LSIEL 26: A Short Grammar of Hieroglyphic Luwian

A Short Grammar of Hieroglyphic Luwian

John Marangozis

Luwian along with Hittite, Pallaic, Lycian, Carian, and other Anatolian languages, belongs to the Anatolian branch of the Indoeuropean languages. Luwian is known from writings of the second millennium BC, as “Cuneiform Luwian” and from writings of the first millennium BC, as “Hieroglyphic Luwian”.

Luwian (Louvitte, Luwische) is the language of the former land “Luwiya”, of Asia Minor, i.e. the S.-SW part of Asia Minor, constituted by the later provinces of Caria, Lycia, Pisidia, Pamphylia, and Cilicia. Later on, this area was occupied by the Hittites, as part of the Hittite Kingdom, from the 15th to the 12th century BC., and was known by the names of Kizzuwatna and Arzawa. Kizzuwatna was mainly the SE part and Arzawa the SW of old Luwiya. The federation of Arzawa consisted of a coalition of Hittite vassal states, like Mira-Kuwaliya, Hapalla, Seha-River Valley land, and later of some additional states.
Luwian texts in cuneiform writing were stored in the archives of Hattusa, the Hittite capital, in the form of clay tablets which were incinerated ca, 1200 BC. These texts contained the following categories of material:
- Magic rituals
- Mythological stories
- A fragment of a letter
- and a great number of obscure fragments.

ISBN 9783895863417. LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 26. 56pp. 2003.