Anatolian Languages

Place, Memory and Healing: An Archaeology of Anatolian Rock Monuments investigates the complex and deep histories of places, how they served as sites of memory and belonging for local communities over the centuries, and how they were appropriated and monumentalized in the hands of the political elites. Focusing on Anatolian rock monuments carved into the living rock at watery landscapes during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, this book develops an archaeology of place as a theory of cultural landscapes and as an engaged methodology of fieldwork in order to excavate the genealogies of places.

Advocating that archaeology can contribute substantively to the study of places in many fields of research and engagement within the humanities and the social sciences, this book seeks to move beyond the oft-conceived notion of places as fixed and unchanging, and argues that places are always unfinished, emergent, and hybrid. Rock cut monuments of Anatolian antiquity are discussed in the historical and micro-regional context of their making at the time of the Hittite Empire and its aftermath, while the book also investigates how such rock-cut places, springs, and caves are associated with new forms of storytelling, holy figures, miracles, and healing in their post-antique life. Anybody wishing to understand places of cultural significance both archaeologically as well as through current theoretical lenses such as heritage studies, ethnography of landscapes, social memory, embodied and sensory experience of the world, post-colonialism, political ecology, cultural geography, sustainability, and globalization will find the case studies and research within this book a doorway to exploring places in new and rewarding ways.

""This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200–850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments, and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural, and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history, and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as well as sites of political performance and state spectacle.

Excerpt
http://www.cambridge.org/servlet/file/store6/item7256988/version1/9781107027947_excerpt.pdf""

The relationship between the Luwian and Phoenician versions of the bilingual texts emanating from Cilicia has never been systematically studied from the philological viewpoint. In this paper I endeavour to demonstrate that a converging set of formal arguments supports the primary character of the Phoenician versions of the ÇİNEKÖY and KARATEPE 1 bilinguals and the secondary character of their Luwian versions. I interpret this as a metaphor for the relationship between two ethnic constituents of the Neo-Hittite principality of Que, whose coexistence was earlier argued for on independent grounds. According to the proposed interpretation, the Phoenician language was emblematic of the rulers of Que, who claimed Greek descent and therefore attempted to distance themselves from the traditional elites of the neighbouring Neo-Hittite states. The use of the Luwian language was a concession to the indigenous population of Que. The adoption of Phoenician as a language of written expression by the Greek colonists in Cilicia happened at the point when the Linear B script had been forgotten and represented the first step toward the creation of the Greek alphabet.

The land Purušhanda was connected with the Luwian culture and religion. It appears to be a part of the Land of Luwiya. This book describes three phases of the history of the kingdom:  the rise of a kingdom, the great kingdom and Purušhanda as a principality under the realm of Hattusha.

The paper addresses the question of the presence of Anatolian influence in Early Greek (conventionally, about 1500–800 BC). The first part addresses methodological questions of language contact, such as mechanisms of linguistic interaction and the scale of borrowings. In the second part, eleven important cases of presumable Anatolian lexical borrowings in Greek are critically analyzed. The results of the analysis suggest that the Anatolian influence on the vocabulary of Early Greek was minimal (if any), which strongly speaks against the possibility of influences in morphology, phonetics or phraseology.

In this article it will be argued that the Indo-European laryngeals *h₂ and *h₃, which recently have been identified as uvular fricatives, were in fact uvular stops in Proto-Indo-Anatolian. Also in the Proto-Anatolian and Proto-Luwic stages these sounds probably were stops, not fricatives.

The book covers two centuries of research on Anatolian civilisations, told as a biographical anthology of pioneers in the field. Each of these great explorers followed their own path, but all suffered a similar fate: ostracism, exclusion from the academic community, and ultimately obscurity. And while each was to experience their own particular failure, together they were able to gradually accumulate a wealth of information about the Luwian civilisation. The volume of data available eventually reached critical mass, and the Luwians – a people archaeology had previously overlooked – emerged from the shadows of time.

The title Great King was understood in the Late Bronze Age Near East as a king who is powerful enough to secure the loyalty of the neighbouring kings. I propose a new reading hantawatt-(an)-ura/(i)-, lit. “the great(est) of kings” for the Luwian title in question.

