IN SEARCH OF THE MISSING LINK. WRITING IN WESTERN ANATOLIA DURING THE LATE BRONZE AGE

As has often been pointed out, there is a conspicuous scarcity of written sources from western Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age; attestations of writing are limited to a small number of rock inscriptions and some incidental inscribed objects. This is in sharp contrast to the neighbouring regions Central Anatolia and the Aegean, where various – sometimes elaborate – archives have been unearthed. As a consequence, we are not only much less informed about western Anatolia, but it is sometimes also as-sumed that not much writing was going in this area. This impression is, however, deceiving and there are indications that in west-ern Anatolia use was made of perishable writing materials, such as wood. A well-known example is the reference on a Hittite clay tablet to wooden documents in relation to the kingdom of Wilusa in the Troad region. These wooden records were presumably inscribed with Anatolian Hieroglyphs. The origins of this script are debated, but there are reasons to think that its birthplace may have been in western Anatolia, notably because of the resemblances to the early Aegean writing systems. In both Anatolia and the Aegean, pictographic signs appear on seals from the third millennium onwards and in the second millennium several scripts emerge: Linear A (and B) and Cretan Hieroglyphs in the Aegean and Anatolian Hieroglyphs in Anatolia. These writing systems show some striking formal similarities: they are, e.g., all pictographic, combining logographic with syllabic writing, consisting predom-inantly of Consonant-Vocal (CV) signs. This is all the more significant, since these characteristics are not shared by the already existing writing systems of Mesopotamia and Egypt, which are generally seen as their source of inspiration. This paper will ad-dress the use of the Anatolian Hieroglyphs in western Anatolia and explore the possibility that their roots may lie in this region.


Author(s): Waal, Willemijn (Leiden University)