#luwian

[ker4unos]

ANATOLIA & LEVANT RESOURCES

The Anthropological Masterlist is HERE.

Anatolia, or Asia Minor, is a historical West Asian peninsula that constitutes the major part of modern-day Turkey. 

HITTITE ─ “The Hittites, or the Empire of Hattusa, were an Anatolian people that lived during the Bronze Age, from 1650 B.C.E. to 1190 B.C.E. At their height, the empire encompassed the majority of modern-day Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria.” ─ Hittite Cuneiform Script ─ Hittite Grammar ─ The Chicago Hittite Dictionary Project

HURRIAN ─ “The Hurrians, or Khurrites, were a Near East people that lived from 3000 B.C.E. to 1300 B.C.E. They lived in Anatolia and Mesopotamia.” ─ The Mitanni Empire ─ Hurrian Culture ─ Hurrian Mythology

LUWIAN ─ “The Luwians are a group of Anatolian people that lived from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. They lived in modern-day Turkey.” ─ Luwian Studies ─ Luwian Dictionary

PHRYGIA ─ “The Phrygian people were an Anatolian people that lived from 1200 B.C.E. to 700 B.C.E. They lived in central Anatolia.” ─ Phrygian Language ─ Phrygian Inscriptions

THRACIA ─ “The Thracians were an Indo-European people that lived from the 8th century B.C.E. to 1st century C.E. They lived in the Balkans and Anatolia.” ─ Thracian Information ─ Thracian Culture ─ Thracian Language

UGARIT ─ “Ugarit was an Anatolian civilization that lived from 6000 B.C.E. to 1185 B.C.E. They lived in modern-day northern Syria.” ─ Ugaritic Information ─ Ugarit in the Bible ─ El in Ugaritic Texts

The Levant is a historical West Asian region in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Asia. It spans from the western part of the Arabian Peninsula to northeast Africa.

CARTHAGE ─ “Ancient Carthage, or the Carthaginian Empire, was a Mediterranean civilization that lived from 814 B.C.E. to 146 B.C.E. They lived in modern-day Tunisia.” ─ Carthage Information ─ Carthaginian Religion ─ Carthaginian Archaeology

EGYPT ─ “The Ancient Egyptians were a northeastern African people. They lived in the Nile Valley in Egypt.” ─ Egyptian Information ─ Ancient Egyptian Art ─ Women in Ancient Egypt

PHOENICIA ─ “The Phoenician people were a Mediterranean people that lived from 2500 B.C.E. to 64 B.C.E. They lived in modern-day Lebanon.” ─ Phoenician History ─ Phoenician Alphabet ─ Phoenician and Punic Languages

SYRIA ─ “The Syrians are an Eastern Mediterranean people that share the Syrian culture. They are native to Syria.” ─ Syria Information ─ Syria from 1700 C.E to 1920 C.E. ─ Syrian Cultural Zones

#resources #anatolia #levant #hittite #hurrian #luwian #phrygian #thracian #ugaritic #carthaginian #ancient egyptian #phoenician #syria

[luwiancamera]

Unleash your creativity. Capture the world with precision. Professional camera software for IPHONE. Shot and edited on iPhone with Luwian Professional Camera Software for iPhone & iPad available on Apple store

#luwian #iphonephotography #iphonography #landscapephotography #mobilephotography #onfilm #filmisnotdead #lensblr #kodak #sunset #streetphotography #photographysouls #photogram #iphone #iphone pics #iphone photography

[indo-europeans]

from perkunos to indra & zeus

Anatolian languages:

tarhuan, tarhunna, tarhunnaradu - hittite (linked w bull in anatolia)

tarhu, tarhunz, tarhunta, tarhuwant - luwian

tarhuwanta - palaic

trqqas - lycian

taru - hattian

teshub - hurrian

turvant - sanskrit cognate for indra?

aleppo - 

hadad - mesopotamia?

iskur - sumeria?

