HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Luvian (or Luwian) was arguably the most widely spoken member of the Anatolian sub-group of Indo-European. Evidence for the language is twofold. First, the cuneiform archives of the Hittite capital Hattuša in central Anatolia contain a number of texts with passages in a language designated luwili; that is, of the land Luwiya, which the Old Hittite Laws list as one of three major divisions of the Hittite state.

Starke (1985) has shown in his excellent edition of the Cuneiform Luvian (CLuvian) corpus that the apparently extensive texts actually represent variations on scarcely a dozen distinct compositions (aside from a few fragments). With one or two exceptions, the texts are rituals, some of a private, therapeutic nature, others belonging to the state cult. The CLuvian manuscripts, like the Hittite, date from the sixteenth to thirteenth centuries BC, including a few from the Old Hittite period (see Ch. 2, §1). Beyond this highly restricted material, there are also many isolated Luvianisms scattered throughout the Hittite texts, both as foreign words and as genuine loanwords adapted to Hittite inflection. Starke (1990 and elsewhere) has demonstrated that Luvian influence on Hittite was both earlier (including prehistoric) and more extensive than previously acknowledged. However, the fact that the two languages are very closely related makes it difficult to distinguish with certainty Luvian loanwords into Hittite from native Hittite cognates of Luvian lexemes, and not all of Starke's claims are equally persuasive (see Melchert 1992).