The Luwians, 20 years after The Luwians
After the publication of the volume The Luwians in 2003, which was edited by Craig Melchert just a few years after David Hawkins published his Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions, much has happened in the field of Luwian studies. The works by linguists such as Melchert himself, Elisabeth Rieken and Ilya Yakubovich have highlighted the enormous importance of the Luwian language in the Final Bronze Age, with a very recent proposal for a fine-grained dialectology of Luwian that was advanced by Yakubovich and Alice Mouton. New models for the historical interpretation of the first centuries of the Late Bronze Age called for a re-evaluation of the cultural and political geography of Anatolia in the phase we now call early empire. New data pertaining to the 12th century Dark Age also emerged, and documents that were previously dated to the late II millennium have been now recategorized, at least tentatively, as having been composed much later. The models produced by different scientific approaches, however, are not always entirely compatible with each other, and in some cases some interpretations may require adjustment. In the present paper, I will try to assess the current interpretive models deriving from contactlinguistics, philology, and history and propose a partial revision of some aspects of the scenario as it is currently generally reconstructed.
Note: this abstract refers to research that is part of the ERC project PALaC, that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 757299).