zeus - greek

indra - vedic

trokondas - rome

jupiter dolichenus  - armenian/roman

- associated with sky, weather, lightning, thunder, battlefield, commander, mountains, helpful, slaying enemies with an axe, vanquishing, decided whether would be drought and famine or fertile fields and good harvests, thunderbolt becomes axe

religious treatment

- "Weather god of the thunderbolt, glow on me like the moonlight, shine over me like the son god of heaven!" - KUB 6.45 iii 68-70, Hittite king Muwatalli II’s personal god who he referred to as “my lord, king of heaven” (associated with Anatolia’s bulls instead of horses)

- Hittite king Warpalawas II made rock relief and animals were sacrificed to him 

- Luwian magic rituals intended to bring rain or heal the sick

- chief god of the luwians, whose chariot was pulled by horses. later depicted standing on a bull.

- cows + sheep were sacrificed to him for grain + wine to grow 

- in curses, he was called upon to “smash enemies with his axe” and gave the king royal power, courage and marched him in battle - in late Luwian texts

- Pegasus, Greek winged horse which carries Zeus’ thunderbolt name comes from one of his epithets piḫaššašši meaning “of the thunderblot”

cult sites

- Aleppo, Syria, major city of the weather god - conquered by Hittite king Suppiluluima I who installed his son Telipinu as priest-king. Temple for weather god was modified to conform to Hittite cult

snake/dragon slayer myth near Mount Kasios in Syria & Corycus in Turkey

- Illuyanka in Hittite

- Hedammu in Hurrian

- Typhon in Greek (taken from Cilicia)

- Naga in Sanskrit

#weather god #zeus #indra #taru #tarhunta #mythology #prehistory #syria #anatolia #india #south asia #levant #archaeology #comparisons #indo european #greek #luwian #anatolian #aleppo #hittite #hurrian #hatti #compare

[max1461]

wake up babe new IE language dropped

Yoooooo????

#Apparently it looks related to Luwian #linguistics

[yamayuandadu]

Christmas special: Santa and his helpers. Divine living fossils in Greek sources

For reasons unknown to me, while poorly researched hot takes like “Aphrodite is LITERALLY Inanna” (nevermind that that in areas which plausibly had contact with Greece the closest analog to Inanna would be Ashtart, notably dissimilar to Aphrodite) are repeated over and over again, the actual presence of specific eastern deities under their actual names in Greek sources seems to be a matter mostly of interest to experts in Bronze Age Anatolia. Even generally credible sites will overlook them. Obviously, part of the problem is that the survival of Bronze Age Anatolian deities - whether Hittite, Luwian, Palaic, Hattian or Hurrian - in the Iron Age was the exception, not the rule. The situation is still weird, though. The following article is meant to shed some light on the two main examples, Santa and Maliya - or, according to Greek sources, Sandas and Malis. Needless to say, Santa has nothing to do with Santa Claus; I’m publishing this as a Christmas special only because the accidental homophony is funny to me.

