1 What Is (Cuneiform) Luwian and Where Is Luwiya?
1.1 The Luwian Corpus in Cuneiform Transmission
Unlike most other languages of ancient Anatolia, the Luwian language is attested in two different writing systems: the Anatolian adaptation of Mesopotamian cuneiform (cf. Chapter 6) and Anatolian hieroglyphs.1 It was previously believed that these two corpora corresponded to two closely related languages, named faute de mieux Cuneiform Luwian and Hieroglyphic Luwian. By now it has become clear that the differences between some Luwian dialects attested in cuneiform transmission exceed the postulated distance between Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic Luwian, and one of the dialects attested in cuneiform transmission, namely HattuÅ¡a Luwian, displays a particular resemblance to the early form of Hieroglyphic Luwian. Therefore, it makes more sense to speak of one Luwian language, and reserve the terms âcuneiformâ and âhieroglyphicâ for the writing systems associated with specific Luwian corpora (Yakubovich 2010:68â73). However, all the Luwian cuneiform texts predate the abandonment of HattuÅ¡a, whereas the bulk of Luwian hieroglyphic texts postdate this watershed event in ancient Anatolian history, so the Luwian cuneiform corpus can be used as the basis for the study of areal phenomena involving the Luwian language before the 13th century BCE. This justifies the separate treatment of Cuneiform Luwian and Hieroglyphic Luwian in the present volume. This chapter will address the evidence of Luwian cuneiform texts, while the Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions will find a detailed treatment in Volume 2.
As far as we know, the term âLuwianâ does not reflect the name given to the language by its speakers but rather harks back to its Hittite designation. Hittite cuneiform texts feature the adverb luwili âin Luwian, as a Luwianâ, formed according to the same model as niÅ¡ili âin Nesite/Hittiteâ.2 Although the adverb luwili frequently precedes the direct speech utterances recorded in Hittite, sometimes what follows it is in a different language, which is patently related to Hittite (Mouton and Yakubovich 2021:26). Accordingly, European scholars call this language Luwian, while the variant Luvian appears in the publications of American and some US-trained scholars. The term luwili is probably derived from the geographic name Luwiya, which is likewise attested in Hittite transmission and will be discussed in §â¯1.3. Regrettably, exactly what the Luwian speakers called their language, either in the second millennium BCE or later, remains unknown.
Luwian texts are still imperfectly understood, and this holds in particular for those of the second millennium BCE. The bulk of the Luwian passages in cuneiform are embedded in Hittite religious compositions. In some cases, the Hattuša scribes translated the embedded incantations into Hittite. In other cases, they chose not to do so, presumably to preserve the ritual efficacy. The incantations tend to seem esoteric to modern readers, and many of the lexemes used in them are specialized terms deployed in witchcraft or other religious performances. Therefore, our ability to understand the Luwian embedded passages largely depends on the availability of Hittite adaptations or comparison with the Hittite narrative frame, which frequently makes it possible to predict their content. The situation is exacerbated by the fragmentary condition of nearly all of the relevant texts: the incantation may be preserved but the narrative frame lost or both may be preserved only partially. The contrast between lexical and grammatical interpretations must also be highlighted: it may be harder to interpret the content than the grammatical structure of some sentences because our command of Luwian grammar surpasses our grasp of the Luwian lexicon.3
With very few exceptions, the Luwian embedded passages were not composed by HattuÅ¡a scribes, but rather reflected direct speech utterances that they more or less faithfully recorded. Therefore, the cuneiform script of the available Luwian passages is essentially the same adaptation of the Mesopotamian cuneiform that was used in HattuÅ¡a for Hittite texts, including those that framed the Luwian insertions (Hawkins 2003:129). There are, however, some orthographic peculiarities. The sparing use of Sumerograms and the extreme rarity of Akkadograms in the preserved Luwian passages correlates with the passive role of scribes in their transmission: presumably the âstenographersâ did not have the time or inclination to transpose the recorded utterances into the complex heterographic code that is typical of the Hittite formulaic passages (cf. Kudrinski 2017:278â279). Numerous instances of multiple plene spellings (vowel replications) in Luwian formsâfor example, da-a-u-i-iÅ¡ âeyeâ, ta-a-wi5-⸢ya⸣-a-an âtowardâ, [ti]-⸢i⸣-ti-i-ta-a-ti âwith the eye pupil(s)â may testify to the care that scribes took in transliterating this less familiar language.4
In addition to the embedded passages, the Luwian cuneiform corpus also features isolated forms, likewise mostly embedded in Hittite texts. From the late 14th century BCE onwards, they were commonly marked with special signs that were otherwise used to accompany glosses in certain cuneiform traditions and are therefore known as âGlossenkeil wordsâ after the German term for gloss wedge.5 Furthermore, there are Luwian glosses added to some Akkadian texts (Giusfredi 2012; Pisaniello and Giusfredi, 2021). Some of the texts with Glossenkeil words are attributed to the same kings that commissioned the first monumental hieroglyphic inscriptions in the Luwian language. Although the Glossenkeil words yield a smaller corpus than the embedded Luwian sentences, they are important for three reasons. First, they frequently complement the lexicon known from other sources, being embedded in texts of various genres, many of them secular. Second, it is often possible to guess their meanings from the surrounding Hittite context. Third, they tend to preserve a different dialect than the bulk of the Luwian incantations and conjurations (cf. §â¯1.2).
The patchwork character of the Luwian cuneiform corpus explains why its systematic study trails the investigation of Hittite texts by several decades.6 The publication of KUBÂ 35 by Heinrich Otten in 1953 introduced the largest fragments that contained Luwian passages, including those of CTHÂ 758â763, to the community of cuneiform scholars, while Laroche 1959 represented the first Cuneiform Luwian lexicon. Another accomplishment of Emmanuel Laroche was the preliminary classification of the published Hittite-Luwian texts by genre (CTHÂ 757â773 in Laroche 1971). New opportunities for the study of our corpus emerged with Ottenâs autographic edition of another large group of Hittite-Luwian fragments, which was published as KBo 29 in 1983. This project was coordinated with Frank Starkeâs attempt to transliterate all of the fragments with Luwian insertions, which culminated in the publication of Starke 1985.
The beginning of the twenty-first century marked a new stage in Luwian studies. The work by J. David Hawkins and Anna Morpurgo-Davies on deciphering Luwian hieroglyphic texts greatly improved our understanding of Luwian grammar and the Luwian lexicon. The first collective monograph devoted to the subject, published in 2003, contains a grammatical survey of the Luwian language based on the entire corpus, regardless of the writing system used (Melchert 2003b). This pioneering paper has not lost its value, although for best results it should be read in conjunction with later surveys (Yakubovich 2015a and Melchert 2020a). The growth of the accessible Luwian cuneiform corpus and improved understanding of Luwian morphology made possible the production of a new Luwian lexicon (Melchert 2022).
1.2 Luwian Dialect Geography
Luwian belongs to the Anatolian group of languages and thus is a close relative of Hittite. The relationship between Luwian and the Palaic language, likewise attested in cuneiform transmission, is even closer. For example, the Luwian Sun god Tiwad and the Palaic Sun god Tiyat are derived from the same stem, whereas the Hittite cognate of this stem is Å¡iwatt- âdayâ. However, Palaic and Luwian were not mutually understandable and thus represented separate languages. The closest relatives of Luwian are the languages of the Luwic group,7 which are best attested through alphabetic inscriptions of the first millennium BCE. The most important among those are Lycian and Milyan, known from the rock-cut tombs and other monuments of classical Lycia, and the recently deciphered Carian language, spoken in Caria in the extreme southwestern part of Anatolia. Previously it was believed that at least some of these languages were direct descendants of Luwian. Now most linguists have embraced the view that the Lycian and Carian languages are more closely related to Luwian than to Hittite or Palaic but are not the direct descendants of the known Luwian dialects. One may wonder whether those who spoke their ancestors in the second millennium BCE would have understood some of the attested Luwic dialects (in particular, IÅ¡tanuwa Luwic), but in the absence of any preserved Proto-Lycian or Proto-Carian texts, it is impossible to answer this question.
