The Luwians

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A rock face above a spring on the southern edge of the Anatolian plateau, near Ereğli in the modern province of Konya, carries a figure more than four meters tall. A king in a fringed robe stands with his hands raised. Before him, larger still, a god in a horned helmet holds out ears of grain in one hand and a heavy cluster of grapes in the other. Three lines of a strange script — not cuneiform, not any alphabet, a column of little heads and hands and curled signs — run before the god’s face. Read out, they name him: the great storm-god of Warpalawas. The king was Warpalawas of Tuwana; the god was Tarhunza; the carving was made in the eighth century before the common era, long after the empire of Hatti had fallen. The people who raised it spoke Luwian, and they were keeping a god, and a script, and a world, that were already a thousand years old.

The Luwians are the Anatolian people who outlasted the Hittites. Close kin to them in blood and in language, spread across the west and the south of the peninsula where the Hittite kings held their thinner authority, they survived the catastrophe that ended the Bronze Age and carried the storm-god and the hieroglyphs of Anatolia down into the Iron Age, when a scatter of small kingdoms kept the old worship alive in stone.

The Anatolian kin

The Luwians belong to the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family — the oldest branch to break away, the one that preserves features the rest of Indo-European lost. Within that branch their nearest relatives are the Hittites and the Palaians; the three tongues, Wikipedia notes, “split off from one another over a period of less than a millennium.” Luwian is not descended from Hittite and is not a dialect of it. It is a sister, sharing a common ancestor, near enough that a Hittite scribe could work in both and far enough that the two were distinct languages with distinct words for the same gods.

Where the Luwians came from within Anatolia is argued from the spread of their settlements and their names. The Konya plain — the high inland country around the later site of the İvriz relief — is one proposed early home, with a westward expansion across the second millennium that carried Luwian-speaking populations into south-central Anatolia, the southern reaches of the Sakarya valley, and much of the southwest of the peninsula. By the middle of that millennium Luwian speech reached across the whole southern arc of Anatolia, from the country the Greeks would later call Lycia in the southwest, through the rough highlands, to Cilicia in the southeast.

In the Bronze Age the Hittites bordered Luwian country on every side and absorbed much of it. To the west lay the cluster of kingdoms the Hittite kings called Arzawa — Mira, the Seha River Land, Hapalla, and others — populations that were at least partly Luwian-speaking and that the Hittites alternately fought, subdued, and married into. There was a time, in the troubled fourteenth century, when the king of Arzawa — one Tarhundaradu — was powerful enough that the pharaoh Amenhotep III addressed him as a “great king” and proposed a marriage alliance; the two letters that survive from that exchange, written in Hittite among the otherwise Akkadian correspondence of the Egyptian court, count this western Anatolian land briefly among the great powers. To the south, the kingdom of Kizzuwatna in Cilicia was Luwian and Hurrian by population before Hatti annexed it, and from Kizzuwatna the Hittite court drew much of its ritual learning — the magical and purificatory texts in which a great part of the surviving cuneiform Luwian is preserved.

So thoroughly did Luwian speech spread through the Hittite world that, across the New Kingdom of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, it became the dominant spoken language of the empire itself. By the time the empire fell, around 1180 before the common era, the evidence indicates that the Hittite king and the royal family were fully bilingual in Luwian, and Luwian speakers had become the majority in the capital, Ḫattuša. The Hittites ruled; the Luwians, increasingly, were who they ruled. It is one of the quieter ironies of Anatolian history that the language of the conquered was already swallowing the language of the conquerors before the conquerors themselves were gone.

A god, a script, a worship

Two things the Luwians made that no neighbor made for them: a god who carried a name of their own, and a script that no one borrowed from Egypt or Babylon.

The god stood at the head of the pantheon. He was the storm-god — Tarḫunza in the later Luwian form, Tarḫunt in the older, kin in office and even in name to the Hittite Tarḫunna and the Hurrian Teššub, the weather-power who rules the sky, breaks the storm, and warrants the king. In Luwian iconography he is distinguished by a small detail of cult: where the Hittite storm-god rode a bull, the Luwian Tarhunza was drawn with horses drawing his chariot, an Indo-European feature that scholars read as a sign of how lightly Luwian religion was touched by the older substrate beliefs of Anatolia. Around him stood a pantheon with its own cast: Tiwad the sun-god, Arma the moon-god, Runtiya the stag-god and lord of the wild, Šanta the bringer of death, and the great goddess Kubaba of Karkamish, whose name would travel west and, much later, be heard in the Phrygian Cybele.

