Leiden linguists Alwin Kloekhorst and Alexander Lubotsky made a major discovery this summer. They deciphered several dozen inscriptions on potsherds found in Daskyleion (northwestern Turkey) as Phrygian and Lydian, thus proving the presence of the Phrygians and Lydians in that area.
Sensational
The find of Kloekhorst and Lubotsky can be called sensational. Based on previous excavations it was already suspected that between 6 e and the 3 e century BC. Greeks and Phrygians have lived in and around Daskyleion, but now there is also evidence for the presence of the Lydians.
The kingdom of the Phrygians in the midwestern Anatolian plateau had a rich mythology in which kings like Gordias (of the Gordian knot) figure. The Lydians are known as a rich people who most likely invented coins. As a result, it has been established for the first time that Daskyleion was a multi-ethnic city in that period.
That's important, because we don't quite know yet which languages were spoken in northwestern Turkey before the Greeks settled there around 800 BC. started to settle.
Break through
When Turkish archaeologists Kaan Iren (Mugla University) and Handan Yildizhan (Nevsehir University) found potsherds with inscriptions that they could not decipher, they quickly ended up in Leiden.
Kloekhorst, who received a Veni grant in 2008 for his research on Hittite (a language related to Lydian), is considered an expert in the Anatolian languages (a subgroup of the Indo-European language family). Lubotsky in turn is an authority on the Phrygian language. At the request of the Turks, they stayed in Daskyleion for a week last July to decipher the inscriptions.
Kloekhorst:“It was 35 degrees there and there was no air conditioning. That took some effort.”
To Zeus
According to Kloekhorst, the most beautiful discovery is a small shard on which To Zeus is scratched. “Most of those shards are very small,” he explains, “the words are often broken, and if it's a whole word, it's usually a name. The advantage is that Phrygian and Lydian both had their own alphabet. That is often our only grip:that way we know that it cannot be a Greek text.”
The find amounts to about thirty inscriptions. That doesn't seem like much, but for two dead languages, it's huge. Kloekhorst:“We only have 150 Lydian fragments in total. Then every new piece of text is welcome. It's the little pieces of evidence that we work with.”
New Shards
At the request of the Turkish archaeologists, Kloekhorst and Lubotsky are making a book of the joint discoveries. An article will also be published in which they will make the finds known.
But it probably isn't over yet. “While we were there in Turkey,” says Kloekhorst, “new shards with inscriptions appeared every now and then. I can imagine that we will have to go back next year.”