1 What Is This Book?
1.1 Authors and Contributors
This book contains a synthesis of the main results of the ERC project PALaC, Pre-classical Anatolian Languages in Contact, which received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement nº757299). The project ran from February 2018 to July 2023, including a six-month extension due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This book features a stratified model of authorship. It is a multiauthored monograph divided into two volumes. The first volume, dedicated to the Bronze Age (late third and second millennium BCE), has three main authors (F. Giusfredi, A. Matessi and V. Pisaniello). The second volume, dedicated to the Iron Age (first millennium BCE) and Western contacts, has four (F. Giusfredi, A. Matessi, S. Merlin and V. Pisaniello). These researchers worked for PALaC for three to five and a half years, contributing extensively to the analysis and synthesis of the scientific results and authoring or coauthoring most of the book’s chapters. F. Giusfredi worked on the Bronze Age corpora and some of the historical chapters, V. Pisaniello was mainly responsible for the research on Luwic (especially, but not exclusively, for the Iron Age), S. Merlin was responsible for the research on the Aegean interface (hence her contributions to this monograph will be in Volume 2), and A. Matessi was responsible for most of the historical (and occasionally archaeological) research.
Besides the main authors, other contributors participated in this publication, each providing one or two chapters or parts thereof. Three are young scholars who held shorter postdoctoral positions funded by PALaC or visited the project in an official fashion and worked under the direct supervision of the principal investigator. They are, in alphabetical order, F. De Decker (FWO funded ERC Visiting Researcher in 2020), E. Martínez-Rodríguez (PALaC postdoc April 2021 to March 2023), and B. Obrador Cursach (PALaC postdoc February to November 2020).
A few other contributions were written or cowritten by external scholars who agreed to provide their expertise on specific subjects: P. Cotticelli-Kurras (Verona) on Indo-Iranian, H.C. Melchert (UCLA) on Iron Age Cilicia, A. Rizza (Verona) on the Hattian corpus, Zs. Simon (Budapest) on the hypotheses of long-distance contacts during the Iron Age, I. Yakubovich (Marburg) on the Luwian corpus, and M. Viano (Turin) on the Sumerian corpus. While these five scholars did not work under the academic supervision of the principal investigator and their contributions were not, of course, direct products of the ERC funding, this monograph is offered in full in Open Access, including the chapters or parts of chapters that they wrote.
Finally, as regards this first volume, we would like to thank Mauro Giorgieri, Michele Massa, Craig Melchert, Velizar Sadovski, David Sasseville and Lisa Wilhelmi for discussing with us important topics or sharing unpublished materials. Of course, the responsibilities for the contents, including any shortcomings, belong only to the authors.
1.2 The Aim of the Book
PALaC was a 66-month ERC project hosted by the Department of Cultures and Civilizations of the University of Verona. The goal of the project was to study the traces of language contact in the corpora from Bronze and Iron Age Anatolia, analyzing and contextualizing them in a historical and geographical scenario through the collaboration of linguists, philologists, and historians who specialize in Anatolia and the ancient near East.
Due to the geographical position and historical coordinates of the Hittite civilization and its cultural descendants, Anatolia represents a highly interesting case study. In its Mediterranean context, the Hittite and post-Hittite cultures are the westernmost members of the ancient Near Eastern cultural koiné, with a peripheral interface on the Aegean Sea. Within the ancient Near East proper, these cultures were characterized by the use of Indo-European languages whose speakers were in constant contact with contemporaries who spoke the Semitic or isolated languages of the area. For these reasons, Anatolia can be described as a crossroads of languages and cultures and a bridge between several different worlds.
The metaphor of the bridge, while not exactly original, is particularly fitting for this work. Due to the vitality of the fields of classics and Assyriology, Anatolia has often been seen as either the eastern periphery of the Indo-European Mediterranean world or the northwestern periphery of the cuneiform cultural area. Instead of concentrating on the lands that it may have connected, the focus in this book will be on the bridge itself. We will try to provide as detailed a picture as possible of an area that was naturally exposed to and projected significant influence on several neighboring regions, using the evidence for contacts between languages as the fundamental heuristic engine of the research.