Santa

Santa’s name has a variety of spellings in cuneiform, with either a ta or a da, and transcriptions both with and without diacritics (specifically, with š - read like the English sh sound in “cash” and so on - in place of s) can be found in literature. Variable orthography was not uncommon for names written phonetically rather than logographically. I admit I went with “Santa” here entirely because it’s funny. There’s also a variety of derivative Greek forms, but we’ll get to that in time. Santa’ career began in the earliest textual sources from Anatolia, the texts from the Assyrian trading colony, so-called karum, Kanesh (modern Kultepe in Turkey). These have been dated to roughly 1800 BCE, and are largely just the ancient version of store receipts, legal agreements and guarantees. The early attestations of Santa are therefore basically limited to theophoric names, ie. names invoking the name of a deity, and do not offer much information about his character, beyond telling us that he was viewed as an appropriate figure  to name children after by some of the locals the Assyrian traders did business with. The only thing which might shed some more light on what sort of deity he was is his name. Its precise origin remains unknown, though there is a reasonably popular theory that it comes from one of the Anatolian languages, perhaps Luwian, and that it can be translated as “the furious one” or something to that effect. Luckily, later sources do offer a bit more insight. Texts written in either Hittite or Luwian pretty consistently portray Santa as a warlike deity armed with a bow. He also had some sort of connection to the plague, being invoked against it in rituals. Seemingly he was not a solo act in the Bronze Age sources, his entourage included Annarumenzi (“the forceful ones”) and Marwainzi (“the dark ones”), two groups apparently sharing his interests. Santa was also persistently associated with Iyarri, a plague and war deity similarly armed with a bow. In addition to shared interests in war, plagues and archery, the two also shared roughly the same circle of attendant deities. An interesting thing to note is that there is a single text which refers to Iyarri as female, but since it describes an omen seen in a dream and so far has no parallels, it remains a matter of heated debate if it means that this name referred to more than one deity, that Iyarri’s gender was variable for one reason or another, or simply that it’s a strange dream vision which does not necessarily reflect anything anyone ever actually believed about Iyarri. I personally find the first two options reasonable as temporary assumptions to stick to until more material surfaces, but your mileage might vary. Last but not least, a single text links Santa with Iyaya, a goddess of springs; it has been proposed she was his wife but due to scarcity of sources caution is advised. Sometimes spousal relations between deities are presumed based on too little evidence, which Steve A. Wiggins once satirized by noting applying the same logic to Christian saints would lead to theologically puzzling interpretations. After the collapse of the Hittite state, Santa disappeared from available records for a few centuries, just to resurface when the Neo-Assyrian Empire expanded into eastern Anatolia. Evidently he retained a degree of importance in the eyes of kings of so-called “Neo-Hittite” states, which confusingly were mostly Luwian-speaking (they also used a unique writing system in addition to cuneiform, Luwian hieroglyphs aka Anatolian hieroglyphs, but this is a long story in itself). As far as I can tell, this is also the first time when we get an indication he was the city god of Tarsus. The city does already appear in earlier sources, though to my knowledge no texts associate it with Santa. Still, the consensus view is that presumably the local political situation has been relatively stable between the end of the Bronze Age and the Neo-Assyrian expansion, which also meant local religion did not change much. It also seems plausible Santa was doing fine all along further west in Lydia, but we know very little about the western half of Anatolia in the Bronze Age so whether he was already present there earlier or if he was introduced at some point - perhaps by refugees from collapsed cities in Hittite territory - cannot be determined.

A coin from the reign of Caracalla showing Sandas and a horned lion (Wikimedia Commons) The Neo-Assyrian evidence of Santa continuing his career is not exactly plentiful, but it can be supplemented with quite literally dozens, if not more, references starting in the fifth century BCE or so. Coins from Tarsus from both Hellenistic and Roman periods depict him; theophoric names are incredibly plentiful; and due to Greek presence in the area, he starts to appear in Greek texts. A few different forms of the name are attested in this context: Sandas, Sandes, Sandon and so on. Note that Sandan is incorrect, and if you see it, you’ve stumbled upon someone trying to convince you The Golden Bough is still credible, since this misspelling is Frazer’s fault. Nominally, the interpretatio graeca of Santa was Heracles - how come, we do not really know; note Heracles was VERY commonly used as a translation of foreign deities, though. I think assuming it boils down to both being portrayed as formidable warriors, as a number of experts do, is sensible. You can find quite a lot of examples of this link in primary sources, it even pops up in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca. However, nothing is ever as simple as it sounds, and functionally “Sandas” remained essentially an entirely separate deity. A tradition which hardly aligns with presenting him as an alternate name of Heracles can be found in two sources: implicitly in the writings of Dio Chrysostom, and much more explicitly in those of  Stephanos of Byzantium, both of whom likely depended on accounts of local tradition from Tarsus. According to Dio, Tarsus was founded by a titan, while Stephanus outright calls Sandas one of them, and a brother of Cronus, Rhea, Iapetus, and a number of mysterious figures: Adanos, Olumbros and Ostasos. The presence of Iapetus is the real oddity to me, honestly - Kronos and Rhea are not unexpected, they are well attested, were worshiped for example in Olympia, and they do appear alongside “non-standard” titans at times, a good example being Ophion and Eurynome, but he’s not exactly an a-lister himself even among titans; I cannot really explain why he’s here. What about the other names? All of them seem to be deities originating in Cilica, specifically city gods. Adanos was the mythical eponymous founder of Adana; Olymbros might be related to a city from Hittite sources, Ellibra (there’s also a “Zeus Olybris”, possibly a related epithet), and Ostasos is otherwise unattested, but presumably also represented a city based on the context of this passage. The last two gods are so obscure that as of the 21st of December 2022 googling Olymbros brought up rather few results:

In a way, the Cilician gods enumerated by Stephanos certainly did fit the label of titans - they truly were theoi proteroi, obviously not in the way Hesiod used this term, but in much more literal way. They were, essentially, divine living fossils.

Maliya

While Santa is the best attested example of a Bronze Age Anatolian deity living on in Greek sources, he is not the only one. Most often, his fate is compared to that of Maliya. She has much in common with Santa, in that both of them first appear in Kanesh in theophoric names, both appear in both Hittite and Luwian sources, and both survived until the Hellenistic period and acquired well attested associations with Greek deities, both via interpretatio and as independent figures. The meaning of Maliya’s name is unknown - or at least, there is no widely agreed upon explanation. A recent theory is that it might be derived from a term referring to “mental force” or something along these lines. She was in origin a river goddess, but she was also associated with gardens and, perhaps unexpectedly, with craftsmanship, especially with leather working. She had assistants named Maliyanni, “the small Maliyas” (yes, really) who have been compared in scholarship to Greek nymphs; something that will be relevant later. A curiosity worth mentioning here is that in addition to her Hittite-Luwian career, Maliya was seemingly also adopted by Hurrians in the kingdom of Kizzuwatna (normally it was the other way around - due to prestige of Hurrian culture, Luwians and Hittites adopted Hurrian deities). She was worshiped during a local Kizzuwatnean royal festival, ḫišuwa. In related texts, she appears in esteemed company, the creme de la creme of the western variant of the Hurrian pantheon. Among the deities invoked are Ishara, the tutelary goddess of Ebla already attested in the very oldest texts from Syria; Allani, the queen of the dead (portrayed as upbeat and friendly in her only literary appearance, and remarkably popular); Nupatik (one of the oldest and most broadly distributed Hurrian gods) in two hypostases; and oddities like Kurri, possibly a relic of the once politically powerful cult of Kura, the head of the Eblaite pantheon. So far no studies seem to investigate the reasons behind Maliya’s survival after the fall of the Hittite empire, so there is no explanation I can offer. At most occasional speculation about there in fact being two only linguistically related Maliyas can be found in scholarship. The evidence postdating the Bronze Age comes chiefly from Lycia and Lydia. Lydians seem to be responsible for the form of the name also found in Greek sources, Malis; Lydians stuck with the original Maliya. Her character changed to a degree compared to the Bronze Age, for example she might have developed a distinctly warlike side. In both Lycia and Lydia, Maliya developed a close association with Greek Athena. It was so close there is a Lycian depiction of the judgment of Paris where the other figures appear under transcribed Greek names, but Athena is replaced by Maliya! We also have the inscription in Lydian dedicated to her from the temple of Athena in Pergamon. What was this connection based on? Experts are not entirely sure. It wasn’t even necessarily entirely theological: Athena was prominent on Rhodes, and Rhodes was in turn influential politically in Anatolia. However, it cannot be ruled out that it was based on a shared association - either with warfare, craftsmanship, wisdom or just with specific cities. Despite the power of this specific case of interpretatio, similarly in Santa’s case, Maliya also had a separate role under her own name in Greek texts. Hipponax records a short prayer to her, which does not really say anything about her character. A single poem from Lesbos describes her as a weaver; there’s an admittedly recent and not yet widely accepted theory based on it, courtesy of Ian Rutherford, that if Arachne was not an invention of Ovid, she might have had her forerunner in a hitherto unknown adversary of Maliya, which could account for the story taking place in a Lydian city. However, my favorite reference to Maliya/Malis comes from Theocritus’ Idylls: in the well known episode about the abduction of Hylas carried out by nymphs, specifically naiads, one of them is inexplicably named Malis.