It is the aspect carved at İvriz that most marks Tarhunza out. There he is “Tarhunza of the vineyard” — turwarasina Tarhunza — the storm-god not as the warrior who slays the dragon but as the giver of the harvest, holding the grain and the grapes that the rain makes grow. The İvriz relief is the great image of him: King Warpalawas of Tuwana, who reigned in the second half of the eighth century, raised it beside a productive spring, and the three-line hieroglyphic inscription before the god has been read by the British scholar J. David Hawkins as naming “the great Tarhunza of Warpalawas.” The spring, the grain, the grapes, the rain-god above the water — the whole monument is a theology of fertility cut into the rock. The land lives because the storm-god gives.

The İvriz rock relief near Ereğli (ancient Tuwana), 8th century BCE: King Warpalawas worships Tarhunza, “the storm-god of the vineyard,” who holds ears of grain and a cluster of grapes. Photo Klaus-Peter Simon, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

The script is the other Luwian invention. Beside the cuneiform that the Hittite scribes used — and in which Luwian ritual texts survive among the tablets of Ḫattuša, the oldest from the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries — the Luwians wrote in a wholly different system: Anatolian hieroglyphs, a native picture-script of several hundred signs, owing nothing to the Egyptian hieroglyphs it superficially resembles. The earliest signs appear on royal and official seals early in the second millennium; by the fourteenth century the script is a full writing system, capable of recording connected language. It is read in boustrophedon, the lines turning back on themselves like a plowed field, the little figures facing into the direction of reading. The signs mix word-pictures with syllables. Carved large on stone or pressed into the wax of a seal, this was the monumental hand of the Luwian world.

The worship that these two things served was, in its outlines, the worship of the wider Anatolian sacred order — the storm-god at the head, the sun-deity beside him, the gods of the springs and the mountains and the gate. But the Luwian version leaned harder on its Indo-European inheritance and, unlike the Hittite cult, was little shaped by the religion of the older Hattians whom the Hittites had absorbed. The Luwian gods were, in the main, Luwian.

After the empire

The thing that distinguishes the Luwians most sharply from their Hittite kin is simply this: they did not end when Hatti ended.

Around 1180 before the common era the Hittite empire collapsed in the general catastrophe that brought down the Bronze Age world of the eastern Mediterranean. Ḫattuša was abandoned and burned; the Hittite kingship and the Hittite language, as a written tongue of state, vanished. But across the south and southeast of Anatolia and into northern Syria, the Luwian-speaking populations survived, and out of them rose a scatter of small successor kingdoms that modern scholars call the Neo-Hittite or Syro-Hittite states. As the record stands, they included Karkamish on the Euphrates, Melid (modern Malatya), Gurgum, Kummuh, Pattin, Hamath in Syria, Quwê in Cilicia, and — high on the Anatolian plateau — the powerful land of Tabal, with Warpalawas’s kingdom of Tuwana among its members.

These kingdoms thought of themselves as heirs of Hatti; their kings sometimes took the old royal names and called their land the country of the Hittites. But they spoke Luwian, and they wrote it. The hieroglyphic-Luwian inscriptions run almost without a break from the imperial monuments of the thirteenth century down into the Iron Age stelae of Karkamish, Melid, Aleppo, and the rest — the same script, the same gods, the same storm-god at the head, carried for centuries by people who had outlived the state that first cultivated them. The latest of the great hieroglyphic inscriptions date to the eighth century, until the Neo-Assyrian empire, in its long advance through the ninth, eighth, and seventh centuries, swallowed the Luwian kingdoms one after another. Tarhunza’s worship faded only slowly: Luwian personal names built on the names of the gods are still attested in Cilicia and the southern highlands into the Roman period, the last long echo of the storm-god in the country he had ruled.

An orthostat relief of Tarhunza, the Luwian storm-god, from the Iron-Age Neo-Hittite tradition. Photo Zythème, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

So the Luwian inheritance ran the other way from the usual story of conquerors and conquered. The Hittites had the empire; the Luwians had the longer life. The gods the two peoples shared — the storm-god above all — survived in the mouths and on the monuments of the Luwian speakers for half a millennium after the Hittite kingship was ash.