The aim of this paper is to improve our understanding of a difficult Palaic invocation to the Sun-god, and to elucidate its implications for the study of Hittite religion. The first part of my account contains linguistic and philological discussion that concludes with a new translation of the scrutinized fragment. According to my interpretation, the Sun-god is requested to anoint the Hittite king and to exalt him. This is the only clear evidence that the gods were thought to be personally responsible for the anointment of Hittite kings. A counterpart to this nontrivial concept is well known from the Hebrew Bible and is inherited by the
Christian tradition.

The second part of this paper, which is meant to be accessible to all the historians of religion, discusses the anointment as a rite of passage among the Hittites, as well as the relevant parallels in other Ancient Near Eastern cultures. I am arguing that anointment with oil was extended to both Hittite priestly kings and certain other categories of Hittite priests, and that the underlying purpose of this act was ritual cleansing. The spread of this rite to those cultures where kings were not at the head of the religious hierarchy boosted the secondary association of divine anointment with empowerment rather that purification.

UPS AND DOWNS AT KANESH proposes a revised sequence of Old Assyrian eponyms and establishes a relative and an absolute chronology by way of linking textual evidence, dendrochronology and archaeological stratigraphy. This chronological framework is used to trace broader historical and social developments of political and territorial centralisation in Anatolia, as well as to offer new insights in the social and commercial history of the Old Assyrian trade.
A number of economic and social transformations in Assyrian society over the course of two centuries are identified by way of a statistical and prosopographical analysis. It is shown how the economic system that drove the well-known overland trade of the early Colony Period collapsed in a dramatic fashion after only thirty years (c. 1895-1865 BC), and that a series of changes in administrative organisation were created in immediate response. A primary vehicle in financing the trade – the joint-stock enterprise – was abandoned, and exchange came to be organised by way of venture trade. A distinct community of hybrid Assyrian-Anatolian households grew more prominent as mixed families came to be engaged mainly in local Anatolian trade and agriculture. In turn, a small and wealthy Assyrian elite functioned as permanently settled foreign trading agents, and a distinctive group of itinerant merchants continued to engage in the caravan trade and connect the Anatolian colonies to the mother city of Assur.

The urbanization of Syro-Hittite (Luwian and Aramaean) states is one of most complex yet little explored regional processes in Near Eastern history and archaeology. In this study, I discuss aspects of landscape and settlement change in northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia during the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200–850 BC), and suggest that the emergent geo-politics of the region involved the foundation of cities and construction of specific types of commemorative monuments including rock reliefs, steles and city gates. While defining new forms of territorial power, these monuments linked local polities to a shared Hittite past through their literary and visual rhetoric, and a discourse of inherited agricultural land. To contextualize the subject matter, I first discuss the gradual southward shift of an imperial Hittite center of power from central Anatolia towards Karkamiš and Tarhuntašša at the end of the Late Bronze Age, arguing against the widespread models of a sudden collapse of the Hittite Empire followed by dark ages. Furthermore, I present archaeological
and epigraphic evidence for the formation of the regional state Malizi/Melid. This Syro-Hittite kingdom established itself in the Malatya-Elbistan Plains in eastern Turkey during the first centuries of the Early Iron Age as one of the earliest political entities to emerge from the ashes of the Hittite Empire. Monuments raised by Malizean ‘country lords’ in rural and urban contexts suggest a picture of a fluid landscape in transition, one that was configured through the construction of cities, and other practices of place-making.

""Etruscan is an Indo-European language, probably belonging to a sub-branch of Anatolian which does not include Hittite. This claim is based on the following evidence:
• only lexical items for which Etruscologists have proposed a gloss have been used in this research (no attempt has been made at proposing new glosses for currently obscure or highly controversial Etruscan terms);
• 138 of the glosses put forth by Etruscologists belong to basic lexicon, and 97% of such basic lexicon has an IE etymology;
• 19 grammar morphemes have also been assigned a value by Etruscologists: 95% of them have an IE etymology;
• all such etymologies are based on regular sound laws;
• a few notable innovations are shared by Etruscan and Anatolian languages (often excluding Hittite).""

An examination of the rendering of the name for Cilicia in Akkadian and other Semitic languages.

Note: This version is the same as that uploaded last week but corrects the false impression that Zsolt Simon's paper on the Luvian laryngeals is still forthcoming. It is is not, but appeared in 2014.  Simon deserves full credit as the first to propose the uvular interpretation.

