistos Disc and Cretan hieroglyphs as possibly related scripts, but there is no consensus regarding this. The Phaistos Disc (Phaistos Disk, Phaestos Disc, Greek: Δίσκος της Φαιστού) is a curious archaeological find, likely dating to the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age. ... Cretan hieroglyphs are found on artifacts of Bronze Age Minoan Crete (early to mid 2nd millennium BC, MM I to MM III, overlapping with Linear A from MM IIA at the earliest). ...

References

1. ^ A. Payne, Hieroglyphic Luwian (2004), p. 1.
2. ^ Melchert, H. Craig. 2004. "Luvian", in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, edited by Roger D. Woodard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56256-2
3. ^ Melchert, H. Craig. 1996. "Anatolian Hieroglyphs", in The World's Writing Systems, ed. {Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507993-0
4. ^ see also the article at the Indo-European Database
5. ^ R. Plöchl, Einführung ins Hieroglyphen-Luwische (2003), p. 12.

External links

• http://www.ancientscripts.com/luwian.html
• Luwian Hieroglyphics from the Indo-European Database