1.3 The Title
Some archaeologists may find the title of this book confusing or inaccurate because we chose to use the word ‘post-Hittite.’ Archaeologists, indeed, use the word ‘post-Hittite’ to refer to what is found stratigraphically in central Anatolia between the layers deposited at the end of the Hittite kingdom and those of the Phrygian era. We, however, will employ a broad cultural and less localized conception of the Hittite world and use the word ‘post-Hittite’ to refer to what happens after the Hittite kingdom until the hellenization of Asia Minor, as long as a direct or indirect inheritance of the Bronze Age Anatolian emic set of cultural and linguistic constructs (language, culture, religion) appears to have existed.
2 What This Book Is Not
This is a book on linguistic contacts among cultures in and around ancient Anatolia. Of course, the topic is not new. However, since the methodologies and aims of PALaC are not always the same as those prevailing among Indo-Europeanists, we must also clarify what this book is not, and what one will not find in it. First of all, this is not a book that attempts to reconstruct Indo-European culture. It is not infrequent to witness some degree of polysemy regarding the definition of ‘contact.’ When organizing conferences on contacts, for instance, it is typical to receive abstract proposals with titles such as ‘the concept of ‘supper’ among the Indo-Europeans: a comparative approach’ (we pick ‘supper’ to avoid referencing the specific work of any colleagues). While these topics are fascinating to those who want to reconstruct a unitary Indo-European culture and certainly contribute to explicating some of the problems that pertain to contacts (migrations, chronology of cultural dispersals, local alteration of migrating concepts due to substrata, etc.), PALaC more humbly investigates interferences whose results are attested in texts composed during historical times.
Furthermore, this book will not be a list of formal or semantic isoglosses. While the topic of contacts in and around ancient Anatolia is not new, a significant number of contributions dealing with linguistics are oriented toward the identification of lexical isoglosses, that is, they aim to distinguish inherited and borrowed material using procedures that are typical of internal reconstruction. We find this kind of purely mechanical approach to contact extremely important but partial and, unless well-founded in both theory and context, sometimes misleading, as it frequently relies on the use of etymological dictionaries with no examination of context.
Etymological dictionaries work very well for internal reconstruction and intralinguistic diachronic phonetic change, but contact phenomena cannot be investigated by ignoring the texts and contexts, which provide information on nonlexical change patterns and their cultural-historical and geohistorical levels of credibility. Therefore, phenomena of interference, even in the chapters devoted to the most technically linguistic (as opposed to cultural) types of contact, will be categorized rather than listed. We preferred to represent and duly contextualize the categories of relevant phenomena rather than aiming at the unrealistic goal of listing ‘all loanwords in language X from language Y’: while we obviously rely on the corpus, we feel that an honest, well-founded model is a better and longer-lasting contribution to science than a long, but never long enough, list of forms. A third thing that this book is not is a historical grammar of Indo-European or Anatolian. While the disambiguation between inherited and noninherited elements in the ancient Anatolian languages can—we hope!—be useful for a better definition of the diachrony of the grammar (inclusive of the phonological level) of the Indo-European languages, the phenomena studied by PALaC emerge from the historical corpora of Anatolian and the isolated and Semitic languages that surrounded Hatti and the post-Hittite kingdoms and polities.
3 Structure of the Book
This work is divided into two volumes. Volume 1, which contains this introduction, is devoted to the Bronze Age. It is divided into three parts. Part 1 discusses the concept of contact (both from a cultural and a linguistic point of view) and then defines the historical setting, starting from the Early and Middle Bronze Ages (the former being anepigraphic; the latter coinciding with the age of the Old Assyrian trades, during which the earliest cases of language interference emerged). Part 2 concentrates on the Late Bronze Age. Because it relies on the available documentation, it focuses on the archives of Hattuša on the foreign languages that were written down in cuneiform in the Hittite world, although other significant archives from both Anatolia and the neighboring areas are considered whenever relevant and necessary. Part 3 contains the technical discussion of linguistic interference and examines the significance of interference in the second millennium BCE.
Volume 2 will begin with Part , which will be dedicated to the Iron Age contacts in the Near Eastern interface of the post-Hittite Anatolian world. Part 5 will discuss the Aegean and more generally Western interface. Chronologically, Volume 2 will kick off with the 12th century BCE and end with the Hellenistic age. It will include a brief but fundamental discussion of the late Greek evidence that is so often mentioned too cursorily in works in the Western literature dedicated to Anatolian glosses. For reasons of thematic consistency—and also because of the very limited amount of evidence for interference that is available—Mycenaean will be treated in Volume 2, although diachronically it would belong to the Bronze Age.