When we turn to the attested dialects of the second millennium BCE, traditionally classified as Luwian, there are sufficient grounds to distinguish between Kizzuwatna/Lower Land Luwian, TauriÅ¡a Luwian, HattuÅ¡a Luwian (Empire Luwian), and IÅ¡tanuwa Luwian/Luwic. This proposed taxonomy is based on the conventional Luwian corpus (contrast §â¯1.3) and is by no means exhaustive, given the almost certain existence of cuneiform fragments bearing other Luwian dialects. Future additions to the Luwian corpus may make possible the more precise dialectal identification of some passages. For now, these are the only four dialects that can be defined from their linguistic peculiarities.8
The best-known dialect (or dialectal continuum) is associated with a vast area stretching from the Lower Land, situated on the central Anatolian Plateau, to Kizzuwatna, roughly corresponding to classical Cilicia. The texts featuring minor Luwian insertions that are securely associated with the Lower Land are the festival of HuwaÅ¡Å¡anna (CTH 690â694), a goddess worshipped as the divine queen of HupiÅ¡na, and the rituals attributed to the Old Woman Tunnawiya (CTH 409), whose name links her to the town of Tunna (Mouton and Yakubovich 2021:28).9 Furthermore, the extensive Luwian incantations associated with the earliest layers of the Kuwattalla tradition (CTH 761) show striking parallels to the incantations of the Tunnawiya tradition and therefore must also be associated with the Lower Land (Mouton and Yakubovich 2021:30â31). In contrast, a Hittite-Luwian ritual text that had paramount importance for the initial decipherment of the Luwian language is attributed to Zarpiya, a physician from Kizzuwatna (СTH 757). In addition, there are reasons to think that Old Woman Å ilalluhi, who was responsible, at least in part, for the secondary adaptation of the Kuwattalla tradition, hailed from Kizzuwatna.10 It does not seem possible to discriminate between the Luwian passages emanating from Kizzuwatna and the Lower Land on purely linguistic grounds. A typical linguistic feature of this dialectal continuum is the proleptic construction, which will be addressed in more detail in §â¯2.2.11
The Hittite-Luwian fragments collected under CTH 764â766 can be subsumed under the label of the TauriÅ¡a tradition. They feature an unusual divine triad, namely, the Sun god, the goddess KamruÅ¡epa (probably the adaptation of the Hattian Katahzifuri), and their offspring, the Tutelary God of TauriÅ¡a (Mouton and Yakubovich 2021:38â40). While the Luwian Sun god Tiwad is also common in the Hittite/Luwian texts from Kizzuwatna/the Lower Land, the other two deities are not grouped with him there. The texts of the TauriÅ¡a tradition belong to the genre of conjurationsdefined by means if Hittite hukmaiÅ¡ or Akkadographic Å IPAT as opposed to the Sumerograms SISKUR(.SISKUR) âritualsâ or EZEN4 âfestivalsâ. Their Hittite colophons do not mention a specific performer but specify the occasion of their performanceâusually childbirth or childrenâs diseases. The beneficiaries of these performances are known as DUMU.NAM.LÃ.U19.LU, meaning âhuman childâ or âhuman being.â The conjurations are usually shorter than rituals, but their Luwian portions may contain not only incantations as such but also historiolae. The town of TauriÅ¡a was situated in northern Anatolia, probably to the northeast of HattuÅ¡a. The clitic particle /=wa/ is used frequently in TauriÅ¡a Luwian but not in Kizzuwatna Luwian, whereas the clitic particle /=gwa/ appears to represent an exclusive feature of TauriÅ¡a Luwian (Mouton and Yakubovich 2021:42â43).12
The Luwian dialect of HattuÅ¡a, which apparently spread through the Hittite Empire during the last century of its existence, was discussed in some detail in Yakubovich 2010:15â73 (but cf. Melchert 2003b:171â175). In cuneiform transmission, it manifests itself in Glossenkeil words and other Luwian foreign words occurring in Hittite texts. Presumably most of these forms reflect code mixing in dictation to HattuÅ¡a scribes, but some of them may have entered the scribal jargon. A borderline case consists of isolated Luwian forms in texts of Kizzuwatna inspiration: depending on whether they were written down by HattuÅ¡a or Kizzuwatna scribes, such texts may or may not feature HattuÅ¡a Luwian forms (cf. Chapter 15, §â¯5). The lack of cohesive cuneiform passages, or even sentences, written in HattuÅ¡a Luwian limits our abilities to investigate this dialect, but an innovation that separates it from both the Kizzuwatna/Lower Land continuum and TauriÅ¡a Luwian is the spread of the nom.pl.c. ending /-ntsi/ to acc.pl.c., at the expense of the inherited ending /-nts/. This feature is shared by the Luwian hieroglyphic texts from the Neo-Hittite states of the first millennium BCE, implying that their dialect (Late Luwian) was a descendant of HattuÅ¡a Luwian. Therefore, what is empirically observed as the Luwian dialect of HattuÅ¡a can alternatively be called Empire Luwian.13
The largest group of festival texts with Luwian (or Luwic) insertions addresses the celebrations that are associated with the towns of IÅ¡tanuwa and Lallupiya (CTHÂ 771â773). Both groups feature repeated indications that the participants sing (SÃR-RU) the Luwian passages, while the form /paju/ âmay he giveâ represents their common dialectal archaism.14 The location of the town of Lallupiya is unknown, but IÅ¡tanuwa is usually associated with the Sakarya river valley in the northwestern part of Anatolia. The choral singing accompanying the ritual acts in the IÅ¡tanuwa and Lallupiya traditions finds parallels in the texts of Hattian festivals and in archaic and classical Greece (Hutter-Braunsar 2022) but not in other Hittite-Luwian texts.15 Because the Luwian insertions in the texts of CTHÂ 771â773 are overwhelmingly short and only indirectly related to the Hittite matrix text, they are particularly difficult to interpret. Yet, based on what we know, it is highly likely that the dialect of IÅ¡tanuwa also represents an outlier among the dialects treated in this section. According to Melchert 2022, its idiosyncrasies concern phonology (the likely absence of the change *dw- > /kw-/), morphology (3sg.impv. ending -u), and semantics (=mi âto meâ used in a nonreflexive function).16 Those three cases must represent archaisms. The sociolinguistic and historical implications of this analysis are considered in the following section.
The discussion above should suffice to demonstrate that Luwian occupies a unique position among the ancient languages of Anatolia in the degree of its attested dialectal variation. The contrast with Hittite should be particularly clear: the matrix language of the texts of all of the four Luwian dialects hardly varies except for the geographically irrelevant distinction between Old, Middle, and New Hittite. The reason for this contrast is the erstwhile oral character of the embedded Luwian passages. The observed dialectal differences demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the Luwian language was spoken in several distinct areas of Asia Minor in the second half of the second millennium BCE.
1.3 The Location of Luwiya and Luwian Dialectal Filiation
As mentioned in §â¯1.1, the appellation Luwian, as applied to the language, is derived from the geographic name Luwiya. Therefore, determining the location of the land of Luwiya would directly impact the discussion of the Luwian homeland. Unfortunately, the land of Luwiya is mentioned only in the Hittite Laws, which complicates its identification. The laws distinguish between the land of Hatti (HattuÅ¡a), which constituted the core of the kingdom, and the lands of Luwiya and Pala, which were subject to certain legal provisions that did not apply elsewhere in the kingdom. For example, the murder of a merchant was generally punishable by a fine of 100 minas of silver, but the assailant was further expected to replace the merchantâs goods in the lands of Luwiya and Pala (Hoffner 1997:19). Abducting a free person from the land of Hatti and taking him or her to the land of Luwiya could lead to the summary confiscation of the abductorâs property, whereas the abduction of a Luwian national and the delivery of that person to the land of Hatti could be reversed by law but was not otherwise punished (Hoffner 1997:29â31). The most straightforward interpretation of this discrepancy is that the inhabitants of Luwiya and Pala enjoyed fewer legal protections in Hatti than the populace of its core area.
One consideration that helps to constrain the geographic location of Luwiya is its replacement with Arzawa in a passage of a late version of the Laws. Unfortunately, this cannot be taken as direct evidence, because the core area of Arzawa was demonstrably situated on the Aegean coast, which did not belong to Hattuša when the Hittite Laws were first recorded. It seems likely, however, that it reflects the assumed location of Luwiya on the western periphery of the Kingdom of Hattuša, which was contested with Arzawa at the time that the revised version of the Laws presumably came into being.17 Furthermore, it is possible that Purušhanda, an important town to the west of Kaneš/Neša and the westernmost destination of Old Assyrian trade, represented an important center of the Luwian-speaking area in the early second millennium BCE (Forlanini 2017:136 with fn. 77). Finally, the Hittite Laws describe Luwiya as a peripheral location under Hittite jurisdiction: the reward for bringing back a runaway slave increased progressively with distance, depending on whether the escapee was returned from a location nearby, this side of the river, that side of the river, Luwiya, or an enemy land (Hoffner 1997:32).18 The cumulative weight of these arguments supports the localization of Luwiya in the western part of the central Anatolian Plateau.
While the land of Luwiya arguably constituted the Luwian core area in the late third and early second millennium BCE, Luwian speakers must have spread throughout Anatolia by the time the Hittite Laws were composed. The absence of the toponym âLuwiyaâ in later Hittite texts arguably reflects its growing anachronism as a result of further Luwian migrations, some of which presumably correlated with the emergence and spread of the attested Luwian dialects. HattuÅ¡a Luwian probably developed last. Its first traces can be observed in the 14th century BCE (Yakubovich 2010:33â36). The spread of Luwian across the Antitaurus mountain range from the Lower Land to Kizzuwatna was possibly facilitated by the expeditions of HattuÅ¡ili I and MurÅ¡ili I to southeastern Anatolia in the 17th and 16th centuries BCE, although it is risky to link military campaigns to large-scale migrations.
