Hieroglyphic Luwian


Hieroglyphic Luwian Stele from Carchemish, Syria, in the
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Early First Millennium B.C.)

The end of a text which describes how the three main gods should punish the evil-doer. Luwian is an early Indo-European language of Central, South and West Anatolia attested from the Second Millenium B.C. to the first part of the First Millennium b.c. We have Second Millennium texts in cuneiform written in a somewhat different language from the Second and First Millennium texts in the so-called Hieroglyphic script, which is in fact a syllabic script rich in logograms

Type- Logophonetic
Family - Isolate
Location - Anatolia, Western Asia
Timeline - 1000 BCE to 700 BCE

This script was originally mislabeled as Hieroglyphic Hittite, but the decipherment of the signs eventually led to the conclusion that the language recorded was not Hittite, but a related language called Luwian. Hittite and Luwian both belong to Anatolian subgroup of the Indo-European language family.

Hieroglyphic Luwian was used in city-states of Southern Anatolia and Northern Syria, from 1000 BCE (?) to 700 BCE.

The system, as you can see, has a lot of homophonous signs, that is, different looking signs with the same phonetic value. The diacritical marks on the vowels, like in transcribing Sumerian, they do not denote any phonetic value, but simply as a tag saying that this is the n-th sign discovered to have a certain pronunciation (the acute accent being the second and the grave the third). Therefore, wa, wa, wa, wa4, wa5 and wa6 represent the same sound. Luwian




Hieroglyphic Luwian Phonetic Signs

Simple Vowels




The Dipthongs




The Consonant-Vowel Signs





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