Anatolian hieroglyphs

Anatolian hieroglyphs are an indigenous

Individual Anatolian hieroglyphs are attested from the second and early first millennia BC across Anatolia and into modern Syria. A biconvex bronze personal seal was found in the Troy VIIb level (later half of the 12th century BC) inscribed with Luwian Hieroglyphs.

The first inscriptions confirmed as Luwian date to the

Language

While almost^[6] all the preserved texts employing Anatolian hieroglyphs are written in the Luwian language,^[7] some features of the script suggest its earliest development within a bilingual Hittite-Luwian environment. For example, the sign which has the form of a "taking" or "grasping" hand has the value /ta/, which is precisely the Hittite word ta-/da- "to take," in contrast with the Luwian cognate of the same meaning which is la-.^[8] There was occasionally some use of Anatolian hieroglyphs to write foreign material like Hurrian theonyms, or glosses in Urartian (such as á – ḫá+ra – ku for aqarqi or tu – ru – za for ṭerusi, two units of measurement).

• 
  The

  Marash

  Lion, with Anatolian hieroglyphs
• 
  The

  Marash

  Lion, with Anatolian hieroglyphs
• 
  God Tarḫunz with inscription in Anatolian hieroglyphs
• 
  Slab with Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions mentioning the activities of king Urhilina and his son. 9th century BC. From Hama. Museum of the Ancient Orient, Istanbul

Typology

As in Egyptian, characters may be logographic or phonographic—that is, they may be used to represent words or sounds. The number of phonographic signs is limited. Most represent CV syllables, though there are a few disyllabic signs. A large number of these are ambiguous as to whether the vowel is a or i. Some signs are dedicated to one use or another, but many are flexible.

Words may be written logographically, phonetically, mixed (that is, a logogram with a phonetic complement), and may be preceded by a determinative. Other than the fact that the phonetic glyphs form a syllabary rather than indicating only consonants, this system is analogous to the system of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

A more elaborate monumental style is distinguished from more abstract linear or cursive forms of the script. In general, relief inscriptions prefer monumental forms, and incised ones prefer the linear form, but the styles are in principle interchangeable. Texts of several lines are usually written in boustrophedon style. Within a line, signs are usually written in vertical columns, but as in Egyptian hieroglyphs, aesthetic considerations take precedence over correct reading order.

Decipherment

Anatolian hieroglyphs first came to Western attention in the nineteenth century, when European explorers such as

By 1915, with the Luwian language known from cuneiform, and a substantial quantity of Anatolian hieroglyphs transcribed and published, linguists started to make real progress in reading the script.[9] In the 1930s, it was partially deciphered by Ignace Gelb, Piero Meriggi, Emil Forrer, and Bedřich Hrozný. Its language was confirmed as Luwian in 1973 by J.D. Hawkins, Anna Morpurgo Davies and Günther Neumann, who corrected some previous errors about sign values, in particular emending the reading of symbols *376 and *377 from i, ī to zi, za.

Sign inventory

The script consists of on the order of 500 unique signs,^[10] some with multiple values; a given sign may function as a logogram, a determinative or a syllabogram, or a combination thereof. The signs are numbered according to Laroche's sign list, with a prefix of 'L.' or '*'. Logograms are transcribed in Latin in capital letters. For example, *90, an image of a foot, is transcribed as PES when used logographically, and with its phonemic value ti when used as a syllabogram. In the rare cases where the logogram cannot be transliterated into Latin, it is rendered through its approximate Hittite equivalent, recorded in Italic capitals, e.g. *216 ARHA. The most up-to-date sign list was compiled by Massimiliano Marazzi in 1998.^[11]

Hawkins, Morpurgo-Davies and Neumann corrected some previous errors about sign values, in particular emending the reading of symbols *376 and *377 from i, ī to zi, za.

List of CV syllabograms

Transliteration of logograms is conventionally the term represented in Latin, in capital letters (e.g. PES for the logogram for "foot"). The

Anatolian hieroglyphs were added to the Unicode Standard in June, 2015 with the release of version 8.0.

The Unicode block for Anatolian Hieroglyphs is U+14400–U+1467F:

See also

• Hieroglyphic Luwian

References

Sources

• Marazzi, Massimiliano; Bolatti-Guzzo, Natalia; Dardano, Paola (1998). Il geroglifico anatolico : sviluppi della ricerca a venti anni dalla sua "ridecifrazione" : atti del Colloquio e della tavola rotonda, Napoli-Procida, 5–9 giugno 1995 [The Anatolian Hieroglyph: Developments in Research Twenty Years After its "Redeciphering": Proceedings from the Colloquium and the Roundtable, Naples-Procida, 5–9 June 1995].
  Istituto Universitario Orientale
  .
• Payne, Annick (2010). Hieroglyphic Luwian: An Introduction with Original Texts.
  ISBN 978-3-447-06109-4
  .
• [1] Waal, Willemijn, Ph M. Steele, and Ph J. Boyes, "Relations between script, writing material and layout: the case of the Anatolian Hieroglyphs", in Writing Around the Ancient Mediterranean, pp. 121144, 2022

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Anatolian hieroglyphs.

• Luwian Hieroglyphics from the Indo-European Database
• Sign list, with logographic and syllabic readings
• AncientScripts.com