A far more intriguing case is that of TauriÅ¡a Luwian, recently identified in Mouton and Yakubovich 2021. Mouton and Yakubovich suggest that Luwian speakers had a presence in the HattuÅ¡a region independently from their presence in the town. The TauriÅ¡a dialect is distinct from that of HattuÅ¡a, and its important isogloss is the high frequency of the particle =wa. This raises the possibility that the Luwian speakers who triggered the language shift in HattuÅ¡a in the 14th to 13th centuries BCE were not the newcomers from the Lower Land or Kizzuwatna but rather those who lived next door. The timing of the initial arrival of Luwians in north-central Anatolia is uncertain but possibly could be relegated to prehistory. This is not a new proposition: even before the identification of the TauriÅ¡a tradition, Goedegebuure (2008:171â174) argued that Luwian newcomers had triggered the syntactic restructuring of the Hattian language (cf. Chapter 15, §â¯3.1). An alternative solution would be interpreting the dialect of TauriÅ¡a as the outcome of a resettlement (or perhaps transportation) of the Luwian population under the direction of HattuÅ¡a in the historical period. The choice between these two solutions must take into consideration the contact-induced features of TauriÅ¡a Luwian (cf. §â¯2.2 below).
The adverb luwili introduces the Luwian insertions in the Kizzuwatna/Lower Land dialect as well as that of TauriÅ¡a. The absence of embedded cuneiform passages in HattuÅ¡a Luwian need not to imply that the adverb luwili was not used in connection with the utterances in the HattuÅ¡a dialect. There are texts in which this adverb introduces the direct speech of HattuÅ¡a residents, although it is rendered in Hittite (Yakubovich 2010:264â265). The cases of the Songs of IÅ¡tanuwa and Lallupiya are different. The lexeme luwili is not attested in this corpus, but the adverb iÅ¡tanumnili âin IÅ¡tanuwianâ is deployed once in connection with singing in CTH 772, albeit not in a Luwian context (Starke 1985:319 with fn. 117a). The implications of this finding do not seem to have been fully appreciated in earlier studies. The contrast between the expressions âhe sings in Luwian,â in KUB 35.1 and KUB 35.2(+), and âhe [s]ings in IÅ¡tanuwian,â in KUB 53.15+ ii 15â², suggests that the HattuÅ¡a scribes did not regard the IÅ¡tanuwa dialect as a variety of Luwian. From their perspective, âthe language of IÅ¡tanuwaâ had the same taxonomic status as âthe language of Luwiyaâ or âthe language of Pala.â19
Naturally, the HattuÅ¡a scribes may have been mistaken in their assumptions, but there are independent reasons to give them the benefit of the doubt. On the one hand, as mentioned in the previous section, the dialect of IÅ¡tanuwa is the most aberrant and archaic of the attested âLuwianâ dialects. On the other hand, while the land of Luwiya is a plausible starting point for the eastward migrations to the Lower Land and then Kizzuwatna, Luwian migrations to the north, to the Sakarya river valley, require special pleading.20 Without assuming such population movements, one may hypothesize that the dialect of IÅ¡tanuwa and Lallupiya belonged to the Luwic continuum but was distinct from Proto-Luwian, spoken further south in about 2000â¯BCE. If the region of IÅ¡tanuwa did not belong to Luwiya, its inhabitants had no reason to call themselves Luwians (whatever the term was in the Luwian language). If the people of IÅ¡tanuwa remained autochthonous at the time of the Luwian migrations, they had no reason to identify themselves with Luwiya at a later point either. The HattuÅ¡a scribes who recorded the festival of IÅ¡tanuwa may have been aware of this fact, but if they were familiar with Luwian, they may also have reacted to the perceived differences between the IÅ¡tanuwa dialect and the Luwian that they spoke/learned at home.
The formal implication of this hypothesis is that the term Ištanuwa Luwic is probably to be preferred to Ištanuwa Luwian. The distinction may seem to be hairsplitting, but the issue is nonetheless important given the parallel with the sociolinguistic situation in Arzawa. The Arzawa core area can be identified with the Meander (Menderes) valley and the region surrounding it, where the Carian and Lydian languages were spoken in the first millennium BCE. The Arzawa personal names transmitted in cuneiform are surely Luwic but structured differently than those associated with Hattuša Luwian, and there are no textual indications that the population of Arzawa spoke luwili. Caution dictates that one should not prejudge the question of whether the dialect of Arzawa is more closely related to Luwian or Carian, and therefore Arzawa Luwic was proposed as a neutral label (Yakubovich 2013:116). But if one extends the distinction between Luwian and Luwic to the second millennium BCE, the question of where and how to draw a boundary between the two arises. The only operational test appears to be the elicitation of contemporary judgment: only those second-millennium dialects that can be linked to the adverb luwili deserve to be called Luwian. The dialect of Ištanuwa fails such a test and thus emerges as the best-attested member of the Luwic dialectal continuum in the Late Bronze Age.
1.4 The Areal Context
The sheer size of the territory inhabited by Luwian speakers makes it impossible to generalize about their linguistic neighbors. Each Luwian community associated with a specific dialect must be treated on a case-by-case basis. The most obscure case is that of Luwiya, the supposed local homeland of the Luwians: we are not aware of other languages that were spoken in west-central Anatolia in the late third to early second millennium BCE. Projecting the situation backward from almost 1000 years later, one could argue that the western part of the Anatolian plateau had been settled by speakers of various Luwic dialects, such as IÅ¡tanuwian (cf. the previous section). We do not know whether non-Indo-European languages lingered in this area or whether the ancestors of the Lydians ventured east of the Aegean basin. Proto-Luwian was probably in contact with pre-Hittite in the east, but the effects of this contact are inferable from Hittite rather than Luwian data (Melchert 2020a:245).21
We are on firmer ground when we turn to the sociolinguistic situation in southeast Anatolia. Although the Hurrians were newcomers to Asia Minor,22 they were established in this area by the early second millennium BCE. We know from the archives of KaneÅ¡ that part of this territory once belonged to the kingdom of Maâama. Its ruler, who bore the Hurrian name Anum-hirbe, corresponded and presumably shared a common border with WarÅ¡ama, king of KaneÅ¡ (Miller 2001). One of the major urban centers ruled by Anum-hirbe was HaÅ¡Å¡u, probably once situated in the area of modern Gaziantep. There are reasons to believe that HaÅ¡Å¡u and its vicinity constituted one of the important Hurrian cultural centres (Wilhelm 2008:190â193). HattuÅ¡ili I retaliated for the Hurrian raids into central Anatolia by conquering and plundering HaÅ¡Å¡u, and his reign may be regarded as the start of substantial Hittite (and presumably Luwian) presence in this region.
We know little about the ethnolinguistic landscape of the Cilician Plains in the first quarter of the second millennium BCE because no indigenous sources are available to us from this period (Novák 2010:401â402).23 However, it seems probable that Luwian speakers arrived in this area in the first half of the second millennium BCE, an event that may or may not have been connected with the military campaigns of HattuÅ¡ili I and MurÅ¡ili I in southeastern Anatolia and Syria.24 Around 1500â¯BCE, the Cilician Plains and adjacent parts of southeastern Anatolia gained independence from Hatti and came to be known as the kingdom of Kizzuwatna, which became a dependency of the Hurrian kingdom of Mittani later in the 15th century BCE (Miller 2004:7). The incorporation of Kizzuwatna into Hatti around 1400â¯BCE sparked interest in Kizzuwatnean religion and culture at the court of HattuÅ¡a. The accumulation of Hurrian and Hittite-Hurrian compositions attributed to Kizzuwatna practitioners was a manifestation of this curiosity.
Although we have no evidence for Semitic population groups settled in southeastern Anatolia in large numbers, both Akkadian and West Semitic must have constituted an important part of the cultural context of this region from the early second millennium BCE. The West Semitic (Amorite) population was linguistically dominant in Syria; the kingdom of Yamhad, which had its center in Aleppo, probably maintained close commercial ties with Cilicia.25 The Assyrian trade network controlled commerce to the east of Cilicia, presumably including the area of HaÅ¡Å¡u, and to its north (on the other side of the Antitaurus Mountains). The demise of the Assyrian trade in the 18th century and the disintegration of Yamhad a century later may have affected commerce, but by that time Akkadian had become the language of cuneiform literacy in Anatolia. Presumably it continued to play this role, alongside Hurrian, in the short-lived kingdom of Kizzuwatna (Yakubovich 2010:274â275). In contrast, Hittite and Luwian had little influence on the West Semitic vernaculars of Syria after Hatti conquered northwestern Syria during the reign of Å uppiluliuma I (mid-fourteenth century BCE) and established residencies in KarkemiÅ¡ and Aleppo.
The situation in north-central Anatolia must have been quite different. The Hattians are generally believed to have inhabited this area before the Indo-European migrations. An Indo-European population group that settled there in prehistoric times consisted of Proto-Palaic speakers. This is suggested by the cumulative evidence of several interference features between Palaic and Hattian, although few of these features are conclusive individually (cf. Chapter 13, §â¯2.3). The advance of the Hittites to the area of HattuÅ¡a and its surroundings is supported by historical sources. The advance began in the mid-18th century BCE, during the reign of Anitta, who boasted of razing HattuÅ¡a to the ground, although the integration of the Hittite and Hattian elites, which culminated in the rebuilding of HattuÅ¡a, probably was not achieved until the following century. After Luwian speakers settled in the same milieu, they must also have interacted with their new neighbors. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the Luwian texts of the TauriÅ¡a tradition show parallelisms with Hattian, Hittite, and Palaic texts at the level of narrative formulae (Mouton and Yakubovich 2021:44â46) and that the linguistic structure of New Hittite underwent numerous changes under the influence of HattuÅ¡a Luwian (Rieken 2006, cf. Chapter 14, §â¯3.4).
Yet the contact-induced features of Luwian dialects need not conform only to the observed areal configurations: they can also reflect the migration itineraries associated with the speakers of particular dialects or elucidate the status of the respective dialects in multilingual societies. We will address contact-induced features through this lens in the remaining sections of the present chapter.
2 Contact-Induced Changes
2.1 Loanwords in Luwian
This discussion of lexical transfers into the Luwian language is based on two recent publications. Simon (2020b) provides a meticulous update on loanwords from Hurrian vis-Ã -vis the state of affairs described in Starke 1990 and Melchert 1993. Melchert (DCL) accepts most of Simonâs conclusions in his new dictionary and offers a parallel revision of data on borrowings from other languages. The list below is based on Melchert 2022, with the omission of some examples whose status is less assured, slight semantic modification of certain others, the adaptation of Luwian nominal stems to the style of the ACLT project.26
This brief survey confirms the impression that Hurrian constitutes the principal source of loanwords in Luwian. As already illustrated in detail in Starke 1990:210â221, most Hurrian nouns whose stems ended in -e/i, were adapted to the class of neuter it-stems when borrowed into Luwian (cf. Chapter 14, §â¯5). The same is true of Akkadian loanwords, several of which are suspected of having been borrowed via Hurrian. From the semantic viewpoint, the majority of borrowed nouns designate transferrable artifacts (such as vessels or items of furniture) or refer to technical terms used in rituals and divination. The predominance of inanimate nouns in (a) and (b) must have facilitated their adaptation as neuter stems in Luwian. The adjectives and verbs belonging to these groups are formed using Luwian denominative suffixes, which do not represent obvious adaptations of any source language forms and therefore presumably reflect language-internal derivation.27
A lesser-known fact about Hurrian and Akkadian loanwords is the lack of their correlation with the Kizzuwatna Luwian dialect. The number of Empire Luwian loanwords in (a) and (b) is comparable to that of Kizzuwatna Luwian loanwords.28 If we were to limit our Kizzuwatna Luwian corpus to actual Luwian passages (as opposed to the isolated Luwian foreign words and loanwords embedded in Hittite texts), then the number of Hurrian loanwords in Kizzuwatna Luwian would be even more modest: just one borrowed noun in -it-, namely, hamrit-, could be assigned to Kizzuwatna Luwian under such a procedure (see below in this section). But, as was already mentioned in §â¯1.2, the Luwian foreign words in Hittite texts primarily reflect code-switching in dictation or adoption into scribal jargon, rather than being vestiges of Luwian texts translated into Hittite.
The conclusion to be drawn is that the nouns in -it-, constituting the bulk of Hurrian and Akkado-Hurrian loanwords in Luwian, were primarily transferred in the milieu of the elites and literati, whether in Kizzuwatna or Hattuša. In the light of this, their status is similar to that of the bulk of Hurrian loanwords in Hittite. This implies, however, that the borrowed nominal it-stems cannot be attributed to a particular Luwian dialect, but rather represent features of a sociolect. The Hurrian technical terms for rituals and divination imply specialized knowledge, while the mobile property items with Hurrian names can be interpreted as luxury goods circulating as wealth finance. Judging by the situation in Hattuša, the literati were primarily recruited from social elites, so there is no contradiction between the two categories. The likely political context for the acquisition of Hurrian loanwords at the court of Hattuša was the annexation of Kizzuwatna between the late 15th and early 14th century BCE.
The residue of the Hurrian, Akkadian, and West Semitic loanwords in Luwian incantations is too meager to draw firm conclusions regarding the circumstances of their transfer. These are hÄpiri(ya/i)- âof the bedouin, seminomadsâ, hamrit- âcult-house, sanctuaryâ, nakkuÅ¡Å¡Ähit- âscapegoat riteâ, nakkuÅ¡Å¡Ä(i)- âto perform a scapegoat riteâ, *Å¡aur(a)- âtool/weaponâ (in a compound waÅ¡ha-Å¡aur(a)-), zammitÄt(i)- âgritsâ, and halal(i)- âpureâ. If anything, they show that the Hurrian and Akkadian superstrate influences on Kizzuwatna Luwian were diminishing rapidly outside of royal circles. It is remarkable that all of these lexemes, except for *Å¡aur(a)- and zammitÄt(i)-, have cognates in Hittite and/or HattuÅ¡a Luwian.29
The clearest example of an exclusive transfer from Akkadian to Kizzuwatna Luwian is the adaptation of the term for a ritual patron. Its cultural background was the widespread character of privately commissioned rituals that were carried out by reputable practitioners in both Kizzuwatna and the Lower Land. The Akkadian bÄl niqê, literally âlord of the offerings,â was translated word for word into Luwian as /malxassassis *nijas/ (usually spelled malhaÅ¡Å¡aÅ¡Å¡iÅ¡ EN-aÅ¡). The calque acquired the terminological meaning âritual patronâ (i.e., a private commissioner of a religious performance) and became very frequent in the texts of Luwian incantations. In contrast, a unitary term, aÅ¡huÅ¡ikkunni, was coined for âritual patronâ in Hurrian, while the Sumerogram EN SISKUR had the same role in Hittite scribal jargon but apparently without a stable phonetic reading.30 The seemingly isolated character of this calque probably results from the fact that Mesopotamian and Hurrian influences on Kizzuwatna Luwian phraseology have yet to be addressed in the same detail as lexical transfers.
Another surprise is the relatively small number of Hittite/Hattian loanwords in Luwian and their lack of correlation with the northern Anatolian Tauriša tradition.31 The only borrowing attested in Tauriša Luwian is parnink(i)- (a disease), supposedly of Hattian origin. A partial explanation for this state of affairs is the parochial character of Tauriša conjurations, which are not associated with a state cult or reputable performers. Yet, even under such conditions, if the local Luwian community formed an enclave within a multilingual region for an extended period, one would expect to find more adstrate interference in the preserved texts. The next section offers a full account of this seeming mismatch.
2.2 Structural Interference
Since Luwian texts are attested across vast tracts of Asia Minor and beyond and span the period between the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, the Luwian language is frequently invoked in discussing contact-induced changes in the region. In some instances, such changes are common to several languages and are best discussed in the context of the Anatolian linguistic area. To this category belong, for example, the second-millennium constraint on word-initial r- (Kocharov and Shatskov 2021), the neutralization of the voiceless/voiced (or fortis/lenis) distinction in word-initial obstruents (Melchert 2020a:274â275), and the grammaticalization of possessive adjectives (Luraghi 1998). Such phenomena will not be discussed here in any detail as this will be done in Chapter 15. There is likewise little point in addressing here instances of structural interference in which Luwian is the donor language because such a discussion is most appropriate in the chapters devoted to the respective target languages. We will instead concentrate on two structural changes that cut across the Luwian dialectal area and are thus conducive to refining our understanding of Luwian dialectal prehistory.
The first isogloss is verbal fronting, which is observed on a number of Luwian incantations from Kizzuwatna and the Lower Land and reconstructed in Lycian A. In Luwian, this syntactic configuration is frequently accompanied by the use of cataphoric second-position clitics, which double the subjects of intransitive clauses and the objects of transitive clauses. For example, KBo 29.6(+) i 23â²â24â² awidu=pa=aÅ¡=ta ma[l]haÅ¡Å¡aÅ¡Å¡iÅ¡ EN-aÅ¡ ha[ratnÄti] waÅ¡kulimmÄ[ti] can be literally translated as âMay he come, (namely,) the ritual patron, from offense and fault,â and KBo 29.3+ iii 17â² ma[m]malway=an EN SÃSKUR-iÅ¡ adduwalin EME-in as âMay (he) crush it, the ritual patron, (namely,) the evil tongue.â The pragmatic reason for verbal fronting is usually the alignment of the predicate with the topic or narrow focus.32 This innovation is synchronically restricted to the Luwian incantations of the Puriyanni and Kuwattalla/Å ilalluhi traditions but can also be reconstructed in Tunnawiya and MaÅ¡tigga rituals, where it occurs in the texts of Hittite incantations that presumably were translated from Luwian (Rieken 2011:500â502).
At the same time, the construction with verbal fronting must be reconstructed as a core feature of the ancestor language of Lycian A.33 Such an approach appears unavoidable to account for the phenomenon of Lycian nasalized preterits, the forms that regularly appear in transitive clauses after the particle m(e)=, in contrast to the preterits without nasalization deployed in other contexts (Adiego 2015:8). An important correlate of the same distribution is the tendency to place the verb before the subject in sentences with the nasalized preterit (âImbert-Garrettâs Ruleâ). Thus, TL 103.1 ebẽñnẽ : xupã : m=ene : prñnawatẽ : tebursseli âThis tomb, the one to build it (was) Tebursseliâ contrasts with TL 40a.1 [p]ajawa : manax[in]e : prñn[a]wate : prñn[aw]ã : ebẽñnẽ âPajawa (titled) Manaknine built this building.â The construction illustrated by TL 103.1 is very frequent in the Lycian A corpus, and the use of the nasalized preterit is a grammatical rule in such constructions.
Adiego (2015:26) persuasively argued that âat a certain point in the prehistory of Lycian ⦠verb-âfrontingâ implied a clitic doubling.â At that point, the virtual archetype of TL 103.1 would have the shape *prñnawat(e)=ẽ tebursseli ebẽñnẽ xupã â(He) built it, Tebursseli, (namely) this tombâ. What eventually emerged as the marker of the nasalized preterit, must then have been an object clitic in its expected second position. This construction is, of course, parallel to the Luwian one âMay (he) crush it, the ritual patron, (namely) the evil tongueâ (see above in this section), and nothing contradicts the assumption that it was already present in the dialect of the Lukka tribes, the ancestors of the Lycians, in the second millennium BCE. The use of the particle m(e)= and the left dislocation of the topic in front of this must be regarded as subsequent inner-Lycian innovations. This secondary process was likewise accompanied by clitic doubling involving =ene âitâ, or its allomorphs
The Luwian dialectal change, particularly its Lycian counterpart, signal a radical departure from the consistent verb-final word order reconstructed for Proto-Anatolian and typical of Hittite, Palaic, Tauriša Luwian, and Late Luwian. The fact that verbal fronting was accompanied by clitic doubling in both Luwian and Lycian suggests that we are dealing with a common innovation, not merely two typologically similar changes.34 Yet its dialectal distribution represents a challenge. Even in the Kizzuwatna/Lower Land dialectal continuum, verb fronting remained an optional device, governed by pragmatic factors, as did clitic doubling in sentences with verb fronting. This speaks against treating the similar change in Proto-Lycian as an outcome of language shift; moreover, the acquisition of Proto-Lycian by Luwian dialectal speakers lacks historical support. The opposite scenario, namely the language shift in Kizzuwatna and the Lower Land imposed by the Lukka tribes, is even less likely because such a migration of the Lukka tribes would have been reflected in the historical sources of the second millennium BCE. It seems most probable that the construction with verb fronting and clitic doubling originated somewhere in southern Anatolia and then spread across a large area as a pragmatic device in a situation of language maintenance. This hypothesis implies that the dialectal continuum of the Luwic languages remained transparent for such innovations; that is, the ancestor of Lycian A and the neighboring Luwian dialects must have remained mutually understandable.
Another areal isogloss of interest for Luwian dialect geography is the possessive construction with a plural possessor, which was first described in Melchert 2000. The Luwian possessive adjective in /-ass(a/i)-/ dialectally inserts a special morpheme /-nts-/ between the possessive suffix and the ending to mark the plurality of the possessor. The suffix /-nts-/, however, has a limited functional distribution: it is compatible only with the endings of nom.-acc.pl.n., dat.sg., dat.pl., and instr. For example, the Luwian term for the âlord of the offeringsâ is malhaÅ¡Å¡-aÅ¡Å¡i-Å¡ EN-aÅ¡, as discussed in the previous section, but its dative plural form is malhaÅ¡Å¡-aÅ¡Å¡a-nz-anza EN-anza: literally, âto the lords of the offerings.â Both the placement of the morpheme /-ants-/ after the possessive marker (the etymological genitive case ending) and its restricted paradigmatic distribution are typologically unusual and call for a historical explanation.35
In Yakubovich 2010:51â53, it was argued that the Luwian instrumental forms in /-assa-nts-adi/, the most frequent ending signaling the plurality of the possessor, represented the starting point for the formation of the new construction. More specifically, /-ants-adi/ was added on top of the pre-existing possessive construction as a calque of the Hurrian =až=Äe, the dedicated possessive instrumental form marking the plurality of the possessor. The morpheme =až= normally functions as the plural marker in Hurrian, although in this case it absorbed the genitive marker =ve= through a historical sound change (*=až=ve=Äe > =až=Äe). Accordingly, it was calqued by the Luwian plural marker /-nts-/, while the instrumental ending /-adi/ represents the expected calque of its Luwian counterpart =Äe. The calque outlined above represents an instance of structural imposition, likely to be implemented during a language shift from Hurrian to Luwian. Later the morpheme /-nts-/ was extended by analogy to other Luwian forms marking plural possession, but only in those cases where its combination with the subsequent inflectional endings would not generate inadmissible consonant clusters.
The hypothesis outlined above was premised on the assumption that the morphological expression of the plurality of the possessor was limited to the Kizzuwatna dialect of Luwian.36 This claim, however, was no longer tenable after the identification of the TauriÅ¡a tradition in Mouton and Yakubovich 2021. In that tradition we find an incontestable example of the relevant construction, namely, KUB 35.103(+) iii 10 wa!-ya-am-ma-na ú-li-ip-na-aÅ¡-Å¡a-an-za âwayamana of the wolvesâ (cf. ibid. iv 9 [ú-li]-ip-na-aÅ¡-Å¡a-an-[za]), also the probable restoration KBo 29.52 r. col. 4â² a-pa-aÅ¡-Å¡a-a[n-za-a]n pár-n[i] âin/to their houseâ and the possessive adjective KUB 35.90 r. col. 7â² dUTU-Å¡a-an-za-a[n] âof the Sun godsâ (dat.pl.) in a broken context. Furthermore, the sequence malhaÅ¡Å¡=aÅ¡Å¡a=nz=anza EN-anza âto the lords of the offeringsâ and other relevant case forms of the same phrase, although nominally occurring in Kizzuwatna/Lower Land incantations, can be reinterpreted as scribal insertions because the ritual patron was presumably called by name in the actual performance. There are reasons to believe that at least the ritual texts attributed to Kuwattalla were first recorded in HattuÅ¡a (Yakubovich 2010:277â278).
In Mouton and Yakubovich 2021:49, this new evidence was taken as an argument for the pandialectal character of marking the plurality of the possessor in Bronze Age Luwian. While formally possible, such a hypothesis does not illuminate the distribution pattern of the relevant construction, which has no counterpart in Late Luwian or Lycian.37 An alternative way of coping with the new facts is admitting the diffusion of the construction from Kizzuwatna to the Lower Land, Hattuša, and Tauriša. However, the horizontal transfer must have had a strong sociolinguistic motivation: the possessive construction with a plural possessor is too unusual and asymmetrical to have been borrowed solely for convenience reasons.
An assumption necessary to maintain the calque from Hurrian is the status of the language of the incantations as the Kizzuwatna Luwian koiné. The historical trigger of its formation would be the interaction among the itinerant Old Women and other ritual practitioners. A handy typological parallel is the formation of the Greek epic language as a result of interactions among the rhapsodes. In sociolinguistic terms, the language of the incantations was akin to a professional jargon (Fachsprache), although it must have been passively familiar to the potential patrons to ensure the success of the rituals.38 Naturally, its spread need not have respected political boundaries: if the ritual specialists of the Lower Land belonged to the same professional community as the Kizzuwatna ritualists, they would have been likely to avail themselves of the same ritual language. This would mean learning not only formulae and stylistic devices but also certain grammatical structures, such as the possessive construction marking the plurality of the possessor.
At the same time, just as one investigates the dialectal background of the Greek epic language, it is appropriate to inquire into the dialectal origin of the Kizzuwatna Luwian ritual language. To maintain the hypothesis of the Hurrian calque, one is forced to assume that the Luwian dialect of former Hurrian speakers played a key role in the formation of the new koiné. Although Simon (2016:326) makes a valid point that the precise area where the Hurrian speakers shifted to Luwian remains elusive, there is a linguistic argument for the presence of Hurrians in Kizzuwatna well before Mittani began to exercise influence in this region. As stressed in Trameri 2020:333â336, the dialect of the Hurrian texts emanating from Kizzuwatna and preserved in the archives of HattuÅ¡a is distinct from that of the Mittani letter found in El Amarna. Moreover, some of the Hurrian texts have idiosyncratic dialectal features. Therefore, the language shift from Hurrian to Luwian in Kizzuwatna (perhaps in its eastern part) remains the default hypothesis. It can be claimed with more certainty that the Hurrian and Luwian ritual traditions interacted with each other in the same region in the mid-second millennium BCE.39
The marking of the plural possessor in the expression âlord of the offeringsâ can be explained through the hypothesis that the Hittite-Luwian rituals were first recorded by Kizzuwatna scribes. The presence of such a scribal group in the chancery of HattuÅ¡a is not a new idea; the activity of âsouthernâ scribes was linked with the Luwian foreign words in Hittite texts in Güterbock 1956b:138. This hypothesis did not stand the test of time because the dialect of those Luwian foreign words turned out to be distinct from the Kizzuwatna dialect (cf. §â¯1.2). There is, however, a different argument that points in the same direction, namely, the presence of Hurrian loanwords in Luwian in Hittite texts that have no apparent connections with the Kizzuwatna or Hurrian milieus (cf. §â¯2.1). The easiest explanation for the extension of the Kizzuwatna scribal jargon to the HattuÅ¡a chancery would be the transfer of some Kizzuwatna scribes to HattuÅ¡a in the wake of Kizzuwatnaâs annexation. Yet if one faced the task of recording Hittite-Luwian rituals emanating from Kizzuwatna or the adjacent regions, it would be only natural to involve scribes of Kizzuwatna extraction familiar with the local variety of Luwian. As long as the Kizzuwatna scribes were able to imitate the language of the oral performers, they would insert the forms in /-assa-nts-/ where appropriate, including into the expression âlord of the offerings.â40
Finally, the use of the same forms in the TauriÅ¡a tradition could reflect the dialect of a Luwian population group that migrated or was transported from Kizzuwatna. Such a solution may seem ad hoc at first glance but gains in attractivity when weighed against the possible alternatives. If the population of TauriÅ¡a had spoken Luwian since the prehistoric period, it would be reasonable to expect a considerable degree of interference between the local dialect and Hittite/Hattian. However, this is not the case: the only likely loanword in this corpus is parnink(i)-, a word for a disease, which was supposedly borrowed from Hattian (cf. §â¯2.1). The hypothesis that the Luwian presence in TauriÅ¡a derived from populations transported from Arzawa or a late language shift has even less to recommend it: some fragments belonging to the TauriÅ¡a tradition are written in Middle Script (Mouton and Yakubovich 2021:41). This leaves us with the late 15th to early 14th century BCE as the most likely period for the Luwian resettlement in the region of TauriÅ¡a; what we know of Anatolian political history in this period would favor Kizzuwatna as its starting point. Granted, we have no written accounts of mass migrations or transportations from Kizzuwatna to HattuÅ¡a in the wake of the formerâs annexation, but this could be due to the extreme scarcity of historical sources addressing the circumstances of this political event. We do know, however, of the integration of Kizzuwatna texts into the archives of HattuÅ¡a (Yakubovich 2010:275, summarizing Miller 2004a); we have reason to believe that Kizzuwatna scribes were relocated to HattuÅ¡a as well (see above in this section); and we know that the Kizzuwatnean Goddess of the Night was split and reinstalled in Å amuha (Miller 2004a:259â439).41 Against such a background, there is nothing counterintuitive in the hypothesis that the rulers of Hatti would draw upon the population of their new province to compensate for the people they had lost to the KaÅ¡ka ravages in the north.42
As mentioned in §â¯1.2, the anonymous TauriÅ¡a conjurations contrast the Kizzuwatna Luwian rituals attributed to reputable professionals, so it would not be unexpected if they also differed in the linguistic register used. The deviations of TauriÅ¡a Luwian from the ritual language of Kizzuwatna may have a twofold explanation. First, if the population to be resettled in TauriÅ¡a was recruited in a particular town or region of Kizzuwatna, then certain features of TauriÅ¡a Luwian could reflect the colloquial speech of that town/region rather than the standardized ritual language. Second, some of the innovations that characterize TauriÅ¡a Luwian may have come into being in the northern Anatolian milieu. This explanation is particularly likely in the instance of the clitic particle /=wa/, which spread beyond its original quotative function in TauriÅ¡a Luwian and was grammaticalized as clause-demarcational particle in HattuÅ¡a/Empire Luwian (Mouton and Yakubovich 2021:42â43). All else being equal, these two phenomena should be considered together as evidence for a new dialectal continuum but do not constitute an argument for a common substrate and thus are compatible with the scenario of secondary convergence.
3 The Status of Luwian in Time and Space
The present section focuses on the chronological presentation of sociolinguistic issues related to Luwian dialects attested in cuneiform transmission, representing an update to their treatment in Yakubovich 2010 in the light of more recent discoveries. At the same time, it summarizes the new hypotheses advanced in the preceding sections. For presentation clarity, their limitations will not be addressed here; alternatives are mentioned in the preceding sections.
We know little about the status of Luwian at the time of the Old Assyrian colonies in Asia Minor but can make educated guesses. The Luwian lexical borrowings, attested in both Old Hittite and Old Assyrian (Melchert 2020a:242â243), suggest that Luwian was the principal language in one of the urban centers associated with Assyrian trade. The most common identification of the center is PuruÅ¡handa, which was situated in the western part of the central Anatolian plateau. Linguistically, Luwian was one of several closely related Luwic dialects spoken contemporaneously in large areas of western Asia Minor; others included IÅ¡tanuwa Luwic, Arzawa Luwic, and Proto-Lycian. Whether the Luwian language functioned as superstrate or adstrate for KaneÅ¡ite Hittite is an open question, but the Luwian personal names attested in Old Assyrian sources suggest that it could be heard on the streets of KaneÅ¡ and was associated there with an integrated minority group (Giusfredi 2020b:250â251).43
At some point in the early second millennium BCE, the Luwian homeland was incorporated into a larger state, conventionally known as the Hittite kingdom or Hatti. A known historical event that could have produced such a result was the peaceful submission of a king of PuruÅ¡handa to Anitta, ruler of KaneÅ¡ (cf. Yakubovich 2010:245), but the Hittite Laws (cf. §â¯1.3) provide the definitive evidence for incorporation. The Luwians had lesser legal status than âthe men of Hattiâ in the new polity, and their language probably was less prestigious than Hittite. Nevertheless, Luwian and/or Luwic incantations are embedded in the descriptions of the Old Hittite festivals, sometimes next to those in the Palaic language.44 There were also individuals with Luwian names among the early Hatti kings, although some were interlopers (Yakubovich 2010:251â252).
The migrations of Luwian speakers to Cilicia and the surrounding regions must likewise be dated to the early second millennium BCE, although how and the extent to which the migrations correlated with the military campaigns of Hatti in southeastern Anatolia and Syria is unknown (cf. Trameri 2020:113â117). There is independent evidence for the early presence of Hurrian speakers in this region, and some must have shifted to Luwian, as suggested by the restructuring of the Luwian possessive construction (cf. §â¯2.2). The Luwians probably constituted the majority of the population of the kingdom of Kizzuwatna, founded in the late 16th century BCE and centered in Cilicia (Trameri 2020:332â333). A peculiarity of Kizzuwatna culture was the prominence of privately sponsored rituals, which were associated with reputable practitioners. This practice can be contrasted with the state-sponsored religious festivals that were typical of HattuÅ¡a and the surrounded region. The Kizzuwatna Luwian ritual language, which presumably developed in the circles of itinerant ritualists and spread to the eastern part of the Lower Land, incorporated innovations such as the construction with verbal fronting (cf. §â¯2.2.).
In the 15th century BCE, Kizzuwatna became a vassal state of the Hurrian kingdom of Mittani, which may have contributed to the increasing use of Hurrian among the local elites. The historical correlate of this process was the archiving of Hurrian and Hittite-Hurrian compositions, while its linguistic correlate was the considerable number of technical loanwords from Hurrian that entered Luwian (cf. §â¯2.1). An argument for their technical character is the restricted use of Hurrian loanwords in Luwian incantations, as opposed to the Hittite/Luwian scribal jargon.
The Luwian language became more prevalent in HattuÅ¡a and its vicinity after the annexation of Kizzuwatna by Hatti in the late 15th or early 14th century BCE. Kizzuwatna scribes, apparently recruited by the HattuÅ¡a chancery, brought with them their version of Luwian, which was replete with technical loanwords from Hurrian. In addition, some Kizzuwatna communities were probably resettled on the northern frontier of Hatti. Since they must have consisted mostly of farmers and artisans, they would have spoken local dialects and been largely unfamiliar with the ritual language of Kizzuwatna. One of the resettlement destinations was the town of TauriÅ¡a, which later became associated with a distinct Luwian dialect attested through anonymous conjurations (cf. §â¯1.2 and §â¯2.2). After the incorporation of Kizzuwatna, the HattuÅ¡a chancery undertook an ambitious project of recording Luwian rituals from Kizzuwatna and the Lower Land. In some of the texts, the incantations were recorded in the local variety of Luwian. They were presumably collected from local ritual specialists, who acted as informants (Melchert 2020a:239â240).
In the early 14th century BCE, the sociolinguistic situation in the town of HattuÅ¡a was characterized by widespread multilingualism. One piece of evidence for such a conclusion is a Hittite instruction for the royal bodyguard, composed around 1400â¯BCE. A gold spearman is to receive an order in an unspecified language, presumably Hittite, and then transmit it to the ordinary spearmen in Luwian (Miller 2013:100, 121). This suggests that the use of Luwian was still associated with a lower social status. However, the syllabic values of Anatolian hieroglyphs, first attested through inscriptions shortly before 1400â¯BCE, speak in favor of acrophony (rebus derivation) based on both Hittite and Luwian lexemes, although the latter were arguably more numerous (Valério 2018 with ref.).45 This implies that some Luwian native speakers entered the circles of scholar-scribes. This is also the period when the term luwili first appears in Hittite texts, even though the place-name Luwiya is no longer used in contemporary compositions.