While Part 3 of Volume 1 is dedicated to the discussion of linguistic aspects of interference, such topic will be treated in single chapters in Volume 2 because of the lack, for the first millennium, of the trait d’union that is represented by the Hittite archives and the cuneiform epigraphic culture for the II.
4 Multi-Authored Chapters
Regarding the chapters in this volume that have multiple authors, attributions of the single sections are as follows. In Chapter 4, section 3, with all its subsections, is by F. Giusfredi, all other sections by A. Matessi. In Chapter 6, sections 1, 2.1 and 4 are by F. Giusfredi, section 2.2 by F. Giusfredi and A. Matessi, sections 3, 3.1, 3.2 by V. Pisaniello. In Chapter 8, sections 2, 3.3 and 4 are by V. Pisaniello, all other sections by F. Giusfredi. In Chapter 10, sections 3, 3.1, 3.1.1, 3.2–3.4 are by V. Pisaniello, all other sections by F. Giusfredi. In Chapter 13, sections 1.2, 3.1, 3.1.1–2 are by P. Cotticelli-Kurras, section 4 is by P. Cotticelli-Kurras and V. Pisaniello, all other sections by V. Pisaniello. In Chapter 14, sections 2, 2.1, 2.2, 3, 3.1, 3.2, 7 are by F. Giusfredi, all other sections by V. Pisaniello. In Chapter 15, sections 3.4, 3.4.1–3 are by V. Pisaniello, all other sections by F. Giusfredi.
5 Chronologies
A historical note is also in order. In this book, we follow the Middle Chronology, with the Hittite sack of Babylon dated to 1595 BCE. This choice is conventional but works better than other options up to the 14th century BCE when more precise assessments are made possible by other dating factors. The chronological uncertainties typical of ancient Near Eastern Studies dissipate after the Dark Age (13th–11th centuries BCE): starting from the end of the 10th century BCE, the absolute dates generally employed are the standard ones reconstructed using the Neo-Assyrian eponym system.
A summary of the main chronological coordinates is contained in the following table.
Dates (BCE) |
Phase (ancient Near East) |
Phase (Aegean) |
---|---|---|
3rd millennium |
Early Bronze Age |
Early Helladic |
ca. 2000–1600 |
Middle Bronze Age |
Middle to Late Helladic |
ca. 1600–1200 |
Late Bronze Age |
Late Helladic/Mycenaean |
ca. 1200–1000 |
Syro-Anatolian Dark Age |
Late Mycenaean/Greek Dark Age |
ca. 1000–539 |
Iron Age |
Greek Dark Age to Archaic Greece |
539–330 ca. |
Achaemenid Period |
Classical Greece |
330 onwards |
Hellenistic/Late Period |
Hellenistic/Late Period |
6 Philological Conventions
We will generally follow the standard transcription and transliteration practices for the study of the languages that will be analyzed. For cuneiform Hittite, Luwian and Palaic, we will follow the system of the Munich Hethitisches Wörterbuch: Sturtevant’s clusters will be rendered as ⟨k⟩ and ⟨kk⟩ respectively, and plene notation for vowels will correspond to graphic sequences. The only exception will be the fricative /h/ which will be rendered as an ⟨h⟩ with no diacritics (a rule that we will apply to all cuneiform transcriptions). Etymological vowel length and consonantal phonetics will be used when lemmas are quoted out of context or for reconstruction. Hurrian forms will be based on the glossaries contained in Wilhelm 2018 and the grammars by Giorgieri 2000 and Wegner 2007; Hattian ones will generally follow Simon 2012.
For cuneiform Akkadian, small problems exist; however, the reference works are the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary for the textual transcriptions and the Akkadisches Handwörterbuch for lemmatization. The Sumerian of the Hattuša archives will follow Viano 2016. For Ugaritic, which is quite unproblematic, we lemmatize following Del Olmo Lete and Sanmartín 2015. For the alphabetic Semitic languages of the Iron Age, we provide a romanization of the forms. Egyptian is transcribed following the conventions of the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae (
Epichoric alphabetic Anatolian languages pose more delicate issues. After a painstaking discussion of the available options, this monograph will follow the eDiAna (
For philological diacritics, we follow the usual conventions. Square brackets are used for integration, as in ap[pa], while square and round indicate certain integration (due to the presence of a parallel or duplicate), as in ap[(pa)]. The ⟨⟨⟩⟩ is used to expunge (e.g., EGIR-pa ⟨⟨EGIR-pa⟩⟩ paišta).
Federico Giusfredi & the PALaC team
Verona, July 2022