This article argues that the phonetic distinction between the Hittite fortis and lenis stops was not one of voice, but rather one of length, and that this distinction must have been present in Proto-Anatolian as well. On the basis of typological and comparative considerations it is argued that the Proto-Anatolian stop system cannot have developed from the stop system that is traditionally reconstructed for the Proto-Indo-European mother language and in which voice is the basic distinction. Instead, the relationship must have been the other way around: the voice distinction of PIE is a younger development of the length distinction as found in the Proto-Anatolian stop system. This relationship can only be accounted for within the context of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, and therefore forms a new argument in favor of it.

Building on Melchert's observation that in Old Hittite narrative texts an aspectual system seems to be used that is different from the aspectual system found in the majority of Hittite texts (Melchert 1998), this article discusses the nature of the tense-aspect system of Proto-Indo-European, especially on the basis of a comparison between the Sanskrit and Hittite verbal systems (following observations and analyses by Pooth 2009). It is argued that the tense-aspect system of the Old Hittite narrative texts as described by Melchert may go back directly to the system that can be reconstructed for early Proto-Indo-European, namely one in which there was no distinction in tense, but rather a distinction between progressive and non-progressive aspect.

Rock reliefs and inscriptions carved on the living rock in Near Eastern archaeological landscapes have often been called “monuments”. A place-based analysis of such sites of rock carving and inscription from the Anatolian countryside during the Late Bronze and Early-Middle Iron Ages (roughly 14th through 7th centuries BCE) suggest that many of the rock-cut inscriptions in Hieroglyphic Luwian and associated pictorial imagery oscillate between being a monument and a graffito, if one carefully consider the landscape context, carving technology, and the visual and verbal content of the reliefs and inscriptions. In this paper, I focus on a cluster of rock inscriptions and reliefs in western Anatolia at the sites of Karabel, Akpınar, and Suratkaya, whose inscriptions collectively link to a genealogy of kings in the Land of Mira. I argue that alternative ontologies of graffiti and its territorial character as a distribution of the body may shed light on our current interpretations of rock inscriptions and reliefs in Hittite and Iron Age Anatolia. I conclude by suggesting that the graffiti are no less political than monuments themselves; they also speak to territoriality, the desire to shape and control public space, and allow an effective referencing of the past.

This paper examines the walwet and kukalim legends appearing on early electrum coinage from Lydia. After a survey of previous interpretations, it is argued that the appurtenance suffix in kukalim functions as a patronymic, ‘I am a son/descendant of Gyges’, referring to Alyattes, whose name is now gen- erally and correctly seen in walwet. Building on this, the chronological impli- cations that this reading poses for the dates of Alyattes are then considered in relation to the revised dating of coins from the Artemisium deposit. It is suggested that Alyattes was already on the Lydian throne by ca. 635 BC, a dating which has further implications for the chronology of other rulers of the Mermnad dynasty.

During the reign of Rusa II in the first half of 7th century BC, Lake Van Basin underwent a remarkable process of urbanization and reconfiguration of its political landscapes through the construction of new cities. The urban spaces that were eventually created were demarcated with a particularly powerful and innovative
architectonic culture: finely carved stone masonry. I argue in this article that monumental building activity, as a historically conspicuous event, creates a medium of exchange of artisanal knowledge and technological innovation. The dramatic
urban landscape of the Iron age city at Ayanis (ancient Rusahinili-Eiduru-kai) in Eastern Turkey on the Eastern shore of Lake Van, features an impressive fabric of such architectonic culture, not only a product of long-term building technologies
in the region, but also that of a series of innovations associated with the reign of its founder Rusa II. This paper specifically focuses on the complex set of stone masonry techniques in the monumental structures at Ayanis, and attempts to reflect
on the multi-faceted aspects of symbolic technologies of production in the context of the foundation of the city. It argues that the highly refined stone masonry in Urartu was a symbolically charged architectural technology that effectively operated as royal insignia in the public sphere, but it also derived from the local corpus of building knowledge in the Lake Van basin.