We do not have evidence to establish whether the shifting balance between Hittite and Luwian in and around HattuÅ¡a in this period was primarily due to the migrations from Kizzuwatna. It is, however, clear that the Luwian dialects attested in northern Anatolia differ from the ritual language of Kizzuwatna. The simplest explanation for this is that the Luwian migrations had several starting points, which resulted in the transfer of the colloquial dialects of the respective communities (some of which, but not necessarily all, had been spoken in Kizzuwatna). The interaction between these groups led to the leveling of dialectal differences and the formation of the new koiné that we call HattuÅ¡a Luwian (cf. §â¯1.2). it seems to have been a vernacular, some of whose speakers also learned Hittite to improve their social status. Imperfect learning of Hittite by Luwian native speakers manifested itself in the contact-induced restructuring of New Hittite (cf. Chapter 15, §â¯3.4).
Although Hittite continued to be a language of high prestige until the abandonment of Hattuša, the Hittite elites must have felt increasing pressure to learn Hattuša Luwian as it became the local lingua franca. A linguistic shift from Hittite to Luwian took place during the 13th century BCE.46 By the end of the century, it culminated in the use of irregular Hittite forms, indicating, at this point, not a changing grammatical norm but rather a continuum of imperfect learning (Cotticelli-Kurras and Giusfredi 2018:185). This pattern signals the prevalence of native Luwian speakers among the scribes but also suggests a gradual deterioration of the system of scribal training, which no longer guaranteed the uniformity of written Hittite. The use of Glossenkeil words must have reflected the practice of code mixing at the court of Hattuša: in the bilingual setting, scribes, officials, and even kings would have felt free to use Luwian expressions when they could not come up with a Hittite equivalent or wanted to vary their discourse.
Luwian became the main spoken language in HattuÅ¡a in the 13th century BCE. In addition to its impact on New Hittite and use as the language of hieroglyphic literacy, the analysis of local onomastics supports its native transmission in HattuÅ¡a. Although both Hittite and Luwian names are mentioned in connection with the local elites in 13th-century sources, the latter names are more numerous (Weeden 2013). One commonly finds onomastic compounds containing theophoric elements or epithets as their first elements and the recurrent Luwian second elements -ziti âmanâ, -muwa âstrengthâ, -piya âgiveâ, -wiya âsendâ, etc. (Yakubovich 2013:98â108).47 The widespread colloquial use of HattuÅ¡a Luwian is confirmed by its resilience: after the abandonment of HattuÅ¡a and the extinction of the Hittite language, its evolved form (Late Luwian) was maintained as the official written language of the so-called âNeo-Hittiteâ states in southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria. The other Luwian dialects attested in the Bronze Age disappear from the radar screen with the demise of cuneiform script in Asia Minor, but they could have survived for several more centuries in local illiterate communities.
The research on this paper was conducted under the auspices of the project âLuwGramm: A Grammar of the Luwian Language,â co-directed by Elisabeth Rieken and Ilya Yakubovich and funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (RIÂ 1730/11â1 and YAÂ 472/3â1). The author of the present chapter is grateful to Stephen Durnford, Alvise Matessi, Craig Melchert, and Andrea Trameri, who read the first draft of this manuscript and contributed to its improvement, although the author naturally bears the sole responsibility for the remaining shortcomings.
The adverbial suffix -li is not limited to the derivatives of language names but also occurs in other Hittite modal adverbs, e.g., Å¡iunili âlike a godâ, UR.BAR.RA-ili âlike a wolfâ. The adverb [GU]4.MAH-li âlike a bullâ is possibly attested in IÅ¡tanuwa Luwic (KBo 4.11 obv. 30). Furthermore, the suffix -li may be cognate with the Lydian dative ending -
Compare and contrast Hawkins 2003:130: âThese Luwian âtextsâ are mostly passages of the language quoted in Hittite texts as incantations and cultic songs, thus not especially coherent or intelligible, also not usually well preserved.â The more optimistic tone of the present account is meant to reflect the progress in the interpretation of Luwian cuneiform texts achieved in the last decades.
A different explanation offered for the unexpected word-initial plene spellings in Luwian (Simon 2010a)âthat they were used as markers of a glottal stop in this positionâcurrently remains sub judice. In particular, one may note the lack of systematic overlap between this scribal device and the use of word-initial â¨Ã¡â© in hieroglyphic texts, which likewise has been claimed to represent a combination with the word-initial glottal stop (Kloekhorst 2004).
For an in-depth discussion of this phenomenon and a representative list of Glossenkeil words occurring in a variety of textual genres, see van den Hout 2007.
For attempts to address the Luwian language in cuneiform transmission that predated the publication of all of the relevant primary sources, see Hawkins 2003:130.
The term âLuwicâ was coined by H. Craig Melchert for the subgroup of the Anatolian languages comprising Luwian and its closest relatives (Melchert 2003b;177, fn. 7) and has been widely accepted among modern Anatolianists. The earlier term âLuwian languages,â which had the same meaning, would be confusing in discussing the Luwian dialects treated in this section. A controversial topic is whether the second-millennium dialects of Luwian and Luwic can be differentiated (cf. § 1.3).
Compare DCL, which treats the dialects of Kizzuwatna and the Lower Land as independent entities and classifies the Songs of Lallupiya as a separate dialect. Melchertâs classification appears to be driven by the desire to provide the maximum number of geographic attributions to the available forms. For the earlier research on Luwian dialects, see Rieken 2017a:301â302.
Although there is only a single, sentence-long Luwian passage attested in a ritual explicitly attributed to Tunnawiya (Starke 1985:43â46), two other fragments with Luwian insertions can be added to the Tunnawiya tradition through textual comparison (Pisaniello 2015b).
Old Woman Å ilalluhi is probably to be identified with the âperformer from Zilunaâ in KBo 29.3+ i 1, a fragment assuredly belonging to the Kuwattalla tradition; the town of Ziluna was situated along a road from HattuÅ¡a to KarkemiÅ¡, i.e., within or near the borders of Kizzuwatna (cf. Sasseville 2020a:113). Furthermore, the practitioner mentioned in the Hittite-Luwian fragment KUB 35.8, whose name is lost in the lacuna but whose stated land of origin is Kizzuwatna, may be the same Old Woman Å ilalluhi.
Noteworthy among the negative innovations that apparently characterize the Kizzuwatna/Lower Land corpus are the elimination of the genitive case forms (Mouton and Yakubovich 2021:47â48), infinitives in /-una/ (Yakubovich 2010:44, fn. 35), and imperfectives in /-tsa-/ (Yakubovich 2010:55). A theoretical possibility remains that the last two negative innovations merely reflect the limitations of our corpus, although the doubts of Sasseville 2020b:439 are probably exaggerated. Note that the few alleged cases of Kizzuwatna Luwian genitives in /-assa/ are amenable to an alternative explanation (Melchert 2012:283â284).
For a more detailed discussion of the particle /=gwa/, cf. Simon 2020a.
The necessity of choosing between the terms HattuÅ¡a Luwian and Empire Luwian is largely a product of the use of the traditional scholarly designation âHittite Empireâ for what was locally known as KUR URUHATTI âKingdom of HattuÅ¡aâ. At some point, the Luwian koiné formed in or around the town of HattuÅ¡a began to spread as the standard written dialect throughout the Kingdom of HattuÅ¡a; the term HattuÅ¡a Luwian could neutralize the distinction between these two stages. Another resource for studying Empire Luwian is the onomastics of HattuÅ¡a in the last century of its existence (cf. Yakubovich 2013 and here, below, the bottom of §â¯3).
Compare also the fragment KUB 35.133+, which belongs to a festival text mentioning the ašuša(tal)la-people (CTH 665). It contains lengthy Luwian incantations, which mention the town of Hattuša but cannot be assigned to the dialect of Hattuša on linguistic grounds. A possible explanation for this discrepancy is the early composition date of CTH 665, which predates the formation of a Hattuša dialect. The ašuša(tal)la-people are also mentioned in connection with the festival of Ištanuwa (KBo 4.11 obv. 22).
References to singing in Luwian also occur in KUBÂ 35.1 and KUBÂ 35.2(+), two apparently related festival fragments, which probably do not belong to the IÅ¡tanuwa tradition. Unfortunately, the Luwian insertions in these texts are limited to some isolated foreign words and so these texts can hardly be called Hittite-Luwian; nor can their Luwian dialect be determined.
See the lemmata dwaya- âto fear, be afraidâ (?), pÄi- âto giveâ (?), and -mi âfor/to meâ (?) in DCL for examples of these idiosyncrasies.
The precise motivation for replacing Luwiya with Arzawa in the late version of the Hittite Laws remains controversial. For possible scenarios, see Yakubovich 2013:111â114. For different approaches to this problem, cf. Hawkins 2013a:4â5, Matessi 2016:138â139, and Gander 2017:263. Another proposal has been made by Stephen Durnford (pers. comm.): Luwiya was replaced by Arzawa because at the time the latter was the most important polity where a variety of Luwic was the main language. Notably, none of these scholars, unlike many earlier researchers, takes this replacement as proof that Luwiya and Arzawa were the same place.
Cf. Chapters 4 and 5 for a detailed discussion of Luwiya as a peripheral region of the Hittite kingdom, with Hatti as the kingdomâs core.
Note that the adverbs iÅ¡tanu-mn-ili âin IÅ¡tanuwianâ and palau-mn-ili âin Palaicâ have identical suffix chains. Another similarity between these two adverbs is that neither is used for introducing IÅ¡tanuwian and Palaic utterances, even though such utterances are attested elsewhere. Objectively, there are, of course, no doubts about the IÅ¡tanuwian dialect clustering with âmainstreamâ Luwian as opposed to Palaic.
There is an archaeological interpretation suggesting that the upper Sakarya river valley (classical Phrygia) was a starting point for the spread of a wheel-made pottery to vast areas of central Anatolia in 2200 to 1900â¯BCE, whether or not it was accompanied by population movements (Sarı 2013:310â311).
For Hittite and Hattian loanwords in Luwian dialects, see § 2.1. below. It is unclear whether the respective loanwords were borrowed into common Luwian or spread through the dialectal continuum later.
For the Hurrian homeland in and around the upper Khabur valley in eastern Syria, see Chapter 10, §â¯1.
The Egyptian reference to the Luwian word for âkingâ attested in in the tale of Sinuhe (allegedly in connection with events of the20th century BCE in Cilicia), is doubted with good reasons by Simon (2011:261â262).
The presence of both Hittites and Luwians in Kizzuwatna (and by extension, in south-western Anatolia generally) derives support from the fact that the local royalty carried both Hittite and Luwian names (Yakubovich 2010:273â274). However, there is no historical evidence directly linking the Luwian migrations to Kizzuwatna with the activities of the early Hatti kings (cf. Trameri 2020:113â117 for the discussion of possible alternatives).
According to Forlanini (2004b:251) the Syrian merchants enjoyed a trade monopoly on the Cilician Plains, which effectively cut off the Assyrian trade from the region in the early second millennium BCE.
The following dialectal abbreviations are used: EL = Empire Luwian, IL = Ištanuwa Luwic, KL = Kizzuwatna Luwian (including texts from the Lower Land), and TL = Tauriša Luwian. The dialectal attribution of individual forms owes much to the discussion of Simon 2020b.
This hypothesis implies, for example, that the abstract noun nakkuÅ¡Å¡Ähit-, etymologically âreleasing (a scapegoat)â is not directly derived from the Hurrian *nakk=o/u=Å¡Å¡e ârelease(d); scapegoatâ but was adopted via an unattested Luwian loanword for âscapegoatâ (cf. Hittite nakkuÅ¡Å¡i- âscapegoatâ, the base of the abstract noun nakkuÅ¡Å¡Ätar). The synchronic transparency of the suffix -it- was apparently so high that it could occasionally be dropped in derived formations: cf. hamrit- and hamrawann(i)-.
In doubtful cases the lexemes in the list above were assigned to Kizzuwatna Luwian rather than Empire Luwian, according to the procedure outlined in Simon 2020b:417â418. Thus, the isolated Luwian forms occurring in Hittite texts of Kizzuwatna inspiration are counted as Kizzuwatna Luwian. The label Empire Luwian is reserved for Luwian loanwords occurring in text showing neither Kizzuwatna background nor Hurrian influence.
Cf. Mouton and Yakubovich 2021:32â37 for a discussion of whether certain Hurrian elements could have been added to Hittite-Luwian rituals during their transmission at the court of HattuÅ¡a.
The evolution of the term for a ritual patron in ancient Anatolia is the topic of Appendix II in Yakubovich and Mouton 2023. In the meanwhile, one may consult the entries for malhašša- and *niya- in DCL.
It is easier to account for the lack of Hittite loanwords in Hattuša Luwian in cuneiform transmission. Since the use of isolated foreign words in Hittite texts presumably occurred when its author ran short of a suitable Hittite equivalent, or thought that the Luwian word would render the intended meaning more precisely, there would be little point in using Luwianized Hittite forms in such conditions. The proper places to look for Hittite loanwords in Luwian are the longer Luwian passages recorded in other dialects.
The Luwian construction with verbal fronting is the topic of Appendix II in Yakubovich and Mouton 2023. In the interim, one can consult the preliminary presentation of the same argument in Russian (Mouton and Yakubovich 2020b). The same construction has also been interpreted as the result of multiple right dislocations of noun phrases (Sideltsev 2012), but this does not address the Lycian parallel. Сf. the independent recognition of Luwian verbal fronting in Giusfredi 2020c:155.
The structure in Lycian B is deliberately left out of consideration here, since the poetic character of the Lycian B texts complicates their syntactic analysis. However, the intrusion of Lycian B in Lycia remains at least a viable option (cf. Yakubovich 2010:136).
Contrast the verbal fronting in the Late Luwian version of the KARATEPE inscription, which was presumably implemented under the influence of its Phoenician original (Yakubovich 2015b). Among the fourteen tokens illustrating this syntactic change (§§â¯4, 5, 7, 25, 26, 37, 49, 51, 52, 63, 66, 72, 73, 74), not a single one features clitic doubling.
For the genitival origin of the possessive marker in the Luwic languages, see Melchert 2012 and the earlier literature cited in this paper. All else being equal, the plural marker of the possessor should be closer to the stem in the chain of affixes than the marker of possessive relationship, whether expressed by the genitive case or its historical reflex. This is the corollary of Greenbergâs Universal 39: âWhere morphemes of both number and case are present and both follow or both precede the noun base, the expression of number almost always comes between the noun base and the expression of case.â Although the relevance of Greenbergâs universal to the present case is rejected in Simon 2016:329â330, this conclusion appears to be based on a misunderstanding: in the instance of a double case construction, the order of the plural marker of the possessor in the affix chain should be construed with respect to the possessive marker, not the secondary agreement case.
Cf. Yakubovich 2010:50: âforms in assanz(-) never existed in central Anatolia.â In addition to the data discussed in this paragraph, this hypothesis is vitiated by the growing evidence that the incantations originating in Kizzuwatna and the Lower Land reflect essentially the same dialect (cf. §â¯1.2).
Contrast Simon 2016:332: â[D]ie traditionelle Erklärung (dass das Morphem -nz- im Kizzuwatna-Luwischen durch die morphologische Reanalyse der Phonemfolge °nz° zustande gekommen ist, die in allen Pluralendungen des Genus commune [bis auf den numerusneutralen Abl.-Instr.] vorkommt) die Herkunft der Konstruktion adäquat erklärtâ. Such an explanation, however, remains gratuitous, as long as one fails to outline the mechanism of the proposed reanalysis, which would yield both the attested syntactic position of the new marker in the middle of the affix chain and its distinct meaning, namely, plurality of the possessor.
See Melchert 2006 for the discussion of some devices that characterized Luwian verbal art. While the title of his paper emphasizes the inherited character of such devices, of no less importance is the question of the sociolinguistic factors that supported the cultivation of Luwian verbal art in the historical period. This chapterâs assumption of a professional jargon linked to the performance of Luwian ritualists provides here a partial answer.
Note also the historical evidence for the presence of Hurrians in Haššu in the early second millennium BCE (cf. § 1.4). In contrast, Luwian remains the only language whose presence in southeastern Anatolia, to the west of the Euphrates, can be confirmed through written sources by the end of the second millennium BCE. The language shift from Hurrian to Luwian in the area of Haššu likewise remains the default hypothesis, although its timing is unclear.
Alternatively, one could argue that the Hittite-Luwian rituals had already been recorded in Kizzuwatna and then their texts were transferred to HattuÅ¡a. The possibility of such a scenario is implied by the discussion in Miller 2004a:256. See Yakubovich 2010:275â278 for its critical assessment and Melchert 2013:169â170 for further discussion. For all its problems, it would explain equally well the secondary forms in /-assa-nts-/ in Kizzuwatna Luwian incantations.
Note also that the resettlement of a group of people from Kizzuwatna to Tapikka is addressed as a distinct possibility in the MaÅat letter HKMÂ 74 (Alp 1991:263).
It is unnecessary to project the forced character of the transportations from Arzawa to Hatti that followed the conquests of MurÅ¡ili II. The circumstances surrounding the annexation of Kizzuwatna were most likely peaceful, so local population groups may have been offered incentives to embark on a northward journey. It does seem, however, that the Luwian community was placed under protection of the traditional gods of TauriÅ¡a and entrusted with their worship (cf. Mouton and Yakubovich 2021:44â46).
Cf. also Yakubovich 2020b:280â283 contra Kloekhorst 2019:58â65.
The cautious formulation âLuwian and/or Luwicâ is prompted by the fact that the term luwili is never used in connection with the relevant incantations, and some of them assuredly reflect IÅ¡tanuwa Luwic, as discussed in §â¯1.3.
The idea that both Luwian and Hittite influenced the acrophonic values of Anatolian hieroglyphs was initially advanced in Yakubovich 2008. For recent assessments of the hypothesis, see Valério 2018 and Simon 2020c.
It seems logical to assume that the speakers of other Luwian and Luwic dialects who came to Hattuša would find it even easier to shift to the local dialect. In their case, the vectors of prestige and communicative simplicity pointed in the same direction.
While names of Hittite origin also occur in this corpus, they are considerably less frequent and do not form a pattern. In essence, this distribution is the reverse of what was found in Kaneš in the Assyrian colony period, where the Hittite names formed a regular core, whereas the Luwian names were few and far between.