In other words, one of these nymphs in the famous Waterhouse painting might be her, if you want to believe. Worth noting is that this might indicate preservation of information about Maliya’s original character as a river goddess, something absent from Lycian and Lydian sources. However, note that the Maliades, naiads associated with the river Spercheois, are not related - this name is instead linked to the completely unrelated toponym Malis. Finally, there is an oddity which may or may not indicate a connection existed specifically between Maliya and Santa. Hellanikos states that a certain Malis, a slave of queen Omphale, had a son, Akeles, with Heracles. It has been argued that this might be a distant memory of a myth about Santa and Maliya, but as those two are not directly connected anywhere else, this is not exactly plausible.

In place of a bibliography

I recently finished obviously less humorous rewrite of the wikipedia Maliya article, created shiny new ones for Iyaya and Iyarri, and I am currently working on Santa but I failed to complete that one on time. All the sources used can be found there. I will add a small disclaimer, though: while Rutherford’s 2017 article is excellent as a source of information about Sandas, the few paragraphs devoted to Nergal are questionable, especially the baffling theory trying to connect Erragal with Heracles. Erragal was a separate deity from Nergal, and I do not think you can draw any real parallels between Heracles and a minor deity whose claims to fame include being married to the goddess of butchers (actually better attested than her husband) and a rather minor role in the flood myth as one of the deities tasked with wreaking havoc (next to such luminaries of the Mesopotamian pantheon Shullat and Hanish)... 

#mythology #greek mythology #hittite mythology #greek gods #luwian mythology

[thirrith]

the teacher was very hungry

#life #hieroglyphic luwian

[hexjulia]

I should build a website and sell the screenprints i've been making. This has been fun but as usual i got obsessive about what i was doing and i only have 1 body. I don't need this many shirts + plain shirts cost moneys to buy. 😔

#does anyone want an uhhhh luwian hieroglyph shirt

[streets-in-paradise]

I know I said i was about to post and i swear I am. I only have two scenes left of the oneshot to finish and i'm currently working on it.

I was slowed down by my passion. I got so into this that i'm literally wasting time digging on resources about Luwian language, which I think is the especulated ancient language of the trojans, just to make Paris speak it ( for romantical reasons, of course.)

#troy 2004 #troy request #troy fanfiction #paris of troy #paris of troy x reader #writing update #i love when legolas fanfict includes ocassional elvish phrases #so I need to give a try for Paris and Luwian #he is so romantic #he would totally say sweet things to his s/o in a language they don't understand

[enbaluka]

In an ideal society I think we would be bringing back long-dead languages, for the simple reason that it would be really cool

#you go central Anatolia and you find a town speaking hittite where everyone complains about the neighboring luwian town #the town hall has copies of all the documents etched in clay tablets #nothing else is different

[themightyacilius]

Tweets of the Week: 5 August 2023

Even when you know that Helga Stentzel did this on purpose, it is as striking as if it had occurred naturally: Artist Helga Stentzel's fun clothesline animals #WomensArt pic.twitter.com/io2BMnLIv8— #WOMENSART (@womensart1) August 2, 2023 Bradley Birzer says something about World War Two: Imagine being told in 1944 that Russia is our noble ally and, three years later, in 1947, that it is the…