A tiny bone plaque found at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey, and currently on display in nearby Sanliurfa Museum, shows the first recorded depiction of the site’s familiar T-shaped pillars. In addition to this, the etching on its surface might well be the earliest known use of a 3D perspective in prehistoric art. The plaque’s finely carved imagery also reignites the debate over the axial orientation of the site’s main enclosures and any potential astronomical targets during the epoch of their construction.

UPDATED, because published.

The Hieroglyphic Luwian sign AVIS (= *128) usually appears in the divine name Kubaba, typically written as (DEUS)Ku+AVIS-pa-pa or Ku-AVIS, but once in while it also occurs as a syllabogram. The strongest piece of evidence for a syllabic reading wax for AVIS (*128) is provided by the word (“MALLEUS”)AVIS-la-i ‘he erases/removes’ (TELL AHMAR 6, § 27). Combining Hawkins’s suggestion that *71 is the cursive form of AVIS with Laroche’s suggestion that *71 should be read as wa, I proposed to read syllabographic AVIS as wa as well. Although this does not apply to all words containing the sign AVIS, we can now provide the full readings of four lexemes:

ARHA “MALLEUS” AVIS-la- = ARHA “MALLEUS” wa(x)-la- /arha walla-/ ‘to remove, lift off’
(DEUS)AVIS-ti- = (DEUS) wa(x)-ti- c. /watti-/ ‘divine mountain’
(DEUS)AVIS-ta-ni- = (DEUS) wa(x)-ta-ni(-ia)- c. /wattani(ya)-/ ‘(sacred) holding’
UPDATED: AVIS-sà- = wa(x)-sà- /wasa-/ = u-sa- /usa-/ ‘to lead here’

As a corollary of reading (DEUS)AVIS-ti-zi as /wattinzi/ ‘divine mountains’ in TELL AHMAR 6, the lexeme (DEUS)*30(-)da-ti-zi in the same text might represent /habadantinzi/ ‘divine riverlands’, suggesting that *30 should be read as HAPA. This in turn leads to a contextually acceptable reading of “*30”(-)ri+i-nu-wa/i- in KARKAMIŠ A12 § 13 as “HAPA”-ri+i-nu-wa/i- /haparinuwa-/ ‘to deliver’. We may thus add two more lexemes with full phonetic readings to the Luwian lexicon:

(DEUS)*30-da-ti- = (DEUS) HAPA-da-ti- c. /habadanti-/ ‘divine river valley’
“*30”-ri+i-nu-wa/i- = “HAPA”-ri+i-nu-wa/i- /haparinuwa-/ ‘to deliver’.

The Telepinu Myth is an ancient Hittite myth. Telepinu was the god of agriculture of the Hittites, people of the ancient Near East. According to a Hittite legend, the disappearance of Telepinu caused all fertility to fail, both plant and animal. In order to stop the havoc and devastation, the gods seek Telepinu but fail to find him. Hannahannah, the mother goddess, sent a bee to find him; when the bee did, stinging Telipinu and smearing wax on him, the god grew angry and began to wreak destruction on the world. Finally, Kamrusepa, goddess of magic, calmed Telepinu by giving his anger to the Doorkeeper of the Underworld.

A fragment of a stone statue bearing two lines of a Hieroglyphic Luwian memorial inscription was discovered in 2006 at Pancarlı Höyük, near Zincirli, Turkey, the Iron Age Aramaean city of Samal. This probably royal monument of the tenth or early ninth century BC may be evidence of either the use of Hieroglyphic Luwian by early kings of the Aramaean dynasty of Samal or the existence of an Early Iron Age Luwian-speaking regime in this region. Following the edition of the new inscription, these two alternatives are explored in light of accumulating evidence regarding the emergence of the Iron Age Syro-Hittite kingdoms following the collapse of the Hittite Empire and the strategic use of old and new epigraphic traditions by their rulers.

The article concerns the Linear A form j/a-di-ki-te-te-du-pu2-re which occurs in four stone libation tables from Palaikastro, in eastern Crete. The starting point of the present analysis is the element (-)du-pu2-re, which appears as a Wanderwort pertaining to the sphere of power and kingship, and is ultimately connected to the Hittite royal title tabarna-/labarna-. Hence, the whole form above should be rendered as ‘Diktaian Master (dat.)’ (vel. sim.), with clear reference to a Minoan deity predecessor of the later Diktaian Zeus.