The Trojan question and the recovered script

Two strands of the modern reception of the Luwians belong to very different registers, and they must be kept apart.

The first is a contested proposal that has drawn more attention than any settled fact about them: that the Luwians, or a Luwian-speaking population, lay behind the city the Greeks remembered as Troy. The Hittite archives know a kingdom in the far northwest of Anatolia called Wilusa, and since Emil Forrer proposed it in 1924, most scholars have accepted — though the correspondence remains formally unconfirmed — that Wilusa is the place the Greeks called Wilios or Ilios, that is, Ilion, Troy. Wilusa appears in the Hittite records as a vassal, and a treaty survives between the Hittite king Muwatalli II and a king of Wilusa named Alaksandu, a name that has tempted comparison with the Greek Alexandros. From this, and from the wider spread of Luwian speech across western Anatolia, has grown the argument that Bronze Age Troy was a Luwian, Anatolian city rather than a Greek one — supported by a seal bearing hieroglyphic-Luwian writing found in the ruins of a late Trojan level, and by Luwian-looking names in the Hittite diplomatic record.

The argument is real and seriously held; it is also genuinely contested. No Trojan name is indisputably Luwian, and at least one — Alaksandu — looks Greek; some scholars now doubt or reject the older equation of the western land of Luwiya with Arzawa; and the historian Trevor Bryce warns that the documentary record gives no warrant for the war of the poems and that thin evidence can be bent to almost any conclusion. The honest statement is that the language of Bronze Age Troy is unknown, that Luwian is the leading candidate, and that the matter sits among the unresolved problems of Anatolian history rather than among its established results. The figure of Helen and the war she is said to have caused belong to Greek memory; whether the city beneath them spoke Luwian is a separate question, and an open one. (See the Greek tradition of Helen of Troy for the legend’s own frame.)

The second strand is wholly scholarly, and it is what made the Luwians legible at all. For most of recorded history the Anatolian hieroglyphs were mute — rows of carved figures whose meaning no one could read. The recovery came in stages across the twentieth century. The breakthrough was the discovery in 1947, by the German scholar Helmuth Theodor Bossert, of a long inscription at Karatepe in southern Anatolia written twice over: once in Phoenician, an alphabet already known, and once in hieroglyphic-Luwian. The bilingual gave the key. Emmanuel Laroche set out a comprehensive decipherment in 1960; in 1973 J. David Hawkins, Anna Morpurgo Davies, and Günther Neumann published a set of corrected sign-readings — “the new readings” — that put the understanding of the script on firm ground. The recovery was not without its scandal: the archaeologist James Mellaart, whose name once attached to claims about Luwian inscriptions, was shown after his death in 2018 to have fabricated some of them, a reminder that the recovered archive must be read with care.

Hieroglyphic-Luwian text from the Azatiwada inscription at Karatepe — the 8th-century Phoenician–Luwian bilingual whose discovery in 1947 opened the script. Photo Dosseman, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

What the decipherment opened was not a literature of epic or philosophy but the words of kings on stone — dedications, building accounts, boasts, and above all the names and the praises of the gods. Through them the Luwians speak in their own script for the first time since antiquity: a people who held the west and the south of Anatolia, who gave their tongue to the empire that ruled them, who raised the storm-god over the springs and the vineyards, and who, when that empire was gone, kept his name carved in the rock for five hundred years more. The map of their world — the western Arzawa lands, the southern kingdoms, the Iron-Age states strung along the Euphrates and across the plateau — is a map of an Anatolian people who were always there beneath the better-known names, and who were the last to keep the old gods.

The Neo-Hittite (Syro-Hittite) and Aramean states of the early first millennium BCE — the Luwian-speaking successor kingdoms of southern Anatolia and northern Syria, from Karkamish to Tabal. Map by Rowanwindwhistler, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Hittites built the empire and gave it to the archive; the Luwians, their quieter kin, gave it the longer afterlife. For more on the imperial center from which both drew, see the Hittites and the Hittite Empire; for the storm-god in his Hittite office, Tarḫunna; and for the Iron-Age image where the Luwian god gives grain and wine, the İvriz relief.

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