View On WordPress

#a z foreman #abby denton #Acilius #andrea more #bill gerrard #bradley birzer #cyndi lauper #elon musk #frank whitehouse #helga stentzel #humanism #ken layne #luwian iliad #mae questel #matt boot #pee wee herman #sam haselby #shadi bartsch #sir geechie #Twitter #Warren G. Harding #womensart

[k4saneterritory]

in a matter of a few weeks i have become an expert on linguistics in teyvat

#hy.txt #rl luwian is hybrid cuneiform/ heiroglyphs which fits with the teyvat script we've seen being cuneiform-like #i am so smart

[artifacts-archive]

Seal of Tarkasnawa, King of Mira

Hittite, Anatolia, late 13th century BCE (Hittite Empire)

Luwian hieroglyphs surround a figure in royal dress. The inscription, repeated in cuneiform around the rim, gives the seal owner's name: Tarkasnawa, king of Mira. The name of the ruler was previously transliterated into English as Tarkondemos and Tarkummuwa. Other inscriptions naming Tarkasnawa of Mira are known, including seals found at Hattusa (the capital of the Hittite Empire) and the Karabel rock relief carving near Izmir, Turkey. Located in west-central Anatolia, Mira was a vassal state of the Hittite Empire. This seal, originally published in the 1860s, was purchased in Izmir by its first known modern owner, A. Jovanoff. Its famous bilingual inscription provided the first clues for deciphering Luwian hieroglyphs, which were previously called Hittite hieroglyphs.

#artifact #Turkey #Hittite #Anatolia #seal #silver

[wuxiaphoenix]

Worldbuilding: Collapsing Empires

One of our classic stories is the band of Plucky Rebels against the Evil Empire. I will boldly go on record as saying I love these stories. Who doesn’t want to cheer on the rag-tag determined heroes fighting against overwhelming odds? (See Star Wars, The Last Starfighter, The Magnificent Seven, and so many others.)

On the other hand I also read history, and so there’s something I’ve noticed. While the urge to create an empire seems to be a human constant, individual empires always fall. Eventually.

I’m sure there are many reasons for this. I’ll give you a few I’ve noticed; you can probably suggest more. The three I’ve got are environmental shifts, out of context problems, and the elite desire to stay in power at all costs.

Each of these can, of course, feed into the others. Here’s a few examples.

Environmental shifts are nasty. Some are from human land use - deforestation and gold or lead mining do numbers on large areas - but others are just the solar system giving you a Bad Era. To be very general, our climate tends to alternate between periods of warmer and more predictable weather, and cooler, less predictable weather patterns. (You can in fact have a scorching drought or a dozen in an Ice Age. It’s just on average cooler.)

Empires tend to get started and grow during the good times, to the point they’re right on the edges of their ecological limits as to how many people can make a living without starving. And then a bad spot hits. And things go sideways. As they say of bankruptcies, first slowly, then all at once. Famines usually start in some spots, and the empire handles it, getting ever more stressed - and then worse weather sparks floods and mudslides, and out of that ecological havoc you tend to get plagues, and between plague and famine you can’t feed or levy enough troops.... And then law and empires collapse as everyone scrambles madly to survive and people who were on the empire’s borders try to make out like a bandit. Pun fully intentional.

A “sudden” (usually over decades) climate change might be considered an out of context problem... but I had more direct and weirder things in mind. At one point, for example, we had archaeological evidence that the Luwian Kingdom might have been wiped out by a comet strike. Current archaeology thinks not, but the scenario still remains possible for fiction. Not to mention the scholarly wrangling over what really happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. It looks like the real-life cities were on a very oil-rich plain. So theoretically, if a meteor shower came down and punched a few holes....

But you don’t have to look to outer space. Cortez and other conquistadores showed up from across the Atlantic with a deep history of warfare that was an extremely out of context problem for the Aztecs, Incas, and many more. (Yes, diseases played a big role. But historically the conquistadores legit beat local armed forces high, wide, and handsome.) Joseon Korea and Tokugawa Japan had similar problems with the rest of the world. Anna and the King is a fictionalized version of the King of Siam trying to ease his kingdom into a soft landing in the modern world. I can only imagine the battles he must have had with his court over that.

Which leads to the third reason I see empires fall. If a ruler wants to keep ruling, and doesn’t trust his people, he has to make sure no one else is strong enough to oppose him. But keeping everyone too weak to fight you means that sooner or later, they’re too weak and corrupt to fight someone else.

And on the edges of an empire, there is always Someone Else.

Side note: This is one of many reasons I think a republic is the best government to create and maintain a nation. Ideally we have people in power getting overthrown all the time. We just do it on an agreed-upon regular basis. Unfortunately that was also supposed to apply to all bureaucracy....

Anyway. If you’re writing Plucky Rebels against the Evil Empire, go for it! But you might want to also poke some history and see if any of these real-world factors apply. Smart rebels take advantage of an existing crisis! Just ask Li Zicheng.

Though note what happened to him....

#creative writing #worldbuilding

[official-linguistics-post]

Best indo-european language for a logography?

i mean... there are already indo-european languages written in logographic systems. anatolian hieroglyphs (luwian)?

also i fully believe that anything could be rendered in a dedicated logography, because script types aren't beholden to language organization. and people are VERY creative when it comes to communicating what we want to say, regardless of given constraints.

#welcome to Opinions On Writing Systems #i do function on some level of pure spite toward ignace gelb #hyperevolutionism can go jump off a pier <3

[wraith-of-thiodolf]

stone lion with luwian hieroglyphs

[scriptorsapiens]

Classicstober Day 1: Cassandra (𒅗𒊭𒀭𒁕𒊏)

On instagram they're doing a ClassicsTober and since Greek Mythology has been my thing since I was little I decided to go hog-wild and participate with minimal preparation. Even though the visions are terrible and unbelievable, her older brother Hector (𒃶𒆠𒌅𒌨) is always there to help comfort her. @sisterofiris I tried my best with the Hittite Cuneiform. My thought process and stuff continues under the cut.

So as I mentioned before I love greek mythology, but recently I have developed a fixation on 'historically accurate' depictions of the myths. Contrary to pop-culture imaginings, the ancient greek myths did not take place in the Classical Period (c. 700 BC and on) but in the much earlier Mycenaean Period (c. 1500-1100 BC). Rather than elegantly gathered chitons and painted marble temples, the Mycenaeans (and their predecessors the Minoans) wore tailored tunics and lived in massive stone fortresses. This creates an entirely different vibe for artistic depictions of these characters and I really want to lean into it.

All that said, these two do NOT wear Mycenaean clothing. For the Trojans I decided to lean much more into the neighboring Hittite fashions. Troy, or as it was known to the Hittites 'Wiluša (𒌷𒃾𒇻𒊭),' was situated on the border between the Mycenaean and Hittite worlds, and since Priam is one of the few names from the Iliad that, as far as I can research, definitively comes from Luwian (𒉺𒊑𒀀𒈬𒀀 Pa-ri-a-mu-a), which is very close to Hittite, I decided to lean all the way in on that. It also provides a convenient visual separation between the two sides of the Trojan War. There was VERY little I could find about Hittite clothing except for the article written by Anna's New Rome as well as her reconstructed garments. I based Hector's beard decorations off some suggested details from a stone carving.

Last but not least, I am also trying my best to render the names of these characters in what would have been their native writing systems. Hittite Cuneiform is much more complicated (to my eye at least) than Linear B, so take my reconstructions with a MASSIVE pinch of salt.

That's all for now, folks.

#classicstober #classicstober2023 #cassandra of troy #hector of troy #trojan war #the iliad #hittites #mycenaean #greek mythology