Lycian Language

Lycian language, one of the ancient Anatolian languages. Evidence for Lycian consists of more than 150 inscriptions on stone, some 200 on coins, and a handful on other objects. While a few of the coins may be earlier, the texts on stone all date from the 5th and 4th centuries bce. All but a few of these are tomb inscriptions with stereotypical contents. An important exception is an inscribed stela from Xanthus, the Lycian capital city; it describes the exploits of a dynastic family, but problems of vocabulary have limited scholars’ understanding of this text. Two other Lycian texts are written in a dialect known as Lycian B, or Milyan, whose precise relationship to regular Lycian is indeterminate.

Some short Lycian-Greek bilingual texts allowed translators to make a few tentative identifications of Lycian vocabulary as early as the 1830s. However, real progress in understanding the language came toward the end of the 19th century through a combined effort in which Scandinavian scholars played a leading role. Later studies by linguists Piero Meriggi (1936) and Holger Pedersen (1945) proved that Lycian is an Indo-European language closely related to Hittite and Luwian. In another series of studies (1958–67), Emmanuel Laroche showed that Lycian shares several specific innovations with Luwian. A trilingual text (Lycian-Greek-Aramaic) describing the establishment of a cult shrine for the goddess Leto was discovered by French excavators in 1973; it confirmed much previous scholarship and led to many important refinements. While the language does have much in common with Luwian, Lycian also shows crucial divergences that clearly mark it as an independent branch of Anatolian.