Lycian
𐊗𐊕𐊐𐊎𐊆𐊍𐊆 Trm̃mili
Xanthos stele with Lycian inscriptions
Native to	Lycia, Lycaonia
Region	Southwestern Anatolia
Ethnicity	Lycians
Era	500 – ca. 200 BC[1]
Language family	Indo-European Anatolian Luwic Lycian
Early forms	Proto-Indo-European Proto-Anatolian
Writing system	Lycian script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	xlc
Linguist List	xlc
Glottolog	lyci1241

The Lycian language (𐊗𐊕𐊐𐊎𐊆𐊍𐊆 Trm̃mili)^[2] was the language of the ancient Lycians who occupied the Anatolian region known during the Iron Age as Lycia. Most texts date back to the fifth and fourth century BC. Two languages are known as Lycian: regular Lycian or Lycian A, and Lycian B or Milyan. Lycian became extinct around the beginning of the first century BC, replaced by the Ancient Greek language during the Hellenization of Anatolia. Lycian had its own alphabet, which was closely related to the Greek alphabet but included at least one character borrowed from Carian as well as characters proper to the language. The words were often separated by two points.

Area

Lycia covered the region lying between the modern cities of Antalya and Fethiye in southern Turkey, especially the mountainous headland between Fethiye Bay and the Gulf of Antalya. The Lukka, as they were referred to in ancient Egyptian sources, which mention them among the Sea Peoples, probably also inhabited the region called Lycaonia, located along the next headland to the east, also mountainous, between the modern cities of Antalya and Mersin.

Discovery and decipherment

Payava (his name is Pamphylian) as depicted on his tomb. The Lycian inscription runs: “Payava, son of Ed[...], acquired [this grave] in the sacred [burial] area of the acropolis(?) of A[rttumba]ra (a Lycian ruler), when Lycia saw(?) S[alas](??) [as governor(?)]. This tomb I made, a 10 year [h]iti (project?), by means of Xanthian ahamas.” Payava may be the soldier at the right, honoring his ruler Arttumbara with a laurel wreath.^[3] 375-360 BC.

The inscription on the front of Payava's tomb in the Lycian language.

From the late eighteenth century Western European travellers began to visit Asia Minor to deepen their acquaintance with the worlds of Homer and the New Testament. In southwest Asia Minor (Lycia) they discovered inscriptions in an unknown script. The first four texts were published in 1820, and within months French Orientalist Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin used a bilingual showing individuals' names in Greek and Lycian as a key to transliterate the Lycian alphabet and determine the meaning of a few words.^[4] During the next century the number of texts increased, especially from the 1880s when Austrian expeditions systematically combed through the region. However, attempts to translate any but the most simple texts had to remain speculative, although combinatorial analysis of the texts cleared up some grammatical aspects of the language. The only substantial text with a Greek counterpart, the Xanthos stele, was hardly helpful because the Lycian text was quite heavily damaged, and worse, its Greek text does not anywhere come near to a close parallel.^[5]

It was only after the decipherment of Hittite, by Bedřich Hrozný in 1917, that a language became known that was closely related to Lycian and could help etymological interpretations of the Lycian vocabulary. A next leap forward could be made with the discovery in 1973 of the Letoon trilingual in Lycian, Greek and Aramaic.^[6] Though much remains unclear, comprehensive dictionaries of Lycian have been composed since by Craig Melchert^[7] and Günter Neumann.^[8]

Sources

Map showing places where Lycian inscriptions have been found.

