Customer Reviews

The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor

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After producing the massive "Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages", Cambridge University Press curiously decided to divide the encyclopedia up and publish individual volumes for each region. Well, for those interested solely in the languages of Asia Minor, that might have been a good thing, because you can economically purchase one of the few general overviews of the ancient languages of this part of the world.

Students of comparative Indo-European linguistics, for example, often work from textbooks that might reflect information gleaned from Anatolian and other IE languages of Asia Minor, but they don't usually get a clear picture of what these languages were like in general. This volume contains brief but highly informative grammars of Hittite, Luvian, Palaic, Lycian, Lydian, Carian, Phrygian and Classical Armenian. These chapters are written by noted experts in the field: Calvert Watkins, H. Craig Melchert, Claude Brixhe and James Clackson.

Some of the Caucasian languages of Asia Minor were documented already in ancient times. Hurrian, Urartian and Early Georgian are also covered by Gernot Wilhelm and Kevin Tuite. The general editor Roger Woodward contributes a general introduction that gives some historical and archaeological background for how we know about all these languages.

The downside of this volume is that, in spite of its 2002/2007 publication date, all the material dates from the mid-1990s. Anatolian studies has come a long way just in the last 15 years (see Ignacio J. Adiego's THE CARIAN LANGUAGE for a convincing decipherment of that language's enigmatic alphabet) and so the grammars here badly need an update. Nonetheless, if you're just looking for a sketch, the material here is enjoyable reading.