Indo-European, Anatolian · Lycian alphabet

Lycian

𐊗𐊕𐊐𐊎𐊆𐊍𐊆 trm̃mili, “Lycian, the Lycians”

Spoken: c. 500–300 BC
Where: The Teke peninsula of southwest Turkey

Walk the coast of southwest Turkey and you will see tombs cut into cliffs, carved to look like wooden houses with beams and doors. Many carry inscriptions in Lycian, a language descended from the same Anatolian branch as Hittite. The Lycians used an alphabet based on Greek, with extra letters for sounds Greek lacked. Their texts are short, mostly funerary, but one great pillar at Xanthos is covered in about 250 lines, the longest Lycian text known.

Where and when

Lycia was a mountainous region on the Mediterranean coast between Caria and Pamphylia. Its cities, Xanthos, Tlos, Pinara, Myra and Limyra among them, formed a league that later impressed Roman writers with its system of proportional representation. The land is steep and rugged, with fertile valleys along the Xanthos river and a coast of sheltered harbours.

Lycian inscriptions date mostly from about 500 to 330 BC, when the region was under Persian rule but governed by local dynasts. There are about 200 stone inscriptions, plus legends on coins. A second, poetic dialect, Lycian B or Milyan, appears on a few monuments. Many of the tombs still stand on the cliffs.

The area where Lycian was spoken, laid in red and gold.

500 BC300 BC

How it fell silent

Alexander the Great took Lycia in 334 BC, and under his successors Greek became the language of government, culture and the elite. The Lycians had already been mixing Greek into their monuments: the Letoon trilingual stele of the fourth century BC carries the same decree in Lycian, Greek and Aramaic. After Alexander, new Lycian inscriptions stop almost immediately.

Lycian speech probably lasted longer in the countryside, but leaves no trace in writing. Over the Hellenistic and Roman centuries Lycians took Greek names and wrote Greek epitaphs, and the language faded unrecorded. By the time Lycia became a Roman province in AD 43, there is no sign that anyone still spoke it.

How it may have sounded

𐊗𐊆𐊅𐊁𐊆𐊎𐊆

tideimi

Say it roughly tee-DAY-mee

“son, child”

A common word on epitaphs naming families; the letters are read with Greek-based values, so the consonants are fairly secure, while stress and vowel quality are guesses.
𐊀𐊕𐊑𐊀

Arñna

Say it roughly ARN-nah

“Xanthos, the main Lycian city”

The ñ is one of the letters added to the Greek alphabet; scholars think it marked a nasal of some kind, perhaps a long or syllabic n, but its exact sound is unknown.

Your name, set in stone

Lycian is an alphabet built from Greek with extra letters for nasal sounds. It has no o, so o becomes u, and it is usually written left to right.

A playful transcription, not a scholarly one: the people who used this script never heard your name, and would have spelled it in more than one way.

Three things

Herodotus records that the Lycians called themselves Termilai, matching their own word Trm̃mili.
Lycian tombs carved in rock copy wooden houses, down to the beam ends and door panels.
Lycian traced descent through the mother, Herodotus claimed, though inscriptions usually name fathers.