Lycian is known from these sources, some of them fairly extensive:^[9][10][11]

• 172 inscriptions on stone in the Lycian script dating from the 5th and 4th century BC (until ca. 330 BC).^[12] They include:
  • The Xanthus stele. The inscribed upper part of a tomb at Xanthos, called the Xanthus Stele or the Xanthus Obelisk. A Lycian A inscription covers the south, east and part of the north faces. The north side also contains a 12 line poem in Greek and additional text, found mainly on the west side, in Milyan. Milyan appears only there and on a tomb in Antiphellos. The total number of lines on the stele is 255, including 138 in Lycian A, 12 in Greek, and 105 in Milyan.
  • The Letoon trilingual, in Lycian A, Greek and Aramaic.
  • 150 burial instructions carved on rock tombs.
  • 20 votive or dedicatory inscriptions.
• About 100 inscriptions on coins minted at Xanthus from the reign of Kuprili, 485-440 BC, to the reign of Pericle, 380-360 BC.^[13]
• Personal and place names in Greek.

Lycian alphabet

The Lycian alphabet consists of about 29 signs, many of them reminiscent of the Greek alphabet:

Classification

Lycian alphabet: an early attempt at transliteration

Lycian was an Indo-European language, one in the Luwian subgroup of Anatolian languages. A number of principal features help identify Lycian as being in the Luwian group:^[14]

• Assibilation of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) palatals (satem change): *h₁éḱwos to Luwian á-zú-wa/i-, Lycian esbe 'horse'.
• Replacement of genitive case with adjectives ending in -ahi or -ehi, Luwian -assi-.
• A preterite active formed with PIE secondary middle endings:
  • PIE *-to to Luwian -ta, Lycian -te or -de in the third person singular
  • PIE *-nto to Luwian -nta, Lycian -(n)te in the third person plural
• Similarity of words: Luwian māssan(i)-, Lycian māhān(i) 'god'.

The Luwian subgroup also includes cuneiform and hieroglyphic Luwian, Carian, Sidetic, Milyan and Pisidic.^[15] The pre-alphabetic forms of Luwian extended back into the Late Bronze Age and preceded the fall of the Hittite Empire. These vanished at about the time of the Neo-Hittite states in southern Anatolia (and Syria); thus, the Iron Age members of the subgroup are localized daughter languages of Luwian.

Of the Luwic languages, only the Luwian parent language is attested prior to 1000 BC, so it is unknown when the classical-era dialects diverged. Whether the Lukka people always resided in southern Anatolia or whether they always spoke Luwian are different topics.

From the inscriptions, scholars have identified at least two languages that were termed Lycian. One is considered standard Lycian, also termed Lycian A; the other, which is attested on side D of the Xanthos stele, is Milyan or Lycian B, separated by its grammatical particularities.

Grammar

Endonym

An epitaph in the Lycian language, which reads: 𐊁𐊂𐊚𐊑𐊏𐊚:𐊓𐊕𐊑𐊏𐊓𐊇𐊒:𐊎𐊚𐊏:𐊁𐊓𐊕𐊑𐊏𐊀𐊥𐊀𐊗𐊚:𐊛𐊀𐊏𐊀𐊅𐊀𐊈𐊀:𐊛𐊕𐊓𐊓𐊆𐊍𐊀𐊅𐊆:𐊁𐊛𐊂𐊆:𐊖𐊁𐊗𐊆𐊅𐊁𐊆𐊎𐊁
"Hanadaza built this building for his wife and sons."

A few etymological studies of the Lycian language endonym are present. These are:^[2]

• Language of the mountain people (Laroche): Luwian tarmi- "pointed object" becomes a hypothetical *tarmašši- "mountainous" used in Trm̃mis- "Lycia." Lycia and Pisidia each had a hill-town named Termessos.
• Attarima (Carruba): A previously unknown Late Bronze Age place name among the Lukka.
• Termilae (Bryce): A people displaced from Crete about 1600 BC.
• Termera (Strabo^[31]): A Lelege people displaced by the Trojan War, first settling in Caria and assigning such names as Telmessos, Termera, Termerion, Termeros, Termilae, then displaced to Lycia by the Ionians.^[32]

See also

• Letoon trilingual
• Lycia
• Lycian script

References

External links

References

Further reading

• Goldstein, David M. "Object agreement in Lycian". In: Historische Sprachforschung Vol. 127, Number 1 (2014): 101-124. 10.13109/hisp.